Kanika is the founder and director of Camino Canicas-Expressive Arts Healing Collective. This grassroots movement focuses on cultivating trauma-informed expressive arts education and resilience building in the Indigenous communities in Lake Atitlan, Guatemala. The project creates a safe space for children who come from under-resourced families affected by trauma, neglect and alcoholism. Through art, stories, ritual and playing together, the children learn to express themselves and gain tools for self-regulation and resourcing, learning to navigate the difficult situations they are born into. Often serving the children leads to holistically serving the family, providing council tools and support for the parents who are also struggling with the dynamics that oppress the children. Kanika provides group expressive arts therapy, movement art, and emotional intelligence training, adapting psycho-somatic and mindfulness practices into developmentally appropriate activities for the children. Naturally, this work builds bridges between the indigenous local children and those who are traveling through or who have moved to the community. Working with privilege and diversity through storytelling and drama, Kanika helps diverse communities build strong resourcing memories and resilience together.
Much like in old village times, Kanika serves the children and their families, and they in turn serve her needs by including her in the community, sharing harvests and trades. Unfortunately, in these modern times this does not cover the basic needs for sustainability. Funds raised will support the project in having a reliable indoor space where classes can take place, art supplies, and basic administrative overhead costs.
Kanika is a seasoned shapeshifter and bridge builder, spending the last 20 years of working at the intersection of youth, art, and social change. Kanika was born and raised in New Delhi, India. At the age of seventeen, she traveled to Soka University in California to pursue her undergraduate studies in liberal arts with a Social and Behavioral Sciences major. She went on to do her postgraduate studies in Dance Movement Therapy in Barcelona, Spain.
Kanika has a gift for clueing into the needs of a community as they arise and sensitively responding in culturally relevant ways. She deeply immerses herself in the community she works and lives in. Her twenty years of experience doing just that includes working in India developing Bridge Programs for rural and urban youth, Arts for Social Change Programs for adolescents, and embodiment and sex education programs for young girls from the slums. She led integration programs for immigrant and refugee women in Spain, along with bringing the expressive arts to classrooms in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Kanika taught embodied leadership courses at the University of Valdivia, Chile, and psychosomatic approaches to peace-building at the UN University for Peace in Costa Rica.
"My apprenticeship to this work has taught me how to "meet" whomever I am working with, to find the heart at the center, regardless of differences, barriers or challenges, to create a container that empowers everyone."
– Kanika Batra SomaSource Practitioner and GGG Leader
