Innovative Mobile Children’s Play Therapy Center Hits The Road In Southern West Virginia
West Virginia’s first-ever mobile children’s play therapy bus is ready to head up the hills and hollers and
run the backroads and byways of southern West Virginia.
Ivy, The Play Therapy Bus, will drive directly into many of the Mountain State’s most remote areas to bring loving care to what is thought to be thousands of WV children suffering the emotional scars of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, according to Ivy’s owner, Beth Hughes, the head of West Virginia Power of Play Therapy Center.
You can tour Ivy The Play Therapy Bus and meet Ms. Hughes and some of the clinicians she is training in play therapy this Wednesday, June 24th, at 2 pm at the Children’s Home Society, 205 Center Street in Princeton WV.
Ms. Hughes, who grew up in Boone County, has returned home to the Mountain State to open the West Virginia Power of Play Therapy Training Center. Beth is a nationally recognized and highly sought after Registered Play Therapist-Supervisor, Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker and Certified Trauma Therapist.
Ms. Hughes has spent the past two decades in practice in Alabama specializing in treating traumatized children and their families how to tap into the child’s first language, play, to assist children in transitioning from victims of post-traumatic trauma to post-traumatic survivors who actually thrive despite what they have endured.
Her purpose and that of Ivy The Play Therapy Bus is two-fold: to travel into remote Southern West Virginia communities to work with the kids there, and also to train local mental health care clinicians and school counselors to become credentialed as Registered Play Therapists or becoming more informed in the use of play therapy to help children.
“Children can often only communicate what’s happening to them and get the help they need to overcome it through play therapy with a trained clinician-someone who can get down on the floor with a child and interact with them at their level. In West Virginia, we deal with a tragically large number of children who either have no active parents at all or have parents with serious drug and alcohol addiction, sexual trauma, extreme poverty, and more who would never be able to come into town to be seen. So, we’ll have Ivy the Play Therapy Bus go to them! Plus, we’ll be training social workers, therapists, and school counselors on how to incorporate play therapy in those communities. Like the old saying goes, if you give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; when you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. That’s how we aim to make real, lasting change,” said Ms. Hughes, who financed and conceptualized the custom remodel of Ivy completely on her own.
For more information, to arrange a tour of Ivy The Play Therapy Bus or to schedule an interview with Beth Hughes from the West Virginia Power of Play Therapy Center, contact Allen Media Strategies Burke Allen/ Shaili Priya at (304) 989-3360 or email burke@allenmediastrategies.com/shaili@allenmediastrategies.com
Grammy award winner 
When was the last time you experienced the peace of controlling your life? How have you felt when you saw the void of the unknown? How did you respond when you looked into the face of anxiety and grief?
