Leah, the Senior Director of Student & Staff Wellbeing at Hillel International, supports social workers, staff, and students across dozens of campuses in the U.S. and Canada. Her first encounter with JSP came years ago as a participant in a Jewish text deep dive, an experience so formative that the piece she made is still hanging behind her desk. But the real turning point came last year, when she used professional development funds to attend a JSP Studio Immersive.

In her words, it gave her, "a new way to think, to use the studio rules as a new way to approach my work", and it sparked a realization: "students need this." College life, she reflected, can be "much more about performance than presence." That insight led her to bring JSP into Hillel's annual staff conference, where the immersive filled every seat in the room. The feedback was striking: "100% of the participants said there was something from that session that they're going to bring back with them to campus."

When it ended, no one wanted to leave, "We all just felt so connected by having done this and being held in this space in this way." The impact has extended into Leah’s own daily practice too, she now catches herself applying JSP's studio rules at work, noticing when she's "feeling the swirl" and returning to creative practice for grounding.

Zooming out, she connects this directly to the systemic gap in mental health support: "our system is never going to be set up so that everybody has access to a therapist when they need one," but tools like JSP's help students and staff alike "grow our resilience”. Two Hillel professionals are now piloting JSP-inspired Creativity Circles of their own, an indicator, Leah hopes, of JSP’s supportive practices spreading across college campuses.