Life Skills
Tayba Foundation recognizes that clients may be deficient in the life skills needed to successfully navigate the challenges and difficulties of prison life.
Opportunity
We also understand that strong life skills, coupled with spiritual instruction and higher education opportunities, can help the formerly incarcerated become law-abiding citizens following parole.
Tayba offers clients a constellation of life skills courses developed by dedicated teams of professionals and thriving former prisoners. Self-directed, the courses encourage robust independent study, allowing clients to work on relevant topics at a pace that works for them.
What are Life Skills?
What are Life Skills all about? They are abilities learned to help a person approach objectives of everyday life; they are sets of skills which people use to live, to survive. It may sound simple, that they are things people do to get through life, and some may expect that everyone already knows them. But, a person must learn life skills in order to progress and grow; it's a lifelong journey.
Our Approach
We find that inmates are far more likely to evaluate their lives and discern areas of improvement while incarcerated. Written by real people who worked through real life problems, the Tayba curriculum encourages clients to apply effective problem-solving techniques to scenarios that closely mirror what they may experience while incarcerated or after release. At Tayba, we realize that a strong evaluative process builds stronger programs. Inasmuch, our life skills offerings are peer-reviewed, evidence based, and constantly enhanced by our professional partners.
Courses offered
Overcoming Addiction
This two-part book is about how to overcome addiction from an Islamic lens, framework, or methodology. The basis of the book, the foundations arise from Islamic concepts and practices of the Qur’an, Hadith, and Islamic Scholarship. The first part takes into consideration the traditional Twelve-step program and adapts a methodology and framework of Islamic practices. The second part takes a different path utilizing other Islamic practices and spiritual lessons. Helping one recover from addiction, this book encourages the person to bring forth the best of themselves from within.
Peer Mentoring / Coaching
Our clients are not only working on themselves, they are also working with others. Tayba offers a program to scaffold the incarcerated population in growing their peer mentoring skills, their coaching skills, and social skills. Using evidence-based research, this course provides a repertoire of tools for peer mentors to pull from enhancing their abilities in working with others, their communities, and their families.
The Path of Recovery
Historically, the approach towards conquering mental health, trauma, and substance use conditions has been seen as a diagnosis to address individuals’ symptoms with the goal to “stabilize” and maintain the condition; a person’s conditions are not seen as recoverable. However, in recent times there is hope. Recovery is the goal as a person’s mental conditions are more complex than diagnosing physical conditions. Recovery is based on the principle that “you must become the expert of your healing; other experts do not know you like you know you.” Recovery should be seen with the capacities and understandings of what a person knows of themselves and that they have the capability to recover. Learning what one needs, a person can focus and plan their recovery and move towards wellness.
Courses not currently offered:
Character Reformation
Denial and self-justifying messages perpetuate the cycle of recidivism. Given this cycle, the Offender Responsibility Course works to reconstruct criminal thinking and behaviors to end client self-deceptive cognition, into strong positive responsible humans.
Anger Management
The Anger Management Course helps clients identify their “anger triggers.” Looking into the root causes of anger and self-defeat, explosive anger can be mitigated and the cognitive process leading after a trigger modified. The more clients learn about anger, the more productive their lives become.
Cognitive Awareness
Using historical fiction as a therapeutic backdrop, the Cognitive Awareness Course encourages clients to explore some of the negative thought patterns that led to their debilitative problems. Cognitive Awareness is especially helpful when paired with counseling.
Offender Corrections
At Tayba, we find that repeat offenders have substantial self-defeating thoughts and behaviors. The Offender Corrections Course targets clients that have a high potential of recidivism because of faulty thinking. An intense course, Offender Corrections challenges clients to explore the consequences of faulty thinking with an eye toward sustainable improvement.
Addressing Criminal Behavior
Domestic Violence
While the Domestic Violence Course provides tools for both victim and abuser, we find that the material is especially valuable for our clients living with the legal, emotional, and relational impacts of their abuse of others. Furthermore, new insights gleaned from the course reduce the risk of continued violence following parole.
Driving Under the Influence
This offering helps client’s see that driving is a privilege and not a right. Cognitive restructuring is a core component of this course, allowing clients to address the faulty thinking that led to poor decisions.
Theft & Shoplifting
Theft is the product of poor decision making, not a one time mistake. In the Theft/Shoplifting Course we help clients take ownership of their missteps, helping them recognize how many individuals are impacted by theft. When addiction is a comorbidity of theft, the course helps clients recognize how multiple negative behaviors can snowball into crisis.
Substance Abuse
The Substance Abuse Course explores two fictitious families. The first family is drug free, while the second is deeply impacted by addiction. These true-to-life scenarios help our clients see the ways substance abuse adversely impacts both the individual and the family system.
Towards A Better Future
Employment
Tayba’s employment course addresses the faulty thinking that perpetuates unemployment and underemployment. Storytelling is used in the course, allowing clients to see how fictitious characters moved toward gainful employment.
Contentious Relationships
Many of Tayba’s clients wrestle with the impact of family discord. The Contentious Relationship offering uses cognitive restructuring models to support clients who wish to reconnect with estranged families after release. Like the Cognitive Awareness course, the Relationships curriculum works to push clients beyond negative thought patterns, and towards responsibility and forgiveness.
Parenting
Research indicates that abuse and neglect of others is learned behavior. In the Parenting Course, we help our clients overcome negative scripting so they can model positive attitudes and behaviors for their children. The course seeks to help family mending in the short-term, while also curbing cycles that negatively impact families through generations.