EXPLORE OUR COLLABORATIVE
WORK IN THE WORLD
DREAMING FLOURISHING FUTURES
Dreaming Flourishing Futures: A Black Womxn’s Manifesto for Designing the Worlds We Must Have To Be Well is a luminous, living collection of declarations, visions, and artifacts that affirm the possibilities we want to bloom in every dimension of our lives. Breathing the future into the present, this is our testimony, designing what will be necessary for us to be well.
The virtual experience that generated our manifesto was seeded in 2020 when we felt an ever-present call for audacious leaps of imagination to propel us toward a future in which we are all free. We convened 40 Black womxn/women/femmes for Dreaming Flourishing Futures, a visionary gathering space inviting Black womxn imaginaries to collaboratively dream, conjure and design the futures we’ve been longing for but have yet to experience.
HEALING JUSTICE PORTALS + PRACTICE SPACES FOR CARE
We designed and held a healing justice space to be experienced throughout the 2022 Closing the Gaps (CTG) Network Convening in Saint Paul, MN. This space, along with grounding sessions and living portal activations, translated into a care-full environment for creative reflection, connection and rest.
Lifting up values of radical love, ancestral connection, storytelling, and embodiment, these holistic, liberatory experiences support participants in exploring the multiple modalities and meanings of care. Each day's offering became an invitation to (re)claim their personal and communal agency in healing as a continual practice as they process the challenges and opportunities of racial equity work, during the convening and beyond.
BLACK WOMXN LEADING + HOLDING ANTI-RACISM WORK
In our year-long collaboration with Living Cities, we created and facilitated co-design sessions to support their organization with envisioning a new network, Closing the Gaps Network, of anti-racist organizers in local governments. The sessions intentionally centered the wellbeing of Black women leaders who face the undue burden of holding racial equity work and the experiences were built to help foster creative, visionary spaces rooted in a pro-Black vision for the future.
We journeyed through deep listening, storytelling, and insights with integrated care practices. What emerged were three main questions being asked by the Black women leading our movements who are continuously reckoning with the intersectional identities that we hold alongside the labor we give. The responses to these questions are from Black women and the people/leaders within their workplaces and communities.
CREATIVE CARE SESSIONS
On a quarterly basis, we hold “collective pauses” where we pause all operational work, and go on a week-long break for our own radical rest and recalibration. As an extension to these breaks we invited our community of Black womxn to be cared for alongside our team. By offering Creative Care Sessions, these virtual sessions were designed to nurture ourselves and our creative practice.
The 2021 Creative Care Sessions became a public series of four sessions in collaboration with health and healing practitioners. Aligning our offerings with the earth’s natural cycles, the sessions were held during each season through the lens of ‘Mind, Body, Soul, Space.’ The healing practitioners invited in the experiences of sound healing, grief and pleasure work, oracle explorations, and astrological insights.
NURTURING THE HEALTH NEEDS + DREAMS OF BLACK MOMS IN BALTIMORE
In collaboration with B’more for Healthy Babies, our virtual Design for Wellbeing sessions were a 4-week facilitated experience for Black moms wanting to participate in a creative way of understanding health and wellbeing beyond traditional therapy and support groups.
Rooted in a holistic lens that also acknowledges the whole self, these sessions included a historical and generational look at Black women’s wellbeing and closed with re-imagining what their wellbeing looks like collectively. Their most present health concerns were addressed with topics such as COVID-19, racial trauma, and every day stress.
This experience was strength and abundance based and affirming of how the daily lived impacts on their health are not just because of themselves but a manifestation of larger systemic forces. Our sessions offered a space where they had collective agency in reclaiming what it means for them to be well and creating the tools they need to bring them closer to life-giving experiences that can support their healing journeys.
