Our mission is to build pathways for resilience and healing individually and collectively.
Our Approach
The Aesthetics Of Wellbeing.
Within each endeavor we...
Build the container for groups to cultivate trust, create healthy connections, and integrate just practices towards exploration, curiosity, and social health. We are not simply offering a "training" or an "experience", instead we see our work as weaving the strands for belonging based on the wisdom of the group, while uplifting the micro practices and mechanisms for change; mapping the choreography of community, healing, and ultimately, what it means to be human.
We create spaces for people to imagine and shape possibilities. Our work is grounded in the expressive arts, popular education, experiential pedagogy, and peace building.
Often, much of what we experience in the world, especially in connection with violence and harm can be inexpressible. The arts help to create space to make visible the stories and experience - allowing people to enter into an embodied knowing through making, moving, and engaging. Creativity allows a community to name the resources that already exist within their own context and build upon these strengths as pathways to move forward.
The Expressive Arts (EXA) is a growing field in which all art modalities (visual art, music, theater, poetry, movement, dance, and nature) are used to help individuals and communities through change and troubled times. The tradition of integrating rhythm, music, story, mark making, and dance into celebrations, ceremonies, and healing rituals has been integral to most cultural contexts and indigenous communities for centuries. The expressive arts emerged as remedies alongside these existing practices to see the individual, family, group or community recover a sense of well-being, connection, and ultimately a restoration of self.
In the process of peace building, conflict and trauma, the arts help to create tangible acts of celebration and lamentations to provide guidance and resources for communities to navigate through beauty and disruption, the unknown, curiosity, and any lingering questions that may remain.
The arts….
allow people to give meaning to their own concepts of safety and security through the invention of new creations and works of art
rebuild connections with others
help us to access non-rational, embodied information
make space for a community to express their aesthetic
encourage us to create a lens through which new social identities, new thoughts, opinions and practices can emerge.
promote space for communities to identify sources of resilience and engage imaginative solutions and possibilities.