COMMUNITY AS MEDICINE
Started in 2022 as a collaboration between teaching artist Maya Davis and myself, Community as Medicine supports early career Detroit educators, through facilitated dinners to connect and build community and to process their experiences while collectively cultivating a network of support.
The program uses dinners centered on connection and building community with one another to collectively cultivate a network of support to nurture new visions for Detroit’s learning landscape. For this work, educators need to be able to access imagination and possibility. We know that teachers who are exhausted and dysregulated by the violence, hopelessness and abandonment they are faced with on a daily basis are not likely to be able to move towards possibility. Our goal is to deepen our support of the individuals that make up the education system, resourcing students, leadership and educators in schools.
In our project, Community As Medicine we host a series of monthly meals, where each portion of the meal is carefully considered, allowing educators to forge relationships. The meals are set in the warmth of a home, decorated to commemorate the time of year with flowers, hand dyed linens and artful table setting. Each meal is catered by a local BIPOC chef whose cooking practice intertwines with food sovereignty. Invitee’s are given Care Kits whose contents guide the night's conversation with art, poems from local writers and books that provide access to further study. After years of learning from supporting teachers we have learned that when people feel tended to and cherished for their participation and presence it invites them to begin to process their experiences and this leads to relationship building.
Community as Medicine is committed to the understanding that being an educator is a rigorous practice and requires this depth of tending to cultivate growth and retention. Our first cohort of educators focused on educators in the early stages of their career. The members of our first cohort were selected for their commitment to humanizing learning as well as their commitment to being innovative in their approach to their role as educators.
I come to this project with over ten years experience supporting educators and youth in Detroit. The pandemic made plain for me that the education landscape is in dire need of deep reimagining and change and I am committed to reimagining the purpose of learning centers and making specific, tangible plans on how to make those visions come to reality.
Through these dinners we have invited each other to think about the ways we as educators and learners utilize imagination to re-shape the systems of our circumstances to better serve our students and ourselves. We are deeply grateful for our loving community partners BULK space and Ceramic School and People in Education who have generously offered us space, and thought partnership as well as each of the participants who bring us their stories, and insights onto how we are holding ourselves and caring for each other as people in education at this time.
each year a cohort of 15 emergent educators are selected to join us with the hope that over the course of the monthy dinners, they will deepen in relationship to each other and forge lasting bonds that support them throughout and after their time with CAM
Image of Maya and Cyrah Setting the table for one of the CAM meals.
Each meal is themed to guide thought and conversation. This meal was entitles; collective care in action and offered participants an opportunity to learn to make dumplings to eat together as an act of collective care.
All imagery is taken on disposable film to offer participants a way to opt into documenting as willing participants instead of being surveilled or having their picture “taken” without desiring to.
Image of Maya and I making the floral arrangements that we have at each meal
each meal is accompanied by a small gift for each participant that features a literary inspiration to deepen consideration of the theme of the meal, and guided by a selected poem.