Healing As We Build
The Madisonville Community Studio is an ongoing project co-created by Madisonville residents and Design Impact (DI) to explore key questions about the inclusiveness of neighborhood changes. The project is supported by the Kresge Foundation.
Design Impact identified a set of themes we saw in our work that we use as guidelines when we work with community. One of these “metathemes,” Give Room to Heal, calls us to consider the whole individual, including their trauma and history. After all, when people come together, they bring more than just their bodies and their brains; they also bring their history, their joys, and their pain. They also bring the multiple identities they hold, which shape their experiences and worldview. In other words, people are complex. DI planned the Madisonville community studio sessions with understanding in mind.
Residents, small business owners, and community leaders with different perspectives on their neighborhood’s development met over multiple weeks. The reflective, creative, and action-oriented “studio” aimed to strengthen relationships across race and ensure that Black residents have shared power and decision-making in Madisonville. To accomplish these goals, we had to make space for healing — particularly as it relates to racial trauma and pain. We did this by embedding three practices into our community studios: Set up an intentional communal space, provide space for pain, and equip people to stay engaged.
The Learning Zone framework is a way of priming participants for a challenging conversation. It includes three zones: comfort, growth, and panic. Throughout the studio sessions, we invited participants to notice which zone they were in. We advised them that even the growth zone will feel uncomfortable. This heightened awareness during challenging conversations and equipped them to distinguish between discomfort that comes from being in the growth zone from the discomfort that comes from being in a panic zone.
We also integrated a practice of PANning throughout the sessions. PAN stands for Pay Attention Now. It is a reminder to take a moment and notice what is happening within and around you. PAN is particularly useful for noticing one’s own experience at any given moment, and developing a habit of noticing how others are engaging in the space as well.
Together, these practices created an intentional space for us to grow and evolve together. By setting and holding an intentional communal space, making room for pain, and equipping people to stay engaged, we were able to build meaningful connections across difference and move toward a more sustainable collective action.
Written by Robin A. Wright, Senior Social Equity Specialist at Design Impact.
Design Impact identified a set of themes we saw in our work that we use as guidelines when we work with community. One of these “metathemes,” Give Room to Heal, calls us to consider the whole individual, including their trauma and history. After all, when people come together, they bring more than just their bodies and their brains; they also bring their history, their joys, and their pain. They also bring the multiple identities they hold, which shape their experiences and worldview. In other words, people are complex. DI planned the Madisonville community studio sessions with understanding in mind.
Residents, small business owners, and community leaders with different perspectives on their neighborhood’s development met over multiple weeks. The reflective, creative, and action-oriented “studio” aimed to strengthen relationships across race and ensure that Black residents have shared power and decision-making in Madisonville. To accomplish these goals, we had to make space for healing — particularly as it relates to racial trauma and pain. We did this by embedding three practices into our community studios: Set up an intentional communal space, provide space for pain, and equip people to stay engaged.
Set up an intentional communal space
We began each studio with a centering practice that included mindful breathing and an intentional de-stressing process. Centering was followed by elevating our shared commitment to the collective. These agreed-upon rules of engagements were created by members of our community leadership team, which included Madisonville residents, business owners, and DI staff. We returned to them at the start of each session to remind us how we committed to be in relationship with one another. In this way, we readied ourselves for the deep work we planned to do together.
The Commitment to the Collective: Studio rules of engagement decided to create a space that is safe, productive and fun.
Provide space for pain
Storytelling is a powerful tool for bridge-building and racial healing. For this reason, we explicitly invited studio participants to listen to one another’s deep and personal stories about their own racialized experience in the neighborhood. Though challenging at times, this exchange of reflecting, sharing, and listening proved to be especially healing and transformative for participants.“It was healing and therapeutic to have white people listen and hear my story.”To do deep and restorative racial equity work, it is important to give people adequate time and space to work through the pain of racial trauma, past and present. During the Madisonville community studios, we were reminded again and again of the importance to not over-program our time together. Instead, we had to create a flexible agenda that allowed us to go with the flow of whatever was needed in the moment. This required us to embrace the ambiguity of our process, an outcome we often set when we want to change mindsets.
Equip people to stay engaged
The Bridge Norms metatheme calls us to work across difference, see each other, and push each other. To do that, we must build our capacity to stay engaged amidst the discomfort of truth-telling conversations about race and inequity. Most of us are not used to talking about racism and inequality, especially in interracial settings. As such, it was important for DI to equip Madisonville residents to stay present in those hard moments. In addition to the commitment to the collective and centering practiced used to set and hold the space, we shared two practices to stay engaged: Learning Zones and PANning.The Learning Zone framework is a way of priming participants for a challenging conversation. It includes three zones: comfort, growth, and panic. Throughout the studio sessions, we invited participants to notice which zone they were in. We advised them that even the growth zone will feel uncomfortable. This heightened awareness during challenging conversations and equipped them to distinguish between discomfort that comes from being in the growth zone from the discomfort that comes from being in a panic zone.
We also integrated a practice of PANning throughout the sessions. PAN stands for Pay Attention Now. It is a reminder to take a moment and notice what is happening within and around you. PAN is particularly useful for noticing one’s own experience at any given moment, and developing a habit of noticing how others are engaging in the space as well.
Together, these practices created an intentional space for us to grow and evolve together. By setting and holding an intentional communal space, making room for pain, and equipping people to stay engaged, we were able to build meaningful connections across difference and move toward a more sustainable collective action.
Written by Robin A. Wright, Senior Social Equity Specialist at Design Impact.
