Announcing our March training: Creating Healthy and Safe Communities

When: Tuesday and Wednesday, March 28th and 29th, 2023

Communities are a crucial part of the world we live in and provide a lot of support and stability for many people in a variety of ways. However, what community looks like is different for different folks, and the ways we keep our community “safe” plays an important role in the effectiveness of the community. In order to ensure our communities are safe, we must understand what “safe” communities look like, as well as learn and understand the historical context of systemic racism on the creation and location of communities in the U.S.

Register here!

Trainers: Lauren Bard, Jasper Lee, and Mo Barbosa

Description:

Communities are the backbone of our social system, and ideally, provide a safe place for people to live, work, and play.  Yet the history of systemic racism in America illustrates how BIPOC communities were not only built to be segregated but have continued to experience harm disproportionately to white communities.  This begs the question: what does a “safe” community look like, especially for people of color?  And how can we center the conversation around health equity?  In this two-day training, the trainers will first examine the history of racist housing policy in the United States, emphasizing the intentional disenfranchisement of Black and Brown communities and the implications for our health and racial equity work.  They will then move into deeper, heart-space questions about our communities, and how we might imagine them differently.  What are ways you can plug in to create changes?  How can we use a Policy, Systems, and Environmental (PSE) change framework to build safe and healthy communities that are designed by the people that live there? Participants should come prepared to dig creatively into some deeper questions about safety and resiliency. 

Objectives:

Participants will be able to

  1. Identify examples of how Black and Brown communities have been historically disenfranchised in the U.S. 
  2. Think creatively about changes they want to see in their own communities, and how they can plug in to create those changes. 
  3. Name strategies to amplify community voice in conversations around justice and equity.