MOURNING & MENTAL HEALTH

Community Partner: Brown Hope

The Mourning and Mental Health Team partnered with the Brown Hope Organization, whose mission is to provide community-led solutions for racial justice by creating platforms for Black, Brown, and Indigenous people to be seen, to love, and to lead. Together we developed online compatible community-building activity guides, with the goal of transitioning Brown Hope’s in-person community programming to the virtual and socially-distanced COVID-19 environment. The team worked with Brown Hope to develop an infographic that discusses their most popular reparations programming, “ Power Hour.” The culmination of the team’s work this summer is the Mourning and Mental Health Playbook. The playbook features important resources that confront the experience of Black mourning, grief, and mental health in the time of COVID-19 through articles, podcasts, racial justice organizations, and artwork by Black creators. This playbook considers the material realities of further marginalization that Covid-19 and concurrent racial oppressions — police brutality, medical health disparities, poverty, xenophobia, etc. — exacerbate in Black communities, through the lens of artistic expressions and scholarship.