The Briar Patch Collaboratory
The mission of The Briar Patch Collaboratory (BPC) is to support the work and development of visionary philosophical artivists (artists + activists) who engage Soulcial Work Praxis to radically imagine and generate refuge, resources, and solutions to sustain life and community (The Briar Patch); and, to create space for collaboratively experimenting with world-building endeavors for Justice, Equity, Wellness, Empowerment, and Liberation (Collaboratory).
The Collaboratory seeks to support and develop visionary philosophical artivists who work to eradicate forces of dehumanization and systems of domination, heal our humanity, and co-create a radically reimagined, life-affirming world for all so that every person may live to their full transformative healing potential and fulfill their soul purpose. BPC provides:
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Grants, Research, Evaluation & Writing
BPC conducts research that addresses social and racial disparities, specifically within the criminal legal system and the healthcare system. We have expertise in arts-based research, critical action intervention research (CAIR), public scholarship, participatory action research, and program evaluation of arts-based programs. Research develops critical understanding and potential interventions.
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Training
An integration of the head (thoughts), heart (feelings), hands (actions), and the soul (humanity) to transform the person and the environment to have a symbiotic relationship in which all can flourish. A reckoning with our history and the reclaiming of ancestral ways of knowing, being, and doing.
Training is available to individuals, communities, and organizations on Soulcial Work Praxis.
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Education
Critical consciousness, community, and cultural educational programs support the development and work of VPAs that collaboratively engage in radical imagination and generate innovative multi-systemic, anti-racist, and wholistic solutions to complex sociocultural conundrums. Educational initiatives develop individual and community critical consciousness that inform critical action project experiments (CAPEs).
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Practice Initiatives
A development and implementation of multi-(soular, molecular, macro) level CAPEs—these are wholistic, socio-cultural, psychosocial, bio-behavioral health interventions that incorporate clinical practice, advocacy, and community and cultural organizing and support the pillars of humanity—grace, space, time, and opportunity. With reevaluation and revision, CAPEs develop into social enterprises that convert practices into self-sustaining entities.
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Social Enterprise
An incubator for social enterprise projects that show world-building potential and humanity-healing promise that use market principles to sustain social impact. BPC has several socially innovative enterprises in the incubator, for example:
The MetaForum Theatre Project will use theatre for restorative social justice education and practice.
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Membership
A membership model to keep the costs of services low. This model provides an alternative and novel resource for purchasing power that supports the implementation of social enterprise and social innovation (SE/SI) initiatives in soulical work and human services, such as supporting the socially innovative businesses of disenfranchised people.
"Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced, "
- JAMES BALDWIN