Dear Friend,
We are holding space for shared grief following the tragic events at Club Q in Colorado Springs on November 19. In the wake of targeted violence towards the LGBTQIA+ community, we hope you are being gentle with yourselves this week.
As our communities are yet again forced to move through and reconcile deep loss and senseless violence, we want to uplift a statement by the Wildflower Alliance, as well available IDHA resources on the topic of grief.
Our Transforming Grief page compiles reflections and educational resources that center political, community-based, and non-medical approaches for tending to grief. And until the end of the month, we are offering free access to our self-paced course Grounding in Grief (click here to enroll). This class approaches grief as a teacher and shares methods on how to interrupt overwhelm through embodiment and ritual.
In this moment of immense loss, we are grateful for our healing-centered learning community here at IDHA. Read on to learn more about upcoming offerings, and we look forward to sharing space with you.
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We're less than 2 weeks out from IDHA's first-ever virtual festival & fundraiser, Healing as Homecoming. Do you have your tickets? We would love to share space with you for a full day of creative and community-oriented programming.
Tiered ticket prices are available, including gifts and prizes like a limited edition IDHA tote bag. Below, you can check out the incredible designs submitted to our tote bag art contest, and vote for your favorite.
Your support directly sustains IDHA's future work and vision. All money we raise will go directly towards compensating people with lived experience for their knowledge, making our programming accessible through ASL interpretation and captioning, and creating scholarships so no one is ever turned away from our offerings due to lack of funds.
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Festival Additions and Highlights
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Workshop: Reclaiming our Wholeness
Priya Florence Dadlani will ground us in a creative space to replenish our spirits around the theme of reclaiming "wholeness." Through guided writing prompts, Priya will create a space to ground, reflect on present emotions and wellness, and create art that allows us to return to wholeness and self-acceptance.
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Panel: Healing the Whole Person
A virtual panel event will bring together people with lived experience, family members, clinicians, and artists to decenter biomedical understandings of mental health and share expansive visions of creativity, connection, community, and consciousness. We'll be joined by a group of esteemed panelists, including Dr. Gabor Maté, author of the best-selling book The Myth of Normal.
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Poetry Performance by Steven Licardi
Steven T. Licardi will perform works of original spoken word poetry emergent from his own madness journey, as well as works created in community with others around the world. In doing so, Steven will explore how play, the arts, and the subversion of language pave paths towards deeper home-building within our bodies, minds, and the worlds we are collectively building.
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IDHA grows out of the lineages of many social movements. Cross-movement organizing is a core part of our strategy because as Audre Lorde says, “there is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”
Ahead of our movement lineages conversation during the festival on December 4, we are crowd-sourcing questions to ask our panelists. Reply to this email, or click the button below to submit your question to our organizing committee.
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Earlier this fall, we launched a contest to identify a design celebrating IDHA and our 6-year anniversary. We invited contributors to send us art embodying our festival theme of "Healing as Homecoming," or transformative mental health more broadly. The winning design will be featured on IDHA’s 2022 tote bag, revealed at the end of the festival.
We encourage you to check out the designs submitted by the talented creatives in our community, then vote for your favorite. And if you haven't yet, we hope you'll get a ticket to the festival to ensure you snag this limited edition tote while you can!
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ABOUT IDHA
IDHA is an organization of current and prior mental health service users and survivors; psychiatrists, psychologists, and other clinicians; community activists; and artists who have come together to transform mental health care through advanced education and community development.
Become a member and join a growing community of mental health change makers.
Become a supporter and make a tax-deductible donation today!
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