Honor. Harvest. Heal. Together In The Garden: Survivors Holiday

10420 South Vermont Avenue,Los Angeles CA 90044

18 December, 2021

Description

Our garden gatherings: born from a collective desire to create community models of healing where we memorialize death through honoring life. This is our second gathering of our ongoing community healing event series: Honor, Harvest, Heal Together In the Garden: Survivor's Holiday. We are a collaboration between Heal Together, CAT 911 South Central Team and Little Green Acres in South Central Los Angeles. Our main purpose is to connect to each other, learn each other within conditions of care, dignity and collective healing. We invite you to Little Green Acres, a community garden space in South Central Los Angeles, where we will gather to memorialize death and loss by paying homage to our life and living and recognizing that the practice of honoring in community creates and transmits collective healing imprints. We will learn together, move together, feel together and build together and allow our bodies, spirits and minds to experience fuller ways of being in relationship with each other in a world where violence, stress and terror normalizes disconnection, fragmentation and disembodiment. Families will get to experience a healing creating space to support each other through the ongoing and various life/death cycles. Imprints of Unlearning and Healing As Power Project is envisioned as a year long offering with monthly garden gatherings informed by Intersectional, Healing Justice, Abolition, Somatic, Ethnic Studies, Transformative Justice, Critical Race Theory frameworks, where we connect and equip the collective with resources/practices generated by our grieving and living processes (i.e. in the form of familial, grief, cultural, spiritual, artistic practices). The main focus is looking at the carceral conditions that live in our bodies and relationships caused by carceral conditions from birth to death (our lived realities living under systems ). And we wish to transform societal conditions through shifting our bodily and relational conditions to each other through sharing and creation of tools. Every month we will come together to learn and discuss the impacts of oppression/violence and intergenerational trauma on individual and collective health. And reflect and practice/embody the importance of collective and individual healing spaces and practices that we will explore together. Each gathering will be accompanied with an art/creating community exercise (as an installation offering). A place where community is building a grieving/celebrating life by acknowledging the generational and collective impacts and imprints of the various branches of violence (i.e suicide, intergenerational abuse, ableism, family violence, non-profit/organizational trauma, detention, imprisonment, migration, abuse/assault, medical racism, houselessness, domestic violence.) Susana Victoria Parras and Keyanna Celina are community members, organizers, healers . We envision green spaces and open spaces to connect, share and grow our relationships. To return to building, organizing and growing with our neighbors and within our own neighborhoods. South Central is a diverse and layered place with complex histories. And we recognize different blocks and neighborhoods within South Central need and require differently. We value growing at the speed of trust and capacities to ensure sustainability in our long term efforts to grow what we imagine, a world where we have what we need and are connected to supports and dignified care right where we live. Susana Victoria Parras is the founder of Heal Together in South Central/Inglewood, CA. Heal Together was born out of the deep yearning to create community models of healing using anti-racist mental health practices. Heal Together is a call to sit with our stories of generational pain, and joy to nurture our own blueprints of wellness. Reconnecting to ourselves as a radical act. Heal Together officially opened as Heal Together: A Licensed Clinical Social Work Corporation in 2018 and better known as Heal Together. The practice is rooted in Critical Race Theory/Abolitionist/ Ethnic Studies/Restorative Transformative Justice/Indigenous Frameworks and envisions with our clients new forms of being and relating to one another. Heal Together invites people to return to their light and radiate their power by highlighting the way our cultural cores are dimmed in a racist, capitalistic, patriarchal world that conditions our silence. Keyanna Celina is a black, mother, womanist community organizer, former foster youth, disabled, activist in South Los Angeles. She is a core organizer for Coalition for Community Control Over the Police and also the founder of Womanism As A Verb, a black women led movement that opposes femicide via cultural activism in South Central Los Angeles. We look forward to holding space with you all with the wonderful staff at Little Green Acres Garden. Bring your loved ones. From the youngest to the oldest. Please join us for our December gathering to Honor. Harvest and Heal Together in the garden. Susana Victoria Parras is the daughter of Guatemalan immigrants, mother, partner and a mental health therapist of color interested in providing therapy through an anti-racist lens. She has served kids, adolescents, couples, parents, college students, LGBT people, undocumented and women of color looking at trauma, PTSD, anxiety, depression, self harm through a critical race/trauma informed/restorative practice lens. Meaning, the focus is not just the individual but rather her practices aim to support an increased awareness of how historical and inter-generational trauma/oppression impact relationships and overall well-being. . As a licensed clinical social worker she specializes in the intersectional integration of critical race practices within clinical settings, community settings and  and for POC grounded organizations. As a school social worker by practice she now has moved into working outside the system developing Heal Together, a mental wellness practice. She develops and provides consultation and therapy practices to strengthen and share her work in how to implement healing frameworks rooted in cultural practices into mental health pedagogy to work towards healing and justice. Susana co-develops and co-facilitates healing justice trainings and tools for community  populations living under systemic oppression. Susana also worked in the system as an adjunct instructor at Cal State Dominguez Hills in Carson, CA teaching Critical Race Theory in Social Work. She obtained her M.S.W from the University of California Los Angeles, Luskin School of Public Affairs and a B.A. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California San Diego.