Anti-Carceral and Abolitionist Approaches to Suicide Series
Panel & Storytelling Event
WHEN: Saturday, September 30th (4:30 PM ET - 6:30 PM ET)
ACCESS: Live Zoom enabled auto-transcription; other access needs available upon request
PANELISTS: Coming soon!
*Open to all community members, healers, mental health workers, folks with lived experience & without.
Skills-Based Training
WHEN: Sunday, October 1st (1:00 - 5:00 PM ET)
ACCESS: Live Zoom enabled auto-transcription; other access needs available upon request
FACILITATORS:
Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu
Nadia Naomi Mbonde
Ysabel Cristina Garcia Peralta, of Estoy Aquí
*Open to community members, peers, and folks with lived experience. This training is open to healers and mental health workers, but will not be centering the perspective of mental health workers, or focusing on skills and approaches within the context of the clinical mental health system.
Training Workshop for Healers & Mental Health Workers
WHEN: Saturday, October 7th (1:00-4:00 PM ET)
ACCESS: Live Zoom enabled auto-transcription; other access needs available upon request
FACILITATORS:
Stefanie Lyn Kaufman-Mthimkhulu
Nadia Naomi Mbonde
Es Torrico, of Project LETS
Mel Butler
*Open to all healers and mental health workers (traditional, professional, licensed, unlicensed)
Suicide Memorial & Day of Healing
WHEN: Saturday, October 14th (1:00-5:00 PM ET/ 10:00-2:00 PM PT)
ACCESS: Live Zoom enabled auto-transcription; ASL/English interpretation; other access needs available upon request
Join us for a day of healing, grieving, story sharing, honoring those we have lost to suicide, remembering, digesting our grief, and feeling our rage and sadness - together.
For years, Project LETS has been hosting anti-carceral Suicide Memorials in community and on college campuses. These have been some of our most powerful & emotional grieving and healing spaces, and we are grateful to bring this event to our virtual community. Suicide is so often clouded in shame. We want this to be a space of open conversation & vulnerability, a space where we will honor & celebrate those we love who have chosen to end their lives.
Rather than try and make stories up about why people made the choices they did, or sit in our own guilt or shame, or think we could have fixed it if we just did X, or believe that the mental health system could have fixed it if we just forced them into care…. we will simply grieve together. Finding answers is not our goal. That is not our journey.
We just want to say, we love you, we miss you. Thank you for joining us on Earth while you did. We don’t forget you, we embed you in everything we do. We are here witnessing and remembering and feeling this pain so it doesn’t kill us.
* We will have space for community members to share their stories, honor lost loved ones, engage in optional grief, integration, and bodywork practices, and join a small group workshop. *
*Open to all community members, suicide attempt survivors/returners, family members & loved ones who have lost folks to suicide, currently or chronically suicidal people, folks without lived experience of suicidality, healers, mental health workers, etc.
Workshop 1: Building a Grief Practice
Grief: noun, meaning deep mental anguish, as that arising from bereavement.
Mourning: noun, meaning the actions or expressions of one who has suffered a bereavement; conventional outward signs of grief for the dead, such as a black armband or black clothes.
Many religions and cultures have or have had mourning rituals and rites: funerals, torn cloth, stones, flowers, Kaddish. Whether we engage in them individually or in groups, these rituals can provide a container to touch our griefs, hold them with care and intention, and share outwardly what often feels impossibly isolating.
In a society of deep disconnection from any mention of death and its accompanying emotions and experiences, many have lost touch with, been forcibly removed from, or never had access to culturally-relevant grief practices. This workshop will provide time and space to openly discuss how this disconnection affects us, and then to begin to craft our own rituals.
Structures: large and small group conversations; individual reflection; writing, drawing, or other ways to record your thoughts.
Notes:
1. While this is not a reconnection workshop, it can lay the foundation for you to learn more about what a grief practice can be and whether you want to build your own, reconnect with practices from your cultures and/or communities, or some combination.
2. This workshop is focused on grief and mourning arising from death. However, there are many other griefs, and mourning rituals and rites can be a part of processing and honouring those as well. Whatever griefs you bring to this space are welcome.
q., a white person with short dirty blonde hair, wearing a black toque, big circular sunglasses, a small dangly mushroom earring, red knit sweater, beige wool vest, and loose blue jeans. on its vest are several pins: one is a 3D-printed shelf mushroom, another says “Dangerous Dyke,” and the third has illustrated fungi and says “Weird But Wonderful”. it’s standing among ferns and bracken, one hand resting on a dead branch, smiling at someone out of frame.
q. (it/they) is a disability justice educator, grassroots death doula, and grieving artist living and creating on the land of the Pilalt and Ts’elxwéyeqw tribes of the Stó꞉lō Nation, and the land of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations.
It has worked as an educator and consultant with organizations such as Salal Sexual Violence Support Center and Pivot Legal Society. It has also spoken at the Edmonton Men’s Health Collective and Converge Con, and written for publications including Briarpatch, ANMLY, and Pride Magazine on queer disabled culture and artist-activist movements.
With an understanding of queercrip culture and community grown in collaboration with its love of mycology and especially mycelium, q. brings its joy for connection and shared learning everywhere it goes. It is still and forever learning what it means to be a white queer disabled Jew in meaningful solidarity with abolitionist and anti-colonial presents and futures.
Double exposure of rabbit, a fat Black person with incisive dark eyes, unsmiling at the camera. They are wearing a denim buttondown shirt and have their hair shaved at the sides and in twists on top. They are seen amidst clusters of orange blooms.
Rabbit Richards was born on occupied Lenni Lenape territory in Brooklyn, NY. Their people have never rooted for more than one generation anywhere for as long as their history can trace. Their father's family claims Kyiv and Minsk; their mother's family remembers St Thomas and St Croix, islands of the Carib, Arawak, and Ciboney.
Rabbit is learning how to exist on stolen land in a marginalized body. Relentlessly compassionate with fierce integrity, Rabbit is passionate about anti-oppression and accessibility work and is deeply invested in the conversations that are provoked by their art.
Currently they serve as Systems Change Coordinator at PACE Society here in k'emk'emaláy, commonly known as the downtown eastside of Vancouver BC, where they focus on harm reduction within community care.
Workshop 2: A Welcome Mat: Building an Altar for Convening With Your Kin
A collective conversation facilitated by kay, darling on making space for your spirits on this side. As kay sees altar building as a fluid art, participants are welcome to ask questions of one another on their practices, preferences, and stories. Where we will all align is in our lineage: this space is exclusive to Black Americans descended from those who were enslaved, and this will be an important grounding for our work together.
kay, darling is pictured, sitting outside, lit up by the sun, and smiling big to the point where her eyes are squinted nearly shut, and her pierced nose is all scrunched up. she has long black braids with a couple of locs tied half atop her head with a bright red scarf. kay is wearing a black t-shirt that reads BAIL IS RANSOM in bold white text. kay has a radiant deep brown skin color, a few shades darker than the wooden panels behind her, where a sign reads FUCK THE POLICE, though her head blocks some of the letters. Also behind her is a mirror reflecting a gathering of friends, some string lights, a couple of trees, and a white water bottle.
kay, darling (kay!/she/they) is a nomadic sleepy sun child and daughter of Assata with a deep reverence for the cosmic dance of time and the sacred responsibility in community. kay's community includes so many beings and spirits, and in this incarnation she's taken the form of a beautiful Blackwoman in a bodymind with ever-shifting limitations and strong sensations. kay loves reading the planetary charts of fellow humans as physical manifestations of moments in time, and you can connect with her through their practice, Cosmic Healing, if you'd like to co-create meaning with them in this regard. to just connect you can find kay on Substack: sag, rising or the IG @itskay.darling