CoLabs
laboratories for communal strategies.
Our CoLabs are playgrounds for collaborative exploration and inquiry, weaving resources that cultivate practices for collective care within communities.
CoLabs are either initiated by practitioners or convened by institutions or community leaders. The creative process is centered on the hopes and strengths within the context and follows a line of inquiry focused on an area chosen by the community.
According to the UN, the world is witnessing a humanitarian crisis like none other with 80 million people who have been forcibly displaced from their homes due to famine, natural disasters, violence, and war. The push and pull factors are numerous for why people make the difficult choice to leave their homeland. This reality is being felt tangibly in places where Collective Tapestry has strategic relationships.
The impact of the current economic challenges and mass migration is leaving a generation of elderly and youth with few caretakers. The day to day care has been challenging for many, as well as the loss of the younger generation has taken a psychological and emotional toll on those who have remained. In the last two years, we have received invitations to accompany individuals and organizations in Cuba and Mexico through the Encrucijadas and CoLab: Cuba projects.
CoLab: Cuba
The CoLab: Cuba project is building a network of lay providers whom offer mental health and psychosocial support through the arts in strategic regions throughout Cuba.
Cuba has a rich cultural history of art making, resilience and creative response. Providing additional resources and support to an already vibrant context provides an opportunity to create additional spaces for health and healing, strengthening social ties in the midst of loss and change; bolstering a community of those who remain to continue to move forward in health.
Our mobile studio trains these providers to integrate community-based psychosocial arts interventions in schools, sports, and faith groups, creating sacred spaces for the human spirit. This builds skills for emotional regulation, social connection, and hope—key elements for restoring relationships, enhancing life quality, and mitigating trauma. After graduating the inaugural cohort group in 2024, this project will continue in 2 strategic locations in 2025.
“Beyond the challenges of confronting daily life and survival,
It is an invitation to continue strengthening the pillars of resilience…
To listen to the sound of silence… ” ”
The Encrucijadas Project
The Encrucijadas project (meaning “Crossroads”) is exploring meaningful ways to support frontline workers, volunteers, and leaders who are accompanying refugees and migrants at the border in trauma-informed psychosocial arts-based interventions. These leaders are creating circles of care for connection and health in the liminal space.
Group leaders explore how to provide space for safety and stabilization through the arts, group work, reflections, breath-work, and movement activities that are connected to psycho-education best practices. The project focuses on building skills for emotional regulation, calming, social connection, increased self-awareness, safety, and hope; key components for restoring social and behavioral functioning after trauma and increasing resiliency.
Encrucijadas was designed by Umbral, a Mexican based group that was launched in 2018. This CoLab is based on a popular education model and integrates the feedback and experiences of Mexican leaders on the border to help shape the project. It is currently being piloted at the Southern border in Tapachula and the Northern border in Tijuana. Find out more in how we are building tapestries of care with communities on the move in Mexico.
“I could take the exercises and use them when I needed to feel calmer, like before going to sleep. I don’t have so many difficult thoughts now”.
— A young women staying at a shelter who participated in an Encrucijadas group.
Mapping Inspiration through the Arts.
Geographies of Hope
Geography of Hope is an art collective that works to create space for communities of change agents to come together to practice the art of sustaining hope. The goal is to nourish existing relationships and develop new alliances between those working at the intersection of peacebuilding and the expressive arts. Together we are mapping hope in our context.
Emerging CoLabs
Collective Tapestry is currently exploring the following emerging questions in the forthcoming labs:
Rhythms of resistance for sustainable social action.
Community Based Participatory Action & Arts-Based Research
