FREE VOICES INSTITUTE

We support the individual’s commitment to healing by fostering our community’s responsibility toward each other. Our Free Voices Institute is a multi-structured comprehensive model that places equal emphasis on holistic, psychological, and material healing through directly-proximate programming. Survivors enter the program and receive grief support, while also becoming equipped with the tools, skills, and connections necessary to increase their quality of life. We support members from the moment they first lose their loved one to the point where they can feel confident and healthy enough to mentor another survivor in the early part of their healing journey. The Free Voices Institute is composed of two steps that include: The Healing Guild and Comprehensive Life Empowerment (CLE).

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In the Healing Guild, we think of individual growth and accountability. This micro experience attunes members to their internal life, sensorial stimuli, and intrapersonal and meta emotions. To support members’ internal work, we provide intensive case management, grief counseling, life preparedness coaching, and support groups. Everyone is given the power to shape their individual healing and express themselves freely, while members of our space also must do the work to maintain a culture of peace and pursue being their best selves. Healing never occurs in isolation; it requires a community of self-awareness, respect, and understanding.
For Comprehensive Life Empowerment (CLE), we think of the collective’s responsibility. This macro experience focuses on building up victims and survivors as a network, with learning opportunities designed around skills that benefit the community and can be transferred into employment or parlayed into entrepreneurship (e.g. community health work, advocacy, civic engagement, administrative support, victim/peer accompaniment, etc.). Members cultivate these skills collaboratively through art, advocacy, workforce development, alternative somatic (ancestral) healing, memorials, speaking engagements, and community outreach.

COMMUNITY EXCHANGE PROGRAMS

As humans, we tend to talk through our problems. However, at times, we may not have the capacity to vulnerably process emotions verbally. Creating intentional space and programming provides a variety of opportunities to help members process ideas, gain insight, and discover different valuable solutions to try.

Power Hours provide structured weekly space for ongoing community support. Racial biases and disenfranchising ideologies slowly break down the humanity of people of color. Through empowerment, we dissolve and deconstruct society’s barriers and limitations to create access to opportunities. Power Hours help to build members up by equipping them with theoretical, applied, and experiential learning all year long.

Members arrive after school or work for 3 hours of academic tutoring, life readiness skill building (e.g. service learning hours, community engagement, team building, etc.), holistic coaching (e.g. counseling, therapy, guidance, apothecary), and focused case management as needed. The modalities of therapy used for Power Hours are a reflection of our community and don’t reinforce harmful ideologies in a space for healing. As such, parents are required to be active participants for those young members under age sixteen!
Science has shown that play develops emotions, creativity, and social skills. Play helps to nurture imagination and give us all a sense of adventure and connectedness. Through play, we can learn essential skills such as problem-solving, working with others, sharing, and much more.

Formerly called "F3 = Faithful Freedom Fridays," Power of Play Days (dates) are monthly gatherings for communal play. These sessions provide ways of healing through sensorial stimuli and respite, using similar evidence-based, trauma-informed, holistic methods offered as therapeutic care. FUN, laughter, and celebrating life are fundamentally hard-wired into many cultures, and for good reason! The environments we submerge ourselves into increase the potential for both inward and outward excellence, plus connectedness creates a strong sense of esteem while bonding with community.

WELLNESS CONSORTIUM

Healing is not a linear or individual experience for anyone. For communities of color, creating space just to “be” supports the healing process regardless of age, gender, or the nature of the problem. Our wellness consortium provides space for healing using evidence-based mental health approaches, including somatic therapies, experiential learning, and guided self reflection, as members learn their individual responsibility and collective accountability.

FSN’s Summer of Healing (Day) Camp, stoop therapies, retreats, and seminars curate an intimate outlet for younger and older people to work their way through individual experiences, common events, and specific negative effects of proximity to violence. We use approaches attuned to the community to support development, bringing to light the various layers of violence—how social systems affect communities and, in turn, affect interpersonal relationships, health, and wellbeing.

Register for Summer healing camp

It is our priority to meet the social, emotional, and physical needs of our young neighbors, disrupting cycles of generational traumas as they learn to emote and relate to the world around them. Our summer camp provides structure for youth in the community during summer break.

Youth participate in a multi-week day camp using the Laurens Street Family House as a home base as they explore beyond their neighborhood through field trips. Throughout the camp experience, we facilitate activities such as: expressive arts and crafts, guided gardening, ancestral healing, plant foraging, bird watching, story time and independent reading, local art and history tours, wildlife education, farm animal interaction, and nature exploration.
Adults can benefit from an immersive camp experience too! Our adult-exclusive retreats provide members with an opportunity to disconnect from the stresses of daily life to focus on their healing and self development.
It can be difficult to find time in the day to tune in to one’s self and emotions. Our workshops and seminars create structured opportunities for creative expression and self realization.

DROP-IN CENTER

Our Laurens Street Family House serves as a sanctuary for survivors to visit, find fellowship, and immediately access support. The Drop-In Center provides clothing, basic needs, anonymous mailing, funeral assistance and memorial planning, emergency triaging, and internet access; all free of charge. Anyone is welcome to participate in activities, register for services, attend support groups, and talk with staff. Visitors can drop in without any commitment, but we do find that many become more actively engaged.

The Drop-In Center provides the communal support required to not only survive but thrive under difficult circumstances. It is intended for members and nonmembers alike to experience supportive services as relief rather than stress; thus, a long-term restorative effect ensues at all levels.

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