We’ve commissioned Michelle Falcón Fontánez, a young local filmmaker, to capture the stories of people of color across Western Massachusetts, in partnership with four local, grassroots organizations leading the way toward healthier communities and advocating for equity, justice, representation, and transformation.
Featured organizations include:
- Women of Color Health Equity Collective (formerly MotherWoman, Inc.), in Springfield, promoting the resilience and empowerment of Women of Color to advance health and wellness by building community capacity and advocating for just policies through evidence-based research and grassroots organizing.
- Estoy Aqui, in Springfield, providing suicide prevention and social justice education to organizations and businesses primarily serving Latino/Latinx and Black communities.
- The Ohketeau Cultural Center, in Ashfield, serving as a safe haven for Indigenous community and a place of creation and growth, where ideas will be born, nurtured, and lived out.
- Multicultural BRIDGE—Berkshire Resources for Integration of Diverse Groups through Education, in Lee, advancing equity and justice by promoting cultural competence, positive psychology, and mutual understanding and acceptance.
Stories shared include:
- Rhonda Anderson, founder and Co-Director of the Ohketeau Cultural Center, explains how indigenous cultures tap into the healing power of art and why it’s important to have a safe place to explore traditional medicine and ceremonies.
- Dayna Campbell and Vanessa E. Martinez-Renuncio, PhD, representing the Women of Color Health Equity Collective, discuss how racism produces a disparity in medical outcomes, how inequities in healthcare systems fail to address the specific needs of women of color, their families, and their communities, and how to ensure that these inequities don’t persist for future generations.
- Ysabel Garcia, Founder of Estoy Aqui, draws on her experience as an immigrant, suicidal person, and former psychiatric patient to explain how the mental health establishment can miss the social and cultural issues that can lead to suicide and why it’s important for people within communities of color to recognize how mental health looks like for them and destigmatize conversations around it.
- Florence Afanukoe, who moved with her family to the United States from Côte d’Ivoire in 2008 and graduated from Pittsfield High School, and Arthur Wright, who migrated to the Berkshires from North Carolina more than 50 years ago, hold an intergenerational and cross-cultural conversation, contrasting their experiences moving to the primarily white community of the Berkshires. As an immigrant from Africa, Florence describes encountering racism for the first time and realizing the difficulties she faces in her pursuit of the American Dream, while Arthur recounts leaving the segregated South and working hard to become his own boss.
Plus interstitial spoken word performances by local poet Lynnette Johnson.
Find out more about the people featured in and behind the scenes of MOSAIC.