Community Mental Health and Art in Social Contexts

Organizing around issues like voting rights, police violence, and housing provides a bottom-up base for community mental health programs incorporating outreach to marginalized and underserved communities like undocumented workers and their families, LGBTQ youth seeking safe spaces, and older adults facing multiple social and financial challenges. As a part of this work the arts can provide vital avenues for personal growth, communal creation, and social movement. We'll explore the history, structure, and performance of important community organizations supporting artists, the aged, cultural festivals, neighborhoods, and other social groups including governmental agencies as well as grassroots organizations.

By studying existing programs in and around New York City, we will learn lessons about community mental health outreach efforts. By examining New York's past history as a laboratory for progressive social programs for new migrants, we'll learn more about how mental health programs have been either folded meaningfully into larger social initiatives or isolated, stigmatized, and starved of necessary support. The program will include an optional week-long field trip to New York City to explore relevant contemporary programs that offer promising models for expanding and improving community mental health programs in the Pacific Northwest. Students not going on the field trip will pursue short-term research projects that week, on topics developed with guidance from the faculty.