Jamillah is a Healer, Community Advocate, Mother, and Founder of Breakbox Collective, a wellness space and community center in Fresno that fosters an arts-integrated approach to community development programs, curating culturally relevant services, programs, experiences, and initiatives that create lasting, multi-generational impact in the Central Valley.
“A sign of listening is when the things that you say, actually happen.” EIana Henderson, Breakbox Collective Youth Participant
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Community, Rest and Healing
Community is the patterns and rhythms you move in as a group. It’s what you accept and question and how you take up space amongst each other. That dance you do with each other—to me, that’s community.
We had a healing circle community healing day, and everyone expressed just the fatigue of life. It’s historical. Fannie Lou Hamer said, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”
Rest as a revolution is so true to me. I believe Audrey Lorde was the originator of that thought. Interdependence says, “I just had a baby and need to sleep. But I’m not from here and don’t have a community here. Can I come to your house and take a nap, and you keep an eye on my baby?”
There are many different types of rest. I’m in my rest phase right now. There’s creative rest– escaping something else that I’m doing to create something that feeds my soul and gives me a certain amount of calm. There’s physical rest, where I’m just laying my body down. There’s mental rest, where I’m just going to take a break from all the things I have to think about all the time—or spiritual respite. There’s sensory rest, just sitting in darkness and silence, asking, ‘How do I recharge myself? Is what I’m doing in the community affirming for me? Or is it draining my life essence?
One of the things I appreciate is that we are intentional about creating spaces that nurture the family. All of us are connected in some way, which makes it challenging and complex but also easier in some cases.
That’s interdependence, but it’s also connected to recovery because we acknowledge the need for rest. There are so many pieces where we don’t know each other well enough, or we’re seeking to find trust and safety, where we can’t be calm, and we can’t attend to ourselves, our bodies, and our spirits, which is essential for recovery.
Expansion
BreakBox is more of a watering spot than an institution. It’s really about destroying the limitations placed on us and the barriers to our expansion.
The trauma of racialized discrimination in this country is a major injury that we carry genetically and ancestrally – every single day when we’re just trying to exist. We are always negotiating a lot of pieces- pieces about our worthiness, whether we’re respected or centered.
Storytelling and narrative work are important parts of what we do. ASHE magazine (URL) is now in its sixth volume. Ashe is a Yoruba word for life essence or energy, life energy, or the power to make something happen. But we have it as an acronym—African diasporic experience, Style, Health, and Expression. In the launch of our fourth issue, we featured’ 100 Black Voices,’ which reinforces a different narrative than what we are sometimes used to seeing. The magazine features beautiful photos and stories captured by our youth participants.
Before I retired, I was an English teacher. I noticed that kids were restrained in what they were allowed to write about. Teachers would always assign essays, but why does it have to be an essay? Why can’t it be a vlog or something they could monetize on YouTube?
It’s super important because the voice is so powerful. Our thoughts create our realities. Healthy thoughts are important. If you don’t have healthy thoughts, imagine the misery and suffering you’ll experience if the stories you tell yourself are creating your realities. It’s critically important that we are in control and in charge of the stories we tell, especially to our babies and to each other.
If we can liberate our youth and see them as equals, we are on the precipice of liberation because that’s the last acceptable group to oppress. If we allow that to happen to human beings, then it’s still possible for it to happen to everyone.
The same goes for neutralizing and making our elders invisible, this idea that they’re not productive anymore. When we bring the elders in, they still have value and merit. They’re still guiding us, informing our ways of being in the world, and anchoring us. That’s why multi-generational work is very important. It creates a power base.
“Re-indigenizing” Organizational Practices
There is a lack of reverence for cultural competency. By having a culturally competent, culturally responsive space that re-indigenizes, the opposite of that would be decolonizing versus re-indigenizing; my friend Brandi Mack uses that term a lot.
Some of the health [disparity] outcomes and the so-called “achievement gap” are occurring because pieces of our identity are lost in the decision-making space.
There’s a lot about the original, indigenous ways of being in the world that made sense, and we are deeply separated from them.
Bringing alternative practices and multi-layered modalities into our work for health or wellness is our way of reclaiming our power and identity, which helps us with our health outcomes.
One Voice
There was a protest at Bullard High School in response to a racist incident at the school. Students marched to the District Office and were supported by teachers, district administrators, pastors of churches, community activists, youth-led organizations, and families. There is this sentiment: don’t come for our babies.
For our Black Girl Magic Project, we hosted a drive-by graduation for our seniors during COVID-19. Some of our seniors left with hundreds of dollars and bags of gifts.
We once were out shopping and supporting a Black-owned business when, unbeknownst to us, someone had set up a fundraiser for our Fresno Black Girl Magic Program.
Sometimes, we can fixate on the suffering and not always highlight the celebration with the same emphasis in volume, but the Fresno community always shows up for our youth.
Power Building Change Makers: Designing the Future
Our power analysis involves gathering people across sectors to collaborate. We have our anchor partners and community ambassadors. They are decision-makers in their own right and their own spaces. We see power as collectivism. We don’t see power as something that’s outside of us. That includes youth. Nothing about us created without us is for us.
That means we’re all at the [decision-making] table.
From a design perspective, we might ask these questions in a charrette:
- What are the needs of the community?
- What are the systems of care that we need and want?
- How do we put them in place?
- What does it look like?
- What does it sound like?
- What does it feel like?
- What do you imagine related to your mental health, wellness, family, creative, and career goals?
- What frustrates you and discourages you from being able to do those things?
Then we go deeper at Community Healing Day:
- What do you need today?
- What did you receive today?
- What would you like us to offer in the future?
We take the information we receive and design programs, spaces, places, situations, engagements, and activations.
We partner with counties and other places that can sustain large-scale investment, and we lift up the work we do as a demonstration site, demonstrating that we are modeling the change we want. The things we are proposing—like education or health—were called out as needs [by our community], and we are modeling them here. The village and the beloved community mean access to wealth in a single space and having people who look like you holding that container and listening to you.
When we evaluate our progress, we ask questions like:
- Does this still make sense?
- Do our systems and infrastructure still work?
- What could be strengthened?
- Where do we need more dollars?
We then start the whole process over again. If we don’t have the money to make decisions, then we don’t have change. We have frustration and powerlessness.
I would love to renegotiate the narrative that always renders us struggling and suffering. I want to get to a different space where it’s not about struggle and suffering but about dreaming of possibilities and having more hope.
Visioning and Creating the Future: A Liberated Community
Breakbox is designing a fully restored and liberated community. It’s an intentional space where people can come and get their needs met. It’s not where you lay your head, but it’s another home. We need more spaces away from home that comprehensively meet our needs.
We look at our bodies, minds, and spirits, and we look at what society has conveyed to us and what messages have been given to us about how we can relate to our bodies, minds, and spirits, particularly as those of us who identify as Black Americans or African Americans.
The problem is the illusion of separation. This illusion of separation is how supremacy operates: a belief in hierarchical systems that one group has more power or privilege over another group when, in reality, all of us are essential and necessary.
You may experience yoga, dance, breathwork, drums, or some other somatic engagement when you visit our space. It’s similar to a gym, where you go and work out; the only difference is that everything is related to mind, body, and spirit in this space. It’s also a place where teenagers come and have parties, and people come and lounge. We also have therapists here. Community members can access therapy at no cost to them. If we have practitioners where we play, we are healing while we’re playing. This is where we live. This is home right here.
This story was produced as part of the Sunrise Futures campaign developed by the James B. McClatchy Foundation. It was developed using the StoryEngine methodology, an open-sourced, narrative-based data collection tool developed by Loup Design.
Copyright James B. McClatchy Foundation. Published on the James B. McClatchy Foundation website using the Creative Commons License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ : Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
