Imagining Health Justice

through Service-learning Arts and Health and Wellness Courses

By UNC Asheville

July 28^th, 2020

At the intersection of health data, creative arts, and community engagement, you’ll find UNC Asheville professors Lise Kloeppel and Ameena Batada, a host of community partners, and a class of enthusiastic students working together to rethink the connections between art, healing and health justice in Asheville.

In the spring of 2020, Kloeppel, chair and associate professor of drama, led a project-based, service-learning arts course called “Imagining Health Justice,” that explored those intersections in the context of Asheville area community. The class partnered with the health and wellness promotion course, “Health Justice: From Data to Action,” taught by Batada, associate professor of health and wellness. Together with community partners Ponkho Bermejo of BeLoved Asheville, community elder Veronica Jackson, visual artist and educator Jenny Pickens, and percussionist and educator Imhotep Dlanod, the classes created two public events and websites that used the arts to bring together long-time and more recent Asheville residents to imagine and practice new ways of being in relationship with one another.

The project, which was funded by a South Arts Cross-Sector Impact Grant, focused specifically on learning about, understanding, and healing racialized trauma in Asheville caused by urban renewal, gentrification, and root shock.

“I designed my course to center the assets, stories, and interests of the communities I’ve been working with for many years,” Kloeppel said. “Rather than having the students participate in traditional service-learning projects where they focus on fixing or solving a community problem, the course invited them to serve their communities primarily through their presence as active listeners and their abilities to build reciprocal relationships.”

It was a goal that fit perfectly with BeLoved Asheville, a local non-profit where Ponkho Bermejo serves as co-director.

“The work of Imagining Health Justice is built from a blueprint that we base all of our work on at BeLoved: the voice and narration of the people, the history of the people, the leadership of the people, the celebration of the people, the vision of the people fully free,” Bermejo said. “It is important to mix the education that comes from schools and knowledge from books with the people that feel the history, live the history and have the knowledge of their ancestors whose stories are often not in these books."

“It is important to connect the University with the streets and neighborhoods and with the people who have lived here their whole lives.”

Community Connection

That connection was forged in the course’s first public-facing project, “Reviving Our History, Healing Our Past Healing Story Circle,” when members of Asheville’s African-American community were invited to the Arthur R. Edington Education and Career Center to share their experiences before, during and after urban renewal in Asheville. The story circle included a special drumming session by percussionist Imhotep Dlanod, and the presentation of a painting by Jenny Pickens, a local self-taught artist who used her painting to capture her memories of life growing up in Asheville.

“I did a painting of all my different memories, the honey suckle trees, the woman who used to always walk around with a Coke bottle on her head, us kids playing in the water from fire hydrants,” Pickens said. “I remember eating peaches and my mouth itching from the fuzz, but just eating them anyway. I never had to come home for a snack because there were so many fruit trees everywhere. It was so much fun. It was a mixed community; the neighbors across the street were white, there were elderly people and young people.”

Pickens knows first-hand the healing capabilities of art. While she has many happy childhood memories, she faced challenges and struggles, as well. “I painted, I made dollhouses so I could make the kind of home I wanted for myself when I grew up,” Pickens said. “I didn’t realize that was my therapy. It was a way for me to heal.”

Now Pickens works with children, teaching them how to practice self-love through art. The opportunity to share her art and her stories at the healing story circle was one she cherished.

“It was the best thing I’ve ever been involved in,” she said.

“It was a moment of listening, learning, and teaching. I think that everybody felt deeply connected to each other. Everybody had something to learn from the stories and everyone had something to teach from their own experiences,” said Bermejo. “We learned from people native to Asheville for generations what was the true essence of the African American community here, and what it looked like day by day: that the community knew how to keep each other safe, share food, take care of the children of the community, and find joy and build thriving businesses and neighborhoods. The past is the answer to the future that we want to have and unlocks solutions that we need.”

“In academia we privilege certain kinds of knowledge and ways of being and so I think this was a great opportunity, because students naturally gravitated to the wisdom of these community partners,” Batada said. “They were able to receive and internalize that information in a way that complemented the texts that we've been reading. That gives students a fuller picture of what health justice is and how to imagine health justice.”

Pivoting in the Pandemic

Halfway through the spring 2020 semester, the COVID-19 pandemic forced classes to pivot to remote, online learning. This required the Imagining Health Justice class to change course, including their plans for a second community event.

“We had to pivot quite a bit,” Kloeppel said, “but we were able to adapt pretty quickly since we had already been working in a very emergent mode. The students were used to letting our collective experiences and in-class dialogues guide the next steps of our project.”

The second public community event was held online as a Zoom webinar by the students, faculty and community partners, which included drumming, meditation, artmaking, storytelling and resource sharing. Class discussions continued online, as well, and the students turned their focus to resiliency, and to creating two websites that could continue the work they had started.

Eliana Franklin, a junior creative writing major and environmental studies major, helped create the “Practicing Resiliency—Creativity as a pathway to wellness” website with her classmates. The website features community stories, such as the experience of service industry workers in Asheville during the pandemic, art collected from community submissions, and guidance on growing your own food for physical and mental wellness. The students were able to include their own stories and artwork, as well, and experience that healing power for themselves.

“I worked on the digital zine part,” Franklin said. She solicited submissions for art and creative writing that focused on resilience during the time of COVID-19, and organized it for the website. “We got a lot of different kinds of artwork, some collage, a lot of stuff with nature relating to trees and growth. We even had some wood turning and sculpture.”

Franklin submitted her own artwork, as well—a tree growing from a book. “It relates to growth and learning from the situation,” Franklin explained. “It’s about gaining knowledge and growing as a person, so it's more of a positive aspect of what's going on.”

Franklin said the course helped expand her ideas about health justice and how art can be used in healing, and taught her about the importance of listening when engaging in the community. “The class is a great way to learn more about the Asheville community, especially the African American community in Asheville,” she said. “It’s also a way to learn about healing and to go outside your comfort zone and try a lot of different types of art.”

Continuing the work of the class through the pandemic was challenging, but important, especially for the students.

“Our students really don't want to wait until they finish their degrees to have a positive influence on the community they're living in,” Kloeppel said. “I see it more and more with each new class of students. They are ready to engage with complex social issues at the human level. They are change-makers. They are visionaries. They have great ideas and community-engaged learning classes gives them a platform and an opportunity to synthesize and apply their classroom learning in tangible, action-oriented ways.”