A Community of Healing will be comprised of six separate workshops on the topic of healing, both as an individual and as a community. Participants will be middle and high school-aged youth from the Washington, D.C. metro area, who are in the midst of coping with a recent or traumatic death. The primary goal of the program is to afford students multiple artistic tools with which to articulate their healing process, and to create a final presentation that will help members of the community to better understand the challenges and wisdom of a young person in mourning. Some art forms explored will be playwriting, spoken word, radio drama, and improvisation. We also plan to examine the Mexican tradition of the Day of the Dead, as an example of a cultural tradition that addresses the process of celebrating and healing as a community. We will then have the opportunity to incorporate Day of the Dead inspired artwork into the final presentation.

Musefire is planning to cultivate partnerships with two organizations for this program. The first potential partner is the Wendt Center for loss and Healing, a Washington DC based organization that specializes in traumatic death counseling and has a number of youth oriented programs. Through a partnership with the Wendt Center, we hope to gain workshop participants as well as a trained grief counselor to be present at all workshops and provide professional support. The second partnership that we plan to pursue is with the Mexican Cultural Center of Washington D.C. From this partnership we hope to gain artistic and historical support for the Day of the Dead portion of the program.