Blossom House
Outreach
“If you have come here to help me,
you are wasting your time.
But if you have come because your liberation
is bound up with mine,
then let us work together.”
Lilla Watson
Blossom House Outreach extends Blossom House services of trauma-informed yoga, art therapy, and other wellness programs into the community at large and is sustained by the proceeds of Blossom House Healing Arts studios, grants, and other generous donations.
Our house is a headquarters for healing, for trauma stewardship, for gatherings, and we are a collective of artists, teachers, and therapists who work to create access to wellness in order to cultivate a caring and just community. We are a catalyst for grassroots resilience and wellness building in Fairbanks and beyond. We work with people who create adaptive strategies to overcome oppression from any source–self or society–supporting their efforts to take effective action to shape their own destiny.
Our goal is to provide accessible community outreach services to residential treatment centers, drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs, correctional facilities, youth organizations, senior centers, women's shelters, agencies for people with disabilities, etc. while supporting and sustaining the work of our Elders, facilitators, and teachers.
Blossom House 501c3 currently sponsors programs of community outreach at Fairbanks Correctional Center, Fairbanks Youth Facility, and other institutions:
• Yoga Service Project Alaska
Yoga Service Project Alaska is an organization of yoga teachers committed to seva yoga–service to community–by creating accessible, trauma-informed programs of yoga for people in isolated communities, people who may not otherwise have the opportunity to attend a yoga class, and to people of all ages, experiences, and backgrounds. In creating equal access to yoga and mindfulness practices, these programs support healing, resilience, self-development, community building, and positive social change. YSPA currently offers yoga practices at Fairbanks Correctional Center, Fairbanks Youth Facility, Family Centered Services Residential Treatment Center, and The Door and is developing a Yoga Teacher Training program for people who are incarcerated to facilitate their own practice both inside and out.
• Breadcrumbs Theatre Company
Breadcrumbs Theatre Company creates opportunities for healing through the performing arts and is committed to:
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providing theatre workshops to all ages
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creating theatre for social justice, healing, and community building
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employing and engaging individuals from diverse backgrounds
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promoting self-expression
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encouraging people from marginalized populations to tell their own stories
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exploring identity and culture
Breadcrumbs Theatre facilitates two forms of Applied Theatre:
Playback Theatre asks audience members to share stories and a troupe of actors and a musician replay the stories back to the audience (immediately and without planning). The teller (audience member sharing a story) benefits from the validation of seeing his/her story replayed. S/he may also gain a deeper understanding of his/her emotional experience. Other audience members may relate to the experience of the teller and feel a similar sense of validation or understanding.
Theatre of the Oppressed can be combined with Playback and asks audience members to brainstorm situations of oppression, and then act out those situations and solutions to them.
Breadcrumbs Theatre Company are trained theatre professionals who bring a wealth of knowledge from various vocational backgrounds in education, art, anthropology, farming, social work, nursing, and activism.
• L.I.O.N.
Learning Inside Out Network is a collective of community members both inside and outside facilities of the criminal justice system who create collaborative works of arts and wellness. L.I.O.N. currently facilitates the Women Writing Workshop inside the Fairbanks Correctional Center (FCC) and its blog Voices Uncaged, as well as the mens' Area 111x writing class which works as a University of Alaska Fairbanks entry level composition course. Blossom House also sponsors Newspapers for Inmates: a program that brings daily newspapers into FCC and the Fairbanks Youth Facility.
• Community Care Collective
Fairbanks Community Care Collective is self care in community. We are a group of people interested in collaborative, consensus-based, anti-oppressive, anti-racist, and trauma-informed ways to support each other personally and professionally. We aim to educate and immerse ourselves in practices of community care, so that we may create access to such resources in our community at large. This description is always open for update, debate, and revision from the collective.
• Roots Recovery Embodiment Praxis (RREP)
a 10-Week
Curriculum for
Post-Traumatic
Growth
RREP is an interdisciplinary arts curriculum for Post Traumatic Growth. We are the embodiment of our ancestors, the living praxis of generations of codes for surviving and thriving. Long before we called it trauma, the body remembered how to heal it. In this course, we explore ways to access the resilient wellness of our people through contemplative story, mindful movement, applied theatre, and percussive expression. Methods of connecting with ancestral wisdom have evolved over centuries in various world cultures' ceremonial arts and traditions. The RREP method is a refined system of recovery based on Jody Hassel’s performance arts practice and experience with various wellness modalities over the past 30 years. In this 10-week curriculum, Jody enlists her understanding of personal and community trauma to inform rituals of embodiment and the arts, to create access to healing, social-justice repair, and shared power.