Founded by Denise Shanté Brown, Black womxn flourish is a design for wellbeing collective shaping the future of Black womxn’s health and healing through community-led practices. we are dreaming of a future where Black womxn are redefining and designing what it means to be well. we are working towards that future Through designing public gatherings, qualitative research, and building liberatory tools, courses & consultations.
From Left to Right: Myself, Intuitive Design Collaborator; Precious Blake, Creative Design Synthesizer & Joy Cultivator; Denise Shanté Brown, Founding Director & Holistic Design Strategist
The goal of each session is for participants to:
Share health concerns that they have for themselves and for other black women in their families and communities
Identify inner and outer support needs using a mind, body, soul, space framework*.
Design personal healthcare (and self-care) tools to utilize in their everyday lives.
*Inspired by Black Girl in Om
Design for the Wellbeing of Black Womxn
Our first time working together was to co-create and co-facilitate Design for the Wellbeing of Black Women (D4WBW) sessions. These sessions ask participants to look at design as a transformative tool that can support their healing process and collective wellbeing.
Design for Wellbeing 2018 Cohort
We had the pleasure of working with a select group of folks from our pilot sessions to develop the first Design for Wellbeing Cohort. For 6 months we engaged our cohort members in a combination of learning sessions and studio sessions to further iterate on the prototypes and ideas that came from the pop-up sessions. Our four learning sessions were each centered around the framework of Mind, Body, Soul, and Space (MBSS), and co-facilitated by local Black women healing practitioners who specialize in one of the areas. In between MBSS sessions, we would then invite the group back to the Center for Social Design at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where participants would take what they’ve learned and see how it could apply to their designs. Designs ranged from a deck of cards used to assist a tarot deck by helping us uncover questions we don’t know we need to ask, to a patient-provider practice framework meant to humanize clients and provide holistic care. We commemorated the experience with a celebration in September 2018.
How I show Up: Co-Facilitation, Social Design Research, Client Consultations, Community Engagement, graphic design
Designing flourishing Futures Manifesto
Dreaming Flourishing Futures is both our Manifesto and the visioning sessions that seeded it. In 2020, we held a series of sessions that asked the question “What does a future where Black womxn are flourishing look like?”
With co-facilitators Teena Lewis and Aisha Shillingford, we led 40 participants through a visioning and artifact creation session, where they designed artifacts from a future where Black womxn are flourishing and brought them back to the present. Three participants from the gatherings, Aki Younge, Alexandra Antoine, and Nechari Riley joined us to make the Manifesto Creation Crew. Together, we documented what was shared in the gatherings, and spent the next 2 years creating this manifesto, with rituals, recipes, and the space to create your own artifact. While a limited run of physical copies were distributed to Black women owned organizations and practices, a digital copy is available for download here!
The manifesto was designed by me and Natalia Arias. Background patterns by Precious Blake and collages by Alexandra Antoine.
