Started in 2022 as a collaboration between Maya Davis and Cyrah Dardas, Community as Medicine supports early career Detroit educators, through facilitated dinners to connect and build community and to process their experiences while collectively cultivating a network of support.​

 

The program uses dinners centered on connection and building community with one another to collectively cultivate a network of support to nurture new visions for Detroit’s learning landscape. For this work,  educators need to be able to access imagination and possibility. We know that teachers who are exhausted and dysregulated by the violence, hopelessness and abandonment they are faced with on a daily basis are not likely to be able to move towards possibility. Our goal is to deepen our support of the individuals that make up the education system, resourcing students, leadership and educators in schools. ​

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In our project, Community As Medicine we host a series of monthly meals, where each portion  of the meal is carefully considered, allowing educators to forge relationships. The meals are set in the warmth of a home, decorated to commemorate the time of year with flowers, hand dyed linens and artful table setting. Each meal is catered by a local BIPOC chef whose cooking practice intertwines with food sovereignty. Invitee’s are given Care Kits whose contents guide the night's conversation with art, poems from local writers and books that provide access to further study. After years of learning from supporting teachers we have learned that when people feel tended to and cherished for their participation and presence it invites them to begin to process their experiences and this leads to relationship building.

 

​Community as Medicine is committed to the understanding that being an educator is a rigorous practice and requires this depth of tending to cultivate growth and retention. Our first cohort of educators focused on educators in the early stages of their career. The members of our first cohort were selected for their commitment to humanizing learning as well as their commitment to being innovative in their  approach to their role as educators.​I come to this project with over ten years experience supporting educators and youth in Detroit.  The pandemic made plain for me that the education landscape is in dire need of deep reimagining and change and I am committed to reimagining the purpose of learning centers and making specific, tangible plans on how to make those visions come to reality.

 

 Through these dinners we have invited each other to think about the ways we as educators and learners utilize imagination to re-shape the systems of our circumstances to better serve our students and ourselves. We are deeply grateful for our loving community partners BULK space, Popps Packing Ceramic School and People in Education who have generously offered us space, and thought partnership as well as each of the participants who bring us their stories, and insights onto how we are holding ourselves and caring for each other as people in education at this time.