WHAT WE DO
Touching Land* uses hands-on experiential arts as a tool for community-building and immigrant empowerment. We have different programming that follows different social tracks: the Empowerment Model and the Building Bridges Model.
Our Empowerment Model is meant for immigrants and vulnerable populations where the focus is on legal rights, self-worth, mental health and building networks of support among participants. While our Building Bridges Model was created as a platform where cross-cultural connections are born. Participants from different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds seek to understand not only their shared humanity, but also their rights and duties as allies in a diverse community.
We are all about building JOY AND BELONGING.
*Fractured Atlas Fiscal Sponsored while awaiting 501 (C)(3) status.
empowerment
Clay Know Your Rights Workshop:
Taught at the beautiful BKLYN Clay Studio, this class is designed for immigrant empowerment. Immigrants learn to build and glaze an object out of clay, while building an emergency plan of action and an understanding of immigrant rights inside and outside of their homes. Students leave empowered with their rights and inspired by the power of their imagination and self worth! This is a 3 hour, 4 session class.
mindfulness and rights (10 week program)
During the pandemic, we discovered that our community needed a lot of emotional support, in collaboration with BREATHE International’s U.S., ED Camila Diaz, we developed a 10 week online course for our immigrant participants teaching mindfulness and rights. We were able graduate 16 different participants who went through the entire course and successfully learnt how to self regulate their emotions.
These signature “Know Your Rights cards” are provided free of charge to workshop participants and their friends.
BUILDING BRIDGES
In Conversation Series:
Women of New York based immigrant communities will come together to build slab plates, stamps and conversation. The participants will then, in a ceremonial way, stamp their creation on each other’s plate, allowing for everyone to have a small piece of each other. This class has a small food celebration during the second session. This is a 2 hour, 2 session class.
Salsa and Visibility:
Done in collaboration with Chef Manolo Lopez from Mofon*Go and Chef Carolina Saavedra, this class was crafted specifically for companies and delivery workers with a main drive of decolonizing foods and spaces. This class is designed to create visibility of the delivery worker in the spaces they serve, but where they are often invisible. Delivery workers and their clientele will have the opportunity to decolonize food together while learning about how to assert their Fourth Amendment rights or intervene as allies. This is a 2 hour class. This class can be modified and used for other audiences as long as decolonizing food and spaces remains the center of the class.
Running, Rights and land
Our running, rights and land is a program that had been in the works for a few year. Running is an incredible tool that like clay and cooking, allows for people to relax and be vulnerable and open. Using our bodies via movement can release so much stress and can connect us to the outdoors, ourselves and our community. It is a perfect somatic/mindful tool, especially in the trails. We also wanted to build more connection with immigrants and the outdoors. The hope is to ultimately introduce these runners to local already established running groups.
We did a modified pilot in 2023 in Brooklyn, NY. We saw a population of immigrant men that were isolated and unable to work, but needed to learn more about their rights and about the power and joy of displacement through running.
We found this would be a great opportunity for introducing them to local community spaces, orgs, restaurants that are ready to welcome and support. A lot of the impediment from moving beyond the 2 block area is knowledge and feeling safe, this was our goal in expanding the space they felt comfortable moving in.
The program was really successful, we were able to provide shoes, shorts, a reusable water bottle, rights information. Given the constant moving of immigrants from shelter to shelter, it created a lot of barriers for the program to continue as migrants were moved to 5 different boroughs in less than 4 months.
We are hoping to restart this program with a different population of immigrants in a different neighborhood.
