Minority Mental Health Awareness Month
Promoting Healing Through Creativity
Speakers
Talented Artist, Yanory Norwood
Tari and Sage Loring, Local Edition Creative
Summary
NAMI Contra Costa was excited to announce its July General Meeting with a focus on Minority Mental Health Awareness Month. Local Edition Creative founders Tari and Sage Loring discussed their recent collaboration with their nonprofit Three Thirty Three Arts and City of Concord’s Creative Concord Art Jam in the Park series donating art for local organizations making an impact within the community. We introduced Yanory Norwood, a self-taught artist who paints to change the narrative of trauma through creative transformation. Through her art therapy curriculum workshops she is honest and fearless in addressing mental health, community racism and injustices.
Yanory graciously donated the central piece of artwork to NAMI Contra Costa, because her purpose organically aligned with NAMI Contra Costa’s mission and values, hoping that this visual will be a representation of being able to help understand one person at a time and help in the healing process. Yanory Norwood is an Afro-Latina immigrant born in Bluefield, Nicaragua, and raised in Oakland, CA. After almost two decades during the pandemic she decided to take a leap of faith and quit a six-figure corporate job to pursue something that she truly felt has been pursuing her her whole life. She creates an experience that acknowledges that our community is informed by trauma, with the manifestation that we can transform the child, family, and individual into more than our trauma. Stated simply, her art listens, speaks, embraces, and hold space for vulnerability to be intimately transparent.
Yarnory created a “Locked In” Series inspired by Black Men Mental Health and hopes we can get to a point where collectively we put less emphasis into why black men and women feel uncomfortable for the need of therapy and more understanding and action into the contexts in which they already feel comfortable sharing their insights. She also created an Art Therapy Curriculum for children/teens and adults to be able to express themselves in a context of gentle guidance that assists them in self-discovery and growth, which has given her the opportunity to lead workshops for women incarcerated with children, an incredible mentoring program for our youth called The N.O.W. Youth Foundation, in Philadelphia, an incredibly social and emotional restoration program called Studiofive10, and currently working with Create The Space, a concierge service for black men seeking wellness and community.
We also updated the audience on the projects NAMI CC is taking on to improve outcomes for the AAPI, African American and LatinX communities.
In Honor of Minority Mental Health Awareness Month, we acknowledged individuals who’ve made a great impact improving outcomes in the AAPI, African American and LatinX communities:
- Daming Mabel Mou
- Lorena Guerreo
- Synetta Freeman