Header Dear Friends:

As we come to the end of 2012, we at Community Healing Network (CHN) would like to let you know about the tremendous progress we've made toward our goal of engaging a critical mass of Black people in the movement for emotional wellness by 2019, the 400th anniversary of the forced arrival of Africans at Jamestown Colony.

This year, CHN reached an important milestone in its quest to build a global grassroots movement for the emotional emancipation, healing, and wellness of Black people. In June, working with the Association of Black Psychologists (ABPsi), our Community Healing Institute held its first Emotional Emancipation Circles Training of Trainers in Tuskegee, Alabama.

Emotional Emancipation Circles (or EE Circles, as we call them) are safe, flexible spaces where we can:
  • come together to revitalize ourselves and our relationships with each other; 
  • deepen our understanding of the impact of historical forces on our emotional lives;
  • share our stories;
  • detoxify and free our minds and spirits; and
  • arm ourselves and our children with essential emotional wellness skills.
ABPsi's ground-breaking, evidence-based EE Circles training is designed to help local leaders establish and sustain neighborhood EE Circles. Leaders in Tuskegee are currently piloting the EE Circles model, and the lessons we are learning there will help us expand the movement across the country and around the world. We have shared the EE Circles vision and model with Black mental health professionals and other leaders across the Diaspora and the response has been enthusiastic and overwhelming. People from New Haven; DC; Baltimore; New York; Chicago; Portland; Los Angeles; Toronto; the Virgin Islands; the United Kingdom; Ghana; and South Africa, and in correctional systems on the East and West Coasts have asked us to train them in the EE Circles process. And we need your help to meet this growing demand.

HELP US USHER IN A NEW ERA

We invite you to help us pave the way to a new era for Black people--an era of emotional emancipation, healing, wellness, and empowerment. During the era of enslavement, our ancestors followed the North Star to physical freedom. In the era of Civil Rights, we marched in Washington and throughout the South.

To make our way to a new era, our journey will not be physical. It will be an inward journey--deep within our own souls to rediscover who we truly are--children of Africa whose inborn compass guides us toward order, truth, respect, balance, sharing, harmony, and justice. These are the principles that guided African people before the atrocities of enslavement and empowered our ancestors to "make a way out of no way" during enslavement and Jim Crow. These are the principles at the heart of the EE Circles and they are the principles that will lead us to emotional wellness to enable us to be at our best--as individuals and as a community.

The history of African American people is a history full of amazing strides, but the lie of Black inferiority and the internalized racism that it engenders are still powerful forces keeping our community from reaching its fullest potential. In order to empower ourselves to overcome the Black-White academic achievement gap and the epidemic of youth violence, and reverse the many other negative trends in our community, we must achieve the goal of emotional wellness.

Please consider deepening your commitment to our work. With the financial support of donors like you we will be able to:

► Expand our Defy the Lie and Embrace the Truth Campaign to raise awareness of the continuing negative impact of the lie of Black inferiority and what we must do to overcome it;

►Develop a wide variety of on-line and off-line EE Circles curricula and other written and audiovisual resources to help individuals and families along the path to emotional wellness, with a special focus on what ABPsi leaders have identified as the "seven essential emotional wellness skills for Black people"--skills to help us flourish, not just survive, even in the face of continuing racism and discrimination; and

►Train and provide technical assistance to at least 2,019 Trainers who will equip local leaders to establish and sustain EE Circles, and at least 2,019 leaders of community-based organizations (especially youth groups) to help them incorporate the principles of emotional emancipation, healing, and wellness into their work-- all by the year 2019.

Please consider a monthly recurring donation or a one-time gift per year, of whatever amount fits your budget. And encourage your family and friends to support us as well. Please forward this email to at least one other person and ask them to support CHN!

CHN is a 501 (c)(3) charitable organization and all donations are tax deductible.

You may click the link below to make a secure donation through Network for Good or mail your contribution to Community Healing Network, Inc., c/o Jill Snyder, Treasurer, 111 Whalley Avenue, New Haven, CT 06511.


We thank you and we wish you a safe and peaceful holiday season and a very Happy New Year.

Sincerely,
Enola Aird, Jill Snyder, Dottie Green, Natalie Roche, Wizdom Powell, Sheila Warren, Tarice Gray, Ric Jennings, Gretchen Vaughn, Carl Miller, A.D. Carson, and all your friends at Community Healing Network, Inc.

Community Healing Network, Inc.
www.communityhealingnet.org

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