the BLACKOUT year
a gap/sabbatical year for the African Diaspora
inaugural cohort: FALL 2022
9 fellows
The BlackOUT Year educates, trains, and challenges
an intergenerational, interdisciplinary cohort of Black people
to collectively develop, design, and steward
healthy and racially equitable communities.
We use the linkages between travel and education, entrepreneurship and activism, art and technology to design, develop, and collectively steward safe, brave, dignified and flourishing communities.
The BlackOUT unfolds in 3 phases:
Design it.
Using design-thinking, study, artistic practice, conversation, individual and collaborative projects, ritual, and writing, we’ll build capacity to understand and analyze both historic and contemporary events with an anti-racist, equity-centered lens.
Together, we’ll explore the racial wealth divide and use the rich history of cooperative economics and collective wealth building among people of African descent to co-design structures to catalyze community wealth.
Create it.
Next we’ll move from co-design to co-creation, engaging our communities of focus - co-curating and co-producing community events, black papers, and more.
Grow it.
After completing the BlackOUT year, we’ll travel the African Diaspora, nurturing our ideas with a global community of like-minded individuals working towards building flourishing, equitable societies.
We’ll grow our community design + development collective and serve on its board for 2 years, selecting the next cohorts of BlackOUT Fellows.
The process carries within it the seeds to increase individual and community capacity for self-awareness, self-discovery, and self-determination.
— Fall 2022
Spirit + Currency: Financial Healing
a collaboration with CEANYC, LIFT Economy, NYCCLI, and Trauma of Money
A financial healing curriculum which uses a trauma-informed approach to conjure abundance - individual and collective.
We’ll address financial harm caused by systemic marginalization, define and examine our current economy, and work to shift behaviors around consumerism that undermine sovereignty, flourishing and abundance - ALL WITH A REPARATIONS LENS.
Embodied Archives
Designed as a companion to Spirit + Currency
Through ancestral research, storytelling, artistic practice, conversation, ritual and writing, we’ll build capacity to understand and analyze both historic and contemporary events with an anti-racist, anti-imperialist, reparations lens.
We’ll reclaim and activate space through site-specific walks with our communities, communal dinners, and relationship-building at cultural institutions and sites tied to African Diasporic history.
— Spring 2023
Community Design School
a collaboration with Parsons School of Design researchers + professors
Our current systems of oppression and injustice are operating the way they were designed to. If that’s the case, then they can be redesigned.
We’ll learn the fundamentals of Equity-Centered Community Design™ and Liberatory Design - two problem solving frameworks and use art + design to center racial equity, history as healing, and empathy.
We’ll prototype, test, and iterate - melding art, technology, and a variety of media into campaigns, cooperatives, and collectively stewarded land and real estate.
Spirit + Currency: Cultivating Abundance through Solidarity Economics
We’ll create a community of practice - connecting with organizations nationwide that are catalyzing community wealth through a variety of methods - Community Land Trusts (CLTs), Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs),and more.
Finally, we’ll shift to practice solidarity and cooperative economics with local and international groups doing the work.
— Summer 2023 Travel
Length TBD - Fellows should expect to travel for 12 weeks
We’ll invert the triangular trade routes that formed the foundation of Transatlantic Slavery - reclaiming and repairing relationships with people across the Diaspora.
As we travel across the city, country and world, we’ll support locally owned and led organizations and businesses, respecting local traditions and culture.
Our Fellows will be introduced to thought leaders across diverse disciplines in an intimate environment and work alongside them to address pressing issues within their communities.
