Renee Mitchell - Spreading the Black Joy Virus
/Today’s Black Beat is honored to introduce local celebrity and Pulitzer Prize nominated Writer and Speaker, Educator, Performer, and ”Creative Revolutionist”, Renee Mitchell. As an expert trainer in Youth Empowerment, Trauma-Informed Practices and Social Emotional Learning from a heART-centered, culturally relevant framework, Ms. Mitchell is also the visionary behind Spreading the Black Joy Virus and the I Am M.O.R.E. youth development program. According to her website profile at https://www.reneemitchellspeaks.com/aboutrenee, she is currently developing I Am M.O.R.E.'s theory of change, called Empowered Resilience™ , as a doctoral candidate at the University of Oregon (2021). Her work intends to create a national example of how to empower and build hope and resiliency in youth of color with profound love, culturally relevant social-emotional skill building, and youth voice-centered programming.
What Black Beat Host, John Washington and Renee Mitchell talk about:
Where Renee got her start
Challenges and successes
What it means to be a “Creative Revolutionist”
youth development and empowerment programming
successes and challenges working with youth
Spreading the Black Joy Virus
Strategies and assistance for coping with the pandemic
How listeners reach out to Renee and support her work
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"I got here through a whole lot of trauma," shared Pulitzer-prize winning writer, author and “Creative Revolutionist'', Renee Mitchell. A survivor of domestic violence, sexual assault and bullying throughout her K-12 experience, Ms. Mitchell grew up as one of one of very few black children in her school and weathered more than her fair share of racism and oppression. “I didn't hear a lot of affirmations so I had thoughts of suicide. I was a sad, sad kid. All of these kinds of experiences I've had though, have given me a real depth of compassion and really helped me understand how important it is to be very heart-centered. What I do is really try to help other youth realize their own potential and understand that trauma is not the whole of their story but it can inform who we are becoming."
After 25 years as an award-winning newspaper journalist Renee reinvented herself as a “Creative Revolutionist”. “I actually came up with this term because people would just say 'Well, what do you do?' I always had this thought, 'Well where do I start?' I love every form of creativity. It's all about creating revolution in different ways so I just made up a title that seems to encompass the breath of what I am about. "
What she is about is luminous and multifaceted in approach. In addition to co-founding a culturally specific, drop-in DV resource center; she also shares her talents throughout the community as a poet, playwright, performer, speaker, teaching artist and self-taught graphic designer who creates and contributes to empowering projects and programs, community healing ceremonies, plays, songs and books about healing from trauma.
"Anything that anyone is capable of, once you give yourself permission to do that without judgement, or without listening to those voices, you know, that ‘inner critic’, you can accomplish anything. As long as it comes from your heart, it's there for a reason and it's just up to each of us to excavate it out of whatever box we are putting it into."
One of the ways that Ms. Mitchell applies her life experiences and helps youth to process trauma, is through a development and empowerment program she co-founded, I am M.O.R.E. (Making Ourselves Resilient Everyday).
"Authentically I had to go through my own journey and it is basically a similar journey I take the youth through, particularly youth of color and most particularly, Black youth. It started when I was a teacher at Roosevelt High School and for a couple of years I was the only Black teacher. There is an organization, "Stand for Children'' which is nationally based but it was started here in Portland. Every year they give out these scholarships called "Beat the Odds" and they are $16,000.00. At Roosevelt, we may have had one student a year or sometimes none, get this scholarship and of course as a writer I am always trying to encourage young people to write their own stories. I teach this process, "don't just tell your story you need to own your story" and that means you need to figure out what it's trying to tell you and which direction it's leading you in. From that perspective, Stand for Children awarded 4 scholarships in Portland. 3 of the 4 were my mentees in my Black Girl Magic club. This was significant that 3 of them, the same year, all black girls, got this scholarship. I talked to them and said, 'We need to put a flag in the ground. This is amazing. This is different. This is something that never happened before.' So we came together and said let's create an organization.
The result of the collaboration was immediate and impactful. “We really didn't know what we were going to do,” shared Ms. Mitchell. “We just said, ok, well maybe you all who have experienced trauma, homelessness, poverty, being scared for your life, coming to the country without knowing the language, all of these different kinds of traumas they have experienced and that have shaped them, now they can go and empower other youth. Maybe 2 months later we had our first performance at the MLK annual tribute in 2019.”
Her background informed her approach to helping the youth enrolled in her program. “I do theatre too, and that's how I came to really understand myself because it was easier for me to become someone else on stage then it was to be myself,” she reflected. “I used those same theatre skills to help these young people weave their stories together. This was the first time they had ever told their stories in public, so they were a little nervous. You could hear it in their voice, you could see the tears but what it did was transform their relationship to their story because adults were coming up to them and saying, ‘Oh my God, I'm so glad you shared this’, ‘you are so brave’, ‘I found myself through your story’, ‘You brought me to tears’. More young people started to hear about what was happening, put their stories into this graphic novel, and then I got all these young people saying 'I want to tell my story!', kids who had never talked about the things that had happened to them and started to understand that trauma is not all of who we are. We can use it to be able to inform and inspire and help other people feel like they are not alone in what they are experiencing.
Within 6 months. I am M.O.R.E had its first national invitation to open up at an annual-trauma informed conference in Philadelphia. “We took 6 young people to Philadelphia, New York and D.C. It was an amazing experience,” Mitchell remembered. “We knew we were on to something when they got a standing ovation and we wound up teaching a workshop on ‘What do youth need from adults?’ We had those adults in tears because it was young people who had the agency to talk about some of their deepest trauma in a way that inspired and empowered other people. It raised the question, ‘what are you doing with your life? What are you doing with your trauma? How are you helping other people understand that they are not alone?’ Since then we have presented at other national conferences and we have been paying youth because I am M.O.R.E. understands that when we ask you to share your story, this is something that you are an expert in. You are an expert in your life. So we pay them and every time they get in front of a microphone, they get a check. It shifts their way of thinking about the relevancy of who they are and what they have to say. It empowers them.”
The Black Joy Virus Campaign is Ms. Mitchell’s most recent contribution to the healing of youth and her broader community. "This also came out of trauma. When the pandemic hit, I was caught up like most other people. I was feeling anxious, I wasn't sleeping, I wasn't eating. One day, I'm standing in front of the hardware store on MLK with my mask on, just trying to take care of business, but just not even really present. There was this older black gentleman who was walking toward me and I didn't know him but instinctively, when he got in front of me, I gave him the 'nod' right? It's just something we do. He gave me the nod back and just kept walking. Today I wouldn't recognize him if I saw him again but in that moment, he gave me a visual hug and that was exactly what I needed. I still get emotional when I think about it because it was like he saved me. He saw me and acknowledged my dignity. It changed everything for me in that moment. Out of that, came the idea for 'The Black Nod' which was the film that you (John Washington) were in. I was like, wow, I need to make a movie about this because it affected me so deeply. From that movie, we started learning things I didn't know like this is something people in Africa do and there's all different kinds of nods and that there were different reasons and rules to it. I am seeing all of this anxiety that people are having, I'm seeing the protests and all of this unearthing of all that was already there with the oppression, but now the world was paying attention to it, right? It brought up all of this anxiety because there were more black deaths and more Black anxiety and it also brought up that I want JOY. I want to laugh again. I knew that if I wanted that, other people wanted that. And so that was what started the Black Joy Campaign. It is about how we, as individuals, can share JOY with others. We can reach back and fetch our ancestral wisdom, our ancestral resilience, our ancestral joy, our ability to make a way in spite of no way, we got that, right? So how can we remind ourselves of that kind of depth of joy that we have? That is what the campaign is all about.”
Despite the heightened anxiety and trauma brought to the entire collective of human consciousness by COVID -19, the pandemic actually affected the work of I am M.O.R.E. in a good way. “We did a summer internship last year. It was our first internship. We have only been operating about 2 years and 2 months and last year we partnered with the City of Portland and Multnomah County through their Summerworks program. We had youth and 3 different cohorts go through our internship process and they were paid to do that, to learn the I am M.O.R.E. process. It's a three-step process, one that I have been through myself. It starts with Inside out, a process where they learn to be researchers of their own lives. They are guided to understand how traumas are signposts to their becoming so they connect the dots between what they experience and what they are hoping to do in life. The next step is Outside Up, which is when we guide them to direct the gaze outside of themselves and what they can do in their family, school and community and society to make a change. It's a social justice kind of mentality, a critical conscious raising about racism so kids stop internalizing when someone treats them badly. They start to understand that this is a systemic issue and so it also reframes their understanding about the world. The third and final step is Up and Beyond which is a platform to share their wisdom. We took them through this process over the course of the summer internship and they felt so connected to each other because they have this safe space online where they were talking about real stuff. They extended the internship until December just because it met their needs and I am M.O.R.E. is planning our next summer internship. We are adding How to become an Entrepreneur, How to understand what your Brand is, how to understand what your story is and out of that story, a sense of what wisdom is. We teach them public speaking, about mindfulness and how to settle themselves down, social emotional learning and getting in touch with your body. All of these skills that will serve them the rest of their lives, we are really, subtly training youth of color to be revolutionaries in their communities by giving them all of these skills that they don't get in high school.”
Her soulful and soaring presence is exemplified by the wisdom and compassion she practices every day of her existence. “We rise by lifting others,” Ms. Mitchell glowed. “I wake up with joy every day because of the work spreading the Black Joy Virus and because of seeing the effect on these young people. This is also an intergenerational campaign. Me being able to help them tap into their joy is the greatest piece of joy that I have ever experienced. Not because of what it is doing for me, but for what I am doing for others. This is a spiritual principle and more people need to be waking up to it. The theory of I am M.O.R.E. is when I am grounded in my power, I AM power."
It is that power that drives Ms. Mitchell and her mission forward and has garnered her widespread acknowledgment, kudos and support. "This is my commitment to my community, to spreading joy, to spreading hope and love,” she shared with deep sincerity. “As a creative consultant, I am all about healing. I am about being heART centered and focused on how we can support each other and how I can get you to tap into what is already inside of you that is just waiting for you to pay attention to it. All of the joy, all the love, all the creativity, it's all there but you are overlooking it because it's encased in trauma. Sometimes you have to go through the trauma to get to the shadows. Beneath the shadows are everything you've ever dreamed for yourself. “
To connect with Renee Mitchell use the following links:
www.Iammoreresilient.com
www.spreadingblackjoy.com
www.reneemitchellspeaks.com
