ALIVE INSIDE…
is bringing community impacted by the prison system creatively into the conversation of grief, loss, & our shared mortality, inspiring a more connected & meaningful experience of being alive.
ALIVE INSIDE offers a rare chance for spontaneous and creative vulnerability, intimacy, and connection, with grief & gratitude open mics, writing workshops and group facilitation.
CONTRIBUTE TODAY: https://givebutter.com/WPhCSn
THE LIGHT KEEPERS
is a weekly year-round program facilitation, with a cohort of 15 mentors & 22 new trainees
THE LIGHT KEEPERS [originally the Brother’s Keepers - founded in 2005], is a peer support training program housed at San Quentin State Rehabilitation Center, focused on crisis intervention and suicide prevention. Graduates of the program provide peer support to other incarcerated individuals in acute crises. The training’s components include the basics of peer counseling, trauma-informed care, grief and loss counseling, rape crisis counseling, suicide prevention, and cultural humility. The program also includes ongoing, regular case conferences with its graduates. Light Keepers has demonstrated success not only in reducing the suicide rate in San Quentin, but also in aiding its graduates on the path to parole. The role of the Light Keeper is not to replace professional intervention, but to be a bridge to accessing the help that will support and not punish. Light Keepers are trained to provide counseling as a peer, not as a lay professional. The program has trained dozens of incarcerated individuals who, in turn, have provided peer support and crisis intervention to hundreds more of their community members.
TESTIMONIALS
"As a man who has lived behind the same walls & fences that I may one day die behind; all the men who share that same reality have spent chunks of our seemingly never-ending time reflecting, writing, sharing, and discussing our special form of impending mortality in small circles made up of us. But there’s something different, special, maybe even sacred, about letting out, into a space dedicated to our shared destination, the pain, desperation, and impotence of not being able to alter the location of my expiration visits upon me. Something sacred about a poem of fully open, vulnerable humans living wholeheartedly in the elegiac celebration of death, that resonates deep in my being."
- Daniel
"Attending an event on grief seemed like scheduling time to be disorganized. But, when during our day do we allow ourselves to grieve? An event like this allows my heart to take a quantum leap of healing."
- Wade, currently incarcerated
