Crisis of Care: Charlotte’s Wedge and Compounding Culture
Realigning bias and removing stigma to renew COMMON-UNITY
Crisis of Care: Charlotte’s Wedge and Compounded Culture is a community awareness experience that is designed to help members of the community understand what life might be like as a member of a typical family working to survive while faced with varying issues of food insecurity, resource inequity. stigma, physical and mental health disparities. The objective of the experience is to raise and mobilize awareness regarding the harsh realities and tough decisions that many neighbors in our community must make every day.
⇒ September 24, 2018, 6p-9p, UNC Charlotte Center City ⇐
On the evening of September 24, 2018, 6p-9p UNC Charlotte Center City will be transformed into Queens Crossings, USA complete with locations representing community resources and services for families. A bank, food pantry, employment office, department of social services, currency exchange, supercenter, county jail, school, police station, utility and mortgage companies aid in bringing the city of Queens Crossing, USA to existence.
The awareness experience begins when participants randomly select a life experience, and are transported to Queens Crossing, USA. Upon arrival in Queens Crossing, participants assume the roles of neighbors working and living in all stages and income levels similar to what neighbors experience every day in the east to west crescent of Charlotte. Each family is given a card explaining its unique circumstances. It is then the families’ task to provide food, shelter, and other basic necessities by accessing various community resources during the course of four 15-minute “weeks”. When the timer sounds the “month” is over and engaged conversation begins.
In an intimate authentic popcorn–style conversation, facilitated by grassroots, public, and/or private sector leaders, neighbors are invited to debrief and discuss their experiences and what perspectives have shifted regarding individual implicit bias. It is at that point in the evening the experience transmutes from a” simulated” experience to a “real” human experience by supporting participants as they rethink the challenges that so many of our neighbors face every day. During the conversation the veil is lifted, paving the way for individuals to breakdown entrenched stereotypes, implicit and explicit bias, that impede growth and adversely impact equitable mobility for many of Charlotte’s most vulnerable residents.
Our evening concludes with a very unique call to SUPPORT that allows everyone to network and identify areas to align, reengage and use individual talents to directly impact the effects of living in a resource desert may have on individuals, families and the common-unity. This experience is a proven tool that is used to birth and nurture innovative, holistic and lasting solutions, that fosters livelihood, renews relationships, supports collaboration, repaves economic access paths, and ensures that the common-unity is a great place to live, work, and play for everyone.
ALL PROCEEDS TO FUND
YVONNE’S PLACE, COMMUNITY CONTINUMUM OF CARE
NURTURING HOLISTIC SUPPORT SERVICES FOR ALL
