2025 Street Works Earth
Kindred Roots
Sunday, September 21 @ 34th Avenue & 77th Street, Queens, NY 11372
These spaces celebrate culturally rooted care for our diverse Queens communities. Here, mental wellness is understood as a shared responsibility, not cordoned off into clinical systems that many can’t access or have reasons to not trust.
This isn’t therapy. It’s activities by peers, practitioners, artists, and organizers who believe that healing needs hope, and it can be woven into experiences of learning, listening, and creating.
Mental Wellness Resource Library
Click to learn more about Queens Mutual Aid’s library of community groups focused on mental wellness.
Activities
Below are activities that we think integrate mental wellness. Kindred Roots is both a theme for activities overall and something that called for intentional design. Click here to see how all activities weave together. If an activity doesn’t have a lead group or individual identified, it means we're still looking! If you have experience in New York City leading on the topic or know somebody that does, we'd love to hear from you. Please email collective@makejusticenormal.org.
2:15-2:45PM, Diamond Spratling
Set sail with Diamond as she reads from Sage Saves the World. Sage embarks on a journey to save the polar bears from the dangers of climate change. After the reading, make your own adventure boat.
3-4PM (every 15-30 minutes)
Join author Tulani Thomas as she reads from her children’s book series, TuTu and The Green Crew! Take a seat, settle in, and get for inspiration and some fun on going green and staying green.
12:00-4:15PM, ~25 Individuals
See who’s sharing their career journey during Street Works. Hear from folks at different points in their careers as they chat about how they got to where they are and the challenges along the way. Not a lecture. Bring your questions!
All day, Frontline Resource Institute
What does a joyful future, free of climate change, look like to you? Add to a collaborative drawing with your response to this question.
11am-4pm, Kaleidospace & More
Join us for an micro-theater featuring short films on climate justice and local stories, including work by Queens filmmakers.
All day, Bayeté Ross Smith
Contribute songs on freedom and liberation to Bayeté Ross Smith’s sculpture made of sugarcane & cotton boombox replicas.
1:15–2:10pm, Queens Mutual Aid
Step into a quiet circle for a guided visualization to meet your future self as an elder, an ancestor, a wisdom keeper.
1:15–2:10pm, Sunny Roberts & Jessica Bauman
Reflect together on who is part of our support systems for daily needs, growth, and work, and how we can expand our circles together.
2-2:30PM, Khalil Remtula
A drawing workshop, where you’ll design your own climate hero, in anime style, reflecting your values & vision for change.
All day, (Focus on Future@Work 12-2PM), Satia Koroma & Natalie Bedon/Street Works/MJN
Navigators will help you make sense of the environment, learn about the event, and offer ideas about which activities might best match your interests.
All Day, Ernest Verrett & Anjali Deshmukh/Street Works/MJN
In 2024, this installation invited passersby to add to a bead curtain reflecting on climate change. In 2025, it weaves in the story of wealth inequality, thanks to support from Stella Muti and the World Inequality Database.
All Day, Memo Salazar
Add your memories — of planet, community, and more — to a growing wall of comic panels.
All day, Grist
Imagine what a clean, green, and just future can look like by writing your own hopeful climate headline for the year 2050.
All day, Queens Mutual Aid
Recharge with calming prompts, reflective questions, and affirmations rooted in care for self, community, and the Earth.
All day, Queens Mutual Aid
Honor the people, places, and acts that sustain you and our planet. Add a note or drawing to help build a shared story of climate resilience, care, and community power.
All Day, Southeast Queens Residents Environmental Justice Coalition
Learn about Southeast Queens’s fight against groundwater flooding and the siting of lithium-ion battery storage in stones throw from homes and a hospital. You’ll walk away with tips on how to prepare for floods from folks who’ve learned by doing.
All day, Latin Academy
Learn how climate change impacts the Latiné community while learning Spanish nature words, games, and free face painting.
Bear witness to what is disappearing and envision what we can do to resist erasures and build abundant futures.
All Day, Team AOC
Join a hands-on creative project using sunlight and light-sensitive paper to make unique sun print. As you create, we’ll explore the Green New Deal, jobs and justice-centered plan to decarbonize the U.S. economy in ten years
2PM onward, (until materials run out), MJN/Marissa Yi/Justin Yi
Join us in making sealed gardens that can thrive without you ever needing to water it. Terrariums show us how ecosystems sustain, a reminder that balance makes life possible in a jar, a neighborhood, or the planet.
Why
We didn’t start this because we had answers. We started because some of us are hurting. We’ve lived the stress and sadness that can come from trying to survive the weight of bills, discrimination, political dehumanization, and/or displacement. And we feel the weight of what is coming: the effects of climate change that will haunt us for centuries.
For some of us, the cultural stigma of looking for help is too hard to overcome. For others, the systems that offer care don’t speak our culture or language, aren’t affordable, or ask us to find time we don’t have.
Many of us have gained wisdom from experiences, inside and outside of systems. Some of us found a way to make the system or resources work for us. Others find our way back to ourselves through art, as makers, fans, or both. We come to this as neighbors trying to imagine mental wellness as something we can do together, make together, and weave into our everyday life and spaces.
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"You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This is a very great liberation for the suffering, struggling person, who always thinks that he is alone. This is why art is important. Art would not be important if life were not important, and life is important.”
— James Baldwin, from “An interview with James Baldwin” (1961)
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"Art is the one place we all turn to for solace."
—Carrie Mae Weems
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"The arts saved my life."
— Michael K. Williams
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"Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence."
— Jeanette Winterson