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.
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.
Co-Designers
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.