About The Project
This is a graduate student collaborative project in the Art, Education, & Community Practice program at NYU focusing on the health and well-being of communities in the Lower East Side. We partnered with Anthony Feliciano, the Director of the Commission on the Public’s Health System (a community focused organization that advocates for people’s right to access health care) who put us in touch with University Settlement’s Older Adults Program Director, Michele Rodriguez.
The project focused on learning about the way people see health and wellness in their lives and within their community. We used the arts as a platform for collecting stories from elderly women and to envision new ways to inspire dialogue about issues of concern within health and healthcare, key themes of well-being that extend from just physical health, and solutions to ultimately initiate social change. We feel that many times the voices from local communities are missing from the bigger picture of how the health care system operates and delivers care. We wanted to explore the different perspectives these women hold about what it means to take care of themselves and be healthy and well in order to better inform the health care system currently in place and to influence future policies and services.
Our community partnership started in April 2017 and we met with a group of seniors from University Settlement once a week. For our first session, we provided a handout to the group explaining our project and goals as well as listing a couple of guiding questions about their sense of health and overall well-being. The conversations quickly veered towards physical health - agility, pain, and coping mechanisms. As our meetings progressed, our workshops and activities became a space for sharing stories about each person’s experiences that included emigrating to the U.S. in the 1950’s, family values and traditions, food, cooking with fresh ingredients, and comparisons between the many cultural remedies adopted from their childhood with present day health.
Their stories had a strong emphasis on culture, tradition, and wisdom centered on more spiritual and holistic practices. All of these themes are connected to how these individuals perceive and experience a sense of overall well-being. Through dialogue and having an open space to share, these women revealed their identities, beliefs, humor, and humanness through their rich stories about their life as immigrants, mothers, grandmothers, daughters, and long-time community members of the Lower East Side.
As we collected each piece of advice, experience, and remedy in our sessions, we thought that as a result of the project, creating a community well-being book made up of personal “remedies” and stories would be a delightful way of sharing each individual’s story and to give more context to the health and well-being of the elderly Puerto Rican community in the Lower East Side. A sense of nostalgia, familiarity, truth, and wisdom is sprinkled through each page of the book. We (the facilitators) thoroughly enjoyed listening to each individual’s story and insight and deeply appreciate the honesty and commitment of each individual that contributed to our research and the content of the community book.