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2018–2024
Organizational Design, Community Organizing, Mental Health and Healing Justice

Creative Resilience
Collective

A Philadelphia collective that studied, designed, and organized toward liberatory mental health care from 2017 to 2023.

ROLE

Founder and Lead Organizer

INCUBATED BY
Slought Foundation now Public Trust

Animated logo by Heejin Suh

01

Overview

A collective built on shared power and care
The Creative Resilience Collective was an art, design, and healing justice organization that operated in Philadelphia from January 2017 to 2023. It organized educational workshops, study groups, critical writing, public art projects, youth programs, and design resources. Driven by a shared question: what would it take to shift the culture of mental health care toward liberation and joy, starting with the communities most excluded from it?

CRC began when I was based in San Francisco, watching legal aid organizations defend immigrants being deported at the airport. A college mentor had introduced me to collective organizing, and I’d remembered how design, collective organizing, and advocacy were powerful practices when used together in service of social and cultural change. After spending much of 2017 building capacity for legal aid groups in the Bay Area, I was invited to Philadelphia by Aaron Levy at Slought Foundation. There I reconnected with Bennett Kuhn and met Jessa Lingel (who co-founded CRC in Philly) and began building CRC as a healing and health justice organization grounded in the conviction that our experiences, both shared and distinct, are what connect us and enable us to protect one another.

CRC was the organization where I stopped working within other people's institutions and started building my own. I developed the organizational infrastructure, the relational practice, and the participatory methods that run through everything I’ve built since.

02

Role

Founder and lead organizer
CRC began as a fully volunteer-based initiative incubated at Slought Foundation, growing through grants, commissions, and community-engaged projects into its own organization. I built its organizational infrastructure with founding co-organizers. Community agreements, collective decision-making frameworks, weekly rhythms, and project pipelines that enabled a core team of a dozen or more people to sustain work across multiple focus areas simultaneously.

What CRC built was deliberately wide, held together by a consistent thread: participatory research leading to co-designed community tools, art, and resources.

Poster by Kim Gim

03

Challenge

Inaccessible mental health care
When CRC was founded in 2017, Philadelphia's mental health care landscape had two challenges.

Access: confusing systems, limited providers, insurance barriers, long wait times, and services not designed for the communities with the highest need — people of color, LGBTQIA+ people, people in recovery, those experiencing housing instability or involvement with the criminal legal system.
Culture: mental health care was framed almost entirely through a medicalized, Eurocentric model that positioned care as something you received from a professional institution, not something communities built and provided for themselves.

What CRC's research kept revealing through the provider interviews, through the study group, through the mapping project — was that alternative forms of care already existed everywhere in Philadelphia: in block parties, in creative spaces, in faith communities, in harm reduction organizations, in the ways people moved through grief together. These were not recognized as care infrastructure. CRC's work was to make them visible, study them seriously, and build with the people practicing them.

The theory of change was relational and cumulative: shift the narratives people hold about what care is and who it belongs to through study groups, build tools that help communities locate and create it for themselves, and grow a network of practitioners who carry that framework into their practice.

04

Outcomes

Community contributions and composted learnings
Over six years, CRC grew and stretched me beyond my wildest dreams. It was an organization that tried to practice what it preached about care, collectivity, and the redistribution of power. Across study groups, participatory research, anti-stigma campaigns, mutual aid, youth programs, public art installations, and published research, CRC gathered and engaged hundreds of people through programs that sought to change how our collective understanding about mental health, care, and our own capacity to create change. Co-organizers went on to pursue social work degrees, carrying CRC's learnings into clinical and community practice. Others continued teaching, organizing, and art making. Permanent public art still stands in Kensington. S.P.I.C.Y. hearts in Karen and Arabic remain installed in Southeast and Northeast Philadelphia. A peer-reviewed paper named the structural barriers our research uncovered. And Creative Resilient Youth (one of our earliest commitments) ran for six years and produced youth-led exhibitions that reached tens of thousands of Philadelphians.

CRC closed not because the work was finished but because the conditions for sustaining it could not be maintined. Operating through COVID (continuing programs under collective strain, holding a largely volunteer organization together) took a significant toll on me and my co-organizers. What that period made clear was how much of the collective's vitality depended on the relational conditions that sustained it.

In 2023, CRC naturally sunset with the completion of our final commitments. We irected our remaining resources toward Creative Resilient Youth. The learnings, the relationships, the organizational frameworks, the research, the programs got redistributed and composted through collective memebrs. Some of it is still finding its form.

We shaped the projects below. In turn, they shaped us.

Creative Resilient Study Group
Collective reading group, 2018 – 2019

A weekly study group questioning the politics and medicalization of mental health, in partnership with the Health Ecologies Lab at Penn. It drew artists, designers, lawyers, urban planners, care providers, and researchers — and depending on the topic, functioned as peer support as much as intellectual inquiry.

Philadelphia's Mental Health Care Landscape
Participatory research, 2017 – 2018

An early research initiative to ground CRC's organizing in lived experience, developed in partnership with Jessa Lingel's Penn graduate students. Interviews with mental health providers and advocates across Philadelphia led to co-design workshops exploring care gaps and referral tools for drug users seeking services. The research contributed to the publication Institutional Shadow Bodies in Mental Health Care Information Seeking.

Photo courtesy of Jenna Spitz

It's Not Always Sunny
Anti-stigma and narrative change campaign, 2018

A grassroots campaign listening for and honoring the diverse ways people cope, initiated by Bennett Kuhn and co-led by Theo Loftis, Jenna Spitz, and other CRC organizers. It pushed back against the social pressure of performing happiness and worked to dismantle stigma around mental health. The campaign launched publicly at Parking Day Philadelphia.

Creative Resilient Youth
Youth program, 2018 – 2023

A creative arts and healing justice program for Philadelphia teenagers that grew out of CRC's community roots. I co-founded and co-directed the program alongside CRC members Bennett Kuhn, Felicia Blow, and Michelle Lee Delgado Wallace, running for five years across Philadelphia.

Learn more

Alternative Spaces of Care
Community research and crowd-sourced map, 2018

An experimental mapping research and mapping project to identify where Philadelphians felt genuinely cared for outside the formal health system. Community responses formed the basis for a map of informal care sites. The project also seeded what became a two year youth program called S.P.I.C.Y.

Photo courtesy of Jenna Spitz

Sanctuary Philadelphia Independent Cultural Youth (S.P.I.C.Y.)
Youth program, 2019 – 2021

A monthly art-making program for immigrant and refugee youth from Southeast and Northeast Philadelphia, developed in partnership with Southeast by Southeast and Dr. Amy Henderson Riley at Jefferson University. Workshops explored belonging, sanctuary, and mental health across communities from Bhutan, Burma, Iraq, Egypt, Sudan, and Syria. Community-sourced phrases and locations from the workshops informed permanent public installations by artist Amberella at Mifflin Square Park, The Exchange at Oxford, and Northeast Regional Public Library.

Photo courtesy of Jenna Spitz

Fundraiser for Health and Racial Justice
Mutual aid, 2020

A campaign CRC led in partnership with Slought to direct resources to Black-led organizations during the 2020 movement for Black lives and racial justice. Across two weeks, 85+ donations were matched 1:1, raising $14,797 for seven organizations supporting Black trans folks, youth, and movement organizers. CRC also provided $100 honoraria to six young Black Philadelphia-based artists, for a public art campaign featuring their work.

Illustration by El Sigelman

The Trust Project
Socially engaged art installation, 2020 – 2022

A permanent community-engaged installation co-produced with Mural Arts Philadelphia and Friends of Harrowgate Park. A crowd-sourced poem — woven from residents' memories, observations, and reflections on neighborhood life — was lifted into the sky to cast colored shadows on the ground below. Still installed at Harrowgate Park, Kensington.

Photo courtesy of Steve Weinik and Mural Arts

Picturing Home: Housing as Harm Reduction
Publication, 2023

A printed zine spotlighting the lived experiences of four Philadelphians navigating housing insecurity, combining interviews and somatic exercises. It emerged from the War on People campaign examining the drug war's impact on Philadelphia communities.

Zine designed by Cynthia Zhou

Contact Improv workshop facilitated by Elizabeth Weinstein

05

Reflections

The tension
I built CRC's organizational structure like a design agency. We held weekly planning meetings, defined project pipelines, and sought grants but we were a largely volunteer collective, not a scaled client-services operation. That mismatch meant we were always working at the edge of our actual capacity: harm reduction, mental health research, youth programming, study groups, public art installations, all running concurrently. The breadth was real, meaningful, and in hindsight quite remarkable. But the model I carried over from professional practice was not built to hold what we were doing on top of our day jobs, and our team felt the weight of that as we grew in scale.

What I learned
Collective organizing taught me that change has to be embodied, not just named. We bring our full self into every collective space. We show up with how we were brought up, how we learned to turn toward or run from conflict, the reasons we show up at all in this work together. We are working out our healing on one another whether we intend to or not. CRC proved that people with shared values and genuine care can heal together and be more powerful together than any one person alone. It also proved that sustaining that power requires infrastructure: for repair, for honest conversation, for accountability that doesn't mistake generative conflict for failure. The organizational design work I do now is built on what I learned from trying (and sometimes failing) to build that infrastructure inside CRC.

What I'd do differently
I would have scaled back earlier and concentrated on the initiatives that felt generative for the whole group, not just a few of us. I would have questioned the organizational model I inherited from professional studio culture sooner. I would have built rest, repair, and honest capacity assessment into the structure of the work itself from the beginning, not as an afterthought. That lesson is now foundational to how I think about building teams, designing programs, and knowing when not to scale.

What I'm most proud of
I'm most proud of the creativity and willingness to imagine and build something we had never experienced but knew we needed. Every roadblock brought us closer. For years, CRC was the truest form of a collective I've ever been part of: real, genuine care and love for the work and for each other.

Creative Resilience Collective Co-Organizers

Credit

This organization was made possible thanks to:

Co-Organizers
Bennett Kuhn
El Sigelman
Feini Yin
Felicia Blow
Jenna Spitz
Jessa Lingel
Michelle Delgado
Olin Morris
Sterling Johnson
Theo Loftis

Fiscal Sponsors
Slought Foundation now Public Trust
CultureWorks

Grantors
University of Pennsylvania
Penn Cares Fund
Velocity Fund (via The Andy Warhol Foundation)

CollaboratorsAaron Levy
Arielle Narva
Austin Kelley
Carolyn Hampe
Chloe Nurik
Cooper Lee Kidd
Cynthia Zhou
Elizabeth Weinstein
Ila Kumar
Kimberly Gim
Kimya Imani Jackson
Maritza Hernandez
Matt Wattman
Megan Bogia
Meredith Degyanksy
Nisse Greenberg
Quan Quan Nguyen
Saradine Pierre
Sarah Gawricki
Tara Boonngamanon
Among many others

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