Roots & Relationships Internship Curriculum

Roots & Relationships is a twelve-week service-learning curriculum I developed for Mind the Gap’s interns. It combines professional development, community engagement, mental health education, expressive arts, reflection, and capstone work. Its purpose is not only to help interns become stronger researchers, organizers, communicators, and nonprofit professionals. It is designed to help them become more resilient, confident, imaginative, compassionate, and grounded human beings.

At its heart, the curriculum offers an alternative and integrated way of understanding healing, human nature, and psychology. Interns encounter clinical frameworks alongside depth psychology, expressive arts, spirituality, cultural memory, systems thinking, rest, play, movement, nature, and community wisdom. They are invited to learn through their minds, bodies, relationships, creativity, and lived experience. Weekly journaling, audio diaries, artmaking, reflective walks, seminars, goal-setting, and a culminating capstone allow learning to become personal, relational, and practical rather than merely theoretical.

I think of this curriculum as a love letter to the world: an attempt to build the kind of learning environment I wish more young people inherited. It treats interns not as units of labor, but as emerging leaders with inner lives, histories, gifts, limits, questions, and dreams. The curriculum asks them to examine systems honestly while still cultivating joy, purpose, courage, tenderness, and hope.


My Role as Community Impact & Equity Coordinator

As Community Impact & Equity Coordinator, I work across community strategy, partnerships, research, mentorship, education, and program design.

I help Mind the Gap listen to the communities it serves and turn that learning into more ethical, accessible, and meaningful action. My role includes cultivating partnerships, bringing an equity lens to organizational decisions, mentoring interns, facilitating seminars, and connecting everyday projects to the organization’s deeper purpose.

Through Roots & Relationships, I shaped much of the curriculum’s intellectual and creative world: selecting materials, designing reflective and artistic exercises, teaching seminars, and guiding capstone projects. My aim is not only to teach nonprofit skills, but to help interns understand why the work matters, who it is accountable to, and who they might become through doing it.

  • Interns enter the organization through relationship, reflection, and context. They learn Mind the Gap’s mission, values, systems, and community while creating an intentional physical and creative workspace for the journey ahead.

  • Interns clarify their responsibilities, set personal and professional goals, imagine capstone possibilities, and learn to approach growth through curiosity rather than perfection. Small experiments make ambition feel playful, flexible, and attainable.

  • This week introduces the ethical foundations of community work. Interns explore organizing, compassion, intersectionality, decolonization, power, and accountability while beginning to assess how Mind the Gap communicates and serves.

  • Interns explore ecological models of human development and locate themselves within networks of family, community, culture, and systems. They compare relational philosophies from around the world and create art about friendship, connection, and interdependence.

  • Interns learn distinctions between mental health challenges, crises, trauma responses, and diagnosed conditions. Clinical language is placed alongside poetry, archetype, music, movement, deep listening, and practices that help transform despair into connection and life.

  • Interns encounter CBT, DBT, psychodynamic therapy, trauma-informed approaches, Internal Family Systems, Mental Health First Aid, Mind the Gap’s Wheel of Wellness, and different forms of rest. The week encourages critical thinking about what healing models offer and what they may leave out.

  • This week centers creativity as a form of knowledge, healing, play, and world-building. Interns explore expressive arts therapy, choreopoetry, psychodrama, visual art, safe space-holding, movement, recovery narratives, and the radical importance of joy.

  • Interns examine what is lost when mental health frameworks ignore spirituality, meaning, ritual, and the sacred. They encounter Buddhist, Taoist, Islamic, Christian, Jewish, Indigenous, and other relational traditions while considering how to approach them with humility and respect.

  • This week asks how history lives in the body, family, culture, and collective imagination. Interns explore storytelling, intergenerational trauma, ancestry, cultural amnesia, inherited coping, and the possibility of transforming memory into clarity and creative tribute.

  • Interns finalize their projects and look back on their growth. They pause to audit their work, identify what remains, revisit formative curriculum materials, and strengthen the relationship between their capstone and Mind the Gap’s community-centered mission. Guided reflection, the KWL process, purpose work, and letters to future interns help them name what they learned and what they now carry forward.

  • The internship ends through celebration, witness, reflection, and rest. Interns share their capstones, receive recognition from the community, revisit their original intentions, and leave with a stronger sense of voice, confidence, and direction.

Sample Exercises

The Death Mother and The Delighted Healer - Week 5

  • Read this brief explanation of addiction.

    We’re looking at the archetype of the Death Mother, one who may show up if we had an early wound in life where we felt unwanted or unworthy of love. Depth psychologist Marion Woodman describes the Death Mother as a cold, destructive force whose gaze can turn us to stone—draining our life, killing hope, and pulling us into a deep inner darkness. Over time, we become hyper-aware and frozen, and to protect ourselves from rejection, the body starts to compensate and hold the tension!

    “Change is fundamental to being alive-to remain fixed is to rot. If the Death Mother archetype is part of our body-psyche, then profound fear means that we try to destroy anything that might precipitate meaningful change. We will do anything to ensure that our life feels safe and secure, even if it is static, rotten, and dead. Our way of relating to the world is written in stone. Death Mother traps potentially vibrant energy and holds it in a cold, rigid, lifeless form. We are imprisoned by an energy that petrifies and ossifies.” pg 180 of above resource

    Once you read through, do whatever you need to do to process what you read. Write a short poem, write some reflections, move a little, or even just get yourself a glass of water. Make sure you are ‘meditating’ on it. 

  • Counteract Death Mother with some life. Embody instead the Delighted Healer. Grab a jug of water and find a plant indoors or outdoors to water. Bring your journal with you too so you can write the following kind of mini prayers. This is a libation practice. It is often done in African diasporic communities and traditions. Approach with appreciation and respect, and remember some of the context we’ve discussed about our Africana brothers and sisters. We’ll discuss more during our check ins. Write this as many times as feels good, replacing what you love each time. Make sure it’s really things you love healthily and wholesomely!! It could be air, freedom, generosity, hope, the sun, the sky, your cat, your favorite toy etc. After writing each mini-prayer, pour a little water on your plant. Try to do this outside!! 

    • I love ______ and I give her/him/them life.

    • Example: I love the Earth and I give her life.
      Example: I love my cat and I give him life.

  • Write an action plan for bringing the Delighted Healer into your life. What are concrete ways to bring her alive? What are philosophies to carry with you? Write out your commitment in your journal and sign it.

Relationship and Community Art Prompt - Week 2

  • 40 minute art piece - set a timer for 40 minutes and create a written or visual “sketch” on the following prompt: 

  • Relationships are the web that weaves, the ties that bind, the bedrock of human connection. How can we experience the world or forge civilizations without understanding the innate poetry of friendship? 

  • Don’t worry about outcome or product. Your process and experience is important here. 40 minutes. Use color, if you wish. Poetry or words, if you wish. Film. Movement you film yourself doing. The important thing is that your work on it takes 40 minutes and you can write a rationale (explanation to accompany your work) about this tomorrow!

Bronfenbrenner’s Model and Other World Wisdoms - Week 2

  • Bronfenbrenner’s Model

    • Take a look at Mind the Gap’s Circles of Care Model. It’ll be a big focus this week! Think and mull about what you read, and feel free to reflect further in your journal (optional). 

    • Read the following article to get a better idea of each of the layers: Simply Psychology | Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Systems Model

    • Copy out the model into your sketchbook and start putting real names, places, and people into it according to your life. Put yourself at the center and start thinking about all the people and forces who impact(ed) you the most at each level.

    • Find two other systems or models of relationship and community other than Bronfenbrenner’s Model (World Wisdoms) in other cultures or societies from human history that prioritize relationality, reciprocity and holistic understanding of human experience. Create a table or write a paragraph drawing at least three comparisons between each.

    • Watch Kingmakers of Oakland’s music video Ubuntu here.

      Reflect back somehow– a journal entry, a haiku, a short audio recording of your thoughts. What do you see? What’s the purpose of this alongside Bronfenbrenner?

Choreopoem Philosophies - Week 7

  • Read Phoebe’s poem on choreopoem philosophies drawn from Cynthia C. Harris’ choreopoem workshop 3.14.2026) and the good invitation to play sheet (3.14 workshop)

    • Read Phoebe’s poem aloud on a video you share with us. After you read it, continue your video spending three minutes reflecting back what you heard. Finish with the words “I write myself in. I commit to building the next world.”

    • Select three of the choreopoem essential story techniques/narrative tools. Define them and come up with an example of how they might support a therapeutic session.

Later Exercise

  • Return to the Internal Family Systems activity from last week. Identify the part you worked with or identify a new one. You’re going to dialogue with it. DO NOT go for big scary parts. They are all good, but you need supervision under a therapist to excavate exiles especially.Write a poem about the part. It should reflect a sacred journey you are going on in your life. It could be:

    • From its perspective

    • A live dialogue

    • From your perspective looking back

    • Observational or expressionistic

    • Any way you would like to depict it

    This poem will serve as the text or script for a mini choreopoem. Recall the storytelling techniques from the choreopoem Invitation to Play, and choose one eclectic one to use in your piece. Come up with simple movements to show the story you want to tell and a simple chant or song as well. Create your piece! This should end up being a maximum of 5 minutes. Record yourself doing this and send it our way via email, uploading it to your folder in Google Drive.

Grandparents Love Letter - Week 9

  • Take a classic Mind the Gap podcast walk – Listen to Dr. Thema Bryant’s The Homecoming Podcast episode  Ep 14: Healing Intergenerational Trauma

  • Think of one of your grandmothers or grandfathers. Perhaps the one you know better, or maybe you choose the one who might have been through more. Everything you know about them is going to be valuable information. What did she/he struggle with in their heyday? Financial pressure? Isolation? Assimilation? What is the theme?

  • Reflect on the cultural context they were living in. What were the expectations of her/him within the family and the broader culture? Were there any big shifts (political, social, personal) in her/his lifetime? How would that have affected her/him? 

    • Did she/he struggle to cope? Or did she/he do okay? How does her/his coping from then affect her/him now? Some of this involves imagination, but get comfortable with painting broad strokes. You are not assuming, but making intuitive connections to what you already know. Write your answers in your journal using color. 

    • All of these factors lead to a worldview and way of thinking, living, and ultimately raising children. How did this worldview pass along to your father or mother? Their siblings? Is it any different between them? How did they then teach their children this worldview?

    • Write all of this information down either systematically, or creatively. Feel free to process this however you wish, and always feel free to bend the rules so you can do this authentically to you!

    • Finally, settle deeper into your sit bones for this one. Breathe. Where does her story live in you? What is your body, your mind, your spirit still holding on to? Is there a part of your own psychology that has inherited her burden? Ask the same questions of yourself. What do you struggle with? What coping strategies do you use for your cultural moment?

Relationship and Community as Medicine: Philosophy and Strategy

At Mind the Gap, “relationship and community as medicine” is both a philosophy and a strategy—one I have helped cultivate.

Young people do not heal in isolation. Mental health is shaped by family, friendship, culture, institutions, history, and access to support. Roots & Relationships therefore looks beyond individual symptoms toward belonging, trust, dignity, reciprocity, and the communities surrounding a person.

Mind the Gap puts this philosophy into practice by serving as a guide and connector: making resources easier to find, strengthening partnerships, listening closely, and building networks of care. The curriculum prepares interns to join this work through ethical community engagement, deep listening, systems thinking, cultural humility, and bottom-up program design.

Its central questions are not only What is wrong? but also: What happened? Who is here? What has been inherited? What helps life, joy, safety, and connection return?