The Vision

The Field’s vision is to leverage the arts as a source of emotional well-being, sociopolitical education, and community building.

This vision emerges in response to the deep depression experienced by its founding member—someone impacted by America’s carceral apparatus, the cycle of poverty, and the collateral consequences of immigration. Poetry became the first healing tool, supporting the emotional stability of a teenager coming of age in the wake of the crack epidemic, the conflation of immigration and criminality, and the far-reaching implications of generational poverty.

The Field is grounded in the belief that, in their most vulnerable moments, our people often have only themselves to turn to. Yet they are frequently left without the tools to understand not only how they see themselves, but also how they feel. Moreover, the resources made available to people navigating trauma often lack the pedagogical approaches needed to effectively support Black, Brown, and other communities most susceptible to state violence.

The Field imagines a world where access to the arts fills the void left by traditional systems of mental health, education, and public safety—systems historically entangled with institutional racism and often devoid of cultural relevance and sensitivity.

We are not mental health practitioners, social workers, teachers, or psychologists. We are people who have engaged in deep inquiry of the material conditions we have lived, survived, and thrived in—often in spite of them. We have also listened closely to those we’ve served over time, many of whom continue to endure the very systems that inflict the highest levels of violence on our communities each day.