Our StoryThe Wellness Collaborative (TWC), founded by three Black women – an internist, a pediatrician, and a psychologist – is a nonprofit that provides an innovative solution to eliminating health care disparities. We provide education, insight, and best practices that promote sustainable personal and community health, wellness, and resilience.
|
|
TWC is unique because of our interdisciplinary framework, ethnocultural focus and our strengths approach to the social determinants of health. Rather than using the typical labeling of social and environmental issues as “determinants,” we frame them as “influencers” which means they do influence but are not fixed or fated determinants of our health. We explore these factors through The 7 Disciplines of Wellness, based on the construct developed by Allen Callahan, Ph.D., as a model for sustainable living.
Our target population can be delineated by zip codes, where study after study has shown that Black and Brown communities experience disparate care and health care outcomes, regardless of education or income level. |
|
The foundation of the nonprofit is its interdisciplinary membership, tasked with providing a think tank that researches and identifies asset-based best practices and trends for improving the wellbeing, advocacy, and agency for our target communities, which includes ethnocultural and historical interventions.
The members organize and present, along with guest speakers, our signature ReImagining Health and Wellness™ Forums & Conferences on critical topics, using a community-based participatory design, to stimulate conversation and encourage multigenerational action for individuals, their families, and the community. Both the membership and the forums are broadly integrative in nature. The members are professionals, artists, advocates, researchers, community service workers, farmers, healers, and educators.
The forums include allopathic, complementary, and traditional healing modalities, as well as behavioral, social, and emotional learning solutions. In addition to the forums, TWC offers workshops, consultations, and training for health care service organizations, provider groups, and employers in any sector.
The members organize and present, along with guest speakers, our signature ReImagining Health and Wellness™ Forums & Conferences on critical topics, using a community-based participatory design, to stimulate conversation and encourage multigenerational action for individuals, their families, and the community. Both the membership and the forums are broadly integrative in nature. The members are professionals, artists, advocates, researchers, community service workers, farmers, healers, and educators.
The forums include allopathic, complementary, and traditional healing modalities, as well as behavioral, social, and emotional learning solutions. In addition to the forums, TWC offers workshops, consultations, and training for health care service organizations, provider groups, and employers in any sector.
Our Grounding Paradigm
|
Seven Disciplines of Wellbeing
The Seven Disciplines are seven suites of theory and practice for thinking through and working through our common challenges. Like the systems of the body, the Seven Disciplines cannot be understood in isolation from one another: they are interrelated, inform each other, and have mutual, complex impacts on each other. Taken together, these Disciplines suggest how we may seek and find what is good for each of us and for all of us.
|
Industry is the discipline of living a life worth living by doing work worth doing, making what we use, using what we make, doing the right things, doing those things right, and offering our own products and services in freedom and with justice.
Security is how we keep safe what we hold dear; it is full coverage, blanket protection, risk management in all areas of common life; what we do and how we do it to prevail against danger and uncertainty, so that, come what may, all will be well.
Education is the complex process whereby we learn from others and learn for ourselves how to make of the world what we would have it be. It treats of the connection between what we think and what we do in the service to what we truly want. In short, Education is the know-how to live life according to Purpose.
Alimentation treats of how we feed ourselves, and how we do so in ways that are wholesome and just. Instead of toxic supply chains that trace a straight line from produce to refuse and from haste to waste, Alimentation restores the nutrient cycle in which our food once again feeds our bodies, our communities, and our economies.
Remediation treats of how we repair, refresh, and restore those things we value. It presupposes that we live in a world where things go wrong. In such a world, merely doing no harm does no good, and even doing good is not good enough: we need a repertoire of righteous hacks for fixing what is broken and making the wounded whole.
Communication is what is said and heard, and how it's said and heard. Much of what we make, use, and consume through mass media and social media does us little good. Through the discipline of Communication, we create our own high-quality content, and we share that content over our own networks, through practices of speaking and listening that model responsibility and respect.
Habitation is all about the built environments where we make things happen – where we work, rest, raise our children – raising the questions of who builds those environments, with what, where, when, and how. We must design such spaces and construct such places for our own good, by means that are both wholesome and just.
