Dance/NYC
Program: Arts in Health
Area of Work: Arts
Grant Purpose: Dance/NYC Staff Wellness Program
Overview:
Dance/NYC’s mission is to promote the knowledge, appreciation, practice, and performance of dance in the metropolitan New York City area. Dance/NYC serves the dance field through five core, mutually-reinforcing program areas: advocacy; action-oriented research; leadership training, networking, and convening; service technology and online resources through Dance/NYC; and grantmaking.
Grant:
Purpose: To support their Dance/NYC Staff Wellness Program, which provides mental health support for the organization’s staff.
Dance/NYC’s Staff Wellness Program is designed to nurture the individual and collective well-being of its employees by providing opportunities to explore social-emotional development & mental wellness, staff cohesion & resilience, and financial stability for a more comfortable work environment.
Through the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, Dance/NYC experienced a rapid and exponential growth in the demand for its services as the global health crisis, economic instability, and social unrest devastated the dance community. To meet this demand Dance/NYC staff took an all-hands-on-deck approach to offer both resources and direct cash awards via its Coronavirus Dance Relief Fund and other means of support such as facilitating regular virtual gatherings and sharing critical information through its communication platforms.
Despite its efforts to administer and deliver a generous emergency relief strategy, Dance/NYC also reckoned with the reality that the need in the dance field far outweighed the capacity of its staff and its fiscal reach as an organization. After 18 months of rigorous relief efforts, the Dance/NYC staff (most of whom are also dancers) was depleted and in need of true rest and restoration, not only on a personal level but also as it pertains to healing their relationship to a professional role that requires emotional labor as well.
Such a prolonged and intense period of overwork resulted in the creation of the Dance/NYC Staff Wellness Program aimed at developing more capacity to maintain the individual and collective well-being of Dance/NYC staff, which includes social-emotional development, mental wellness support, staff cohesion, and resilience driven by a holistic, humanistic and integrated approach.
Impact:
Dance/NYC partnered with Liberation-Based Therapy LCSW PLLC, a psychotherapeutic group practice that supports mental health and wellness through the lens of liberation-based healing practices. Liberation-Based Therapy was selected due to their emotionally focused, culturally affirming perspective and creative and critical consciousness framework that is dedicated to dismantling narratives rooted in oppression. Meetings were held at the organizational, departmental, and individual levels.
