Braxton Institute Summer 2025 Golden Repair Fellowships for Reparations Leaders

Now Accepting applications - Due April 20, 2025

 
 
 

Who are the fellowships for?

Applications are invited from local, regional, and national Reparations leaders of any racial or cultural identity, with priority to be given to Black leaders. The work of Reparations in these United States is challenging and at times exhausting. Often, we find ourselves too depleted or distressed to sustain leadership commitments without impairing our own health and effectiveness. Many of us come to the work of repair from a place of our own injury, or from our awareness of having seen systemic harm and injury and been unable to prevent it. We are, in many cases, broken vessels in need of repair. Kintsugi, or golden repair, is a Japanese art form that repairs broken pottery with gold to make of these broken shards an enduring work of art that is more beautiful and stronger than the original. Our gold comes from restorative and contemplative practices rooted in spiritual traditions.

What Does the Fellowship Provide?

Braxton Institute Golden Repair Fellowships for Reparations Leaders will bring together a group of up to twelve Golden Repair Fellows for an intensive online Circle of Care from May through August 2025. The Circle will provide a carefully guided sacred space for repairers and justice workers to come together in community, to tend to our own spirits as we tend to the world, especially in these times, which ask so much of us. Through collective care, reflection, and renewal, we can make golden repair/soul repair and find the strength to continue the work.

Golden Repair Fellows will receive ongoing 1-1 support as well as an individual orientation with the facilitator, Rev. Joanne Braxton, Ph.D., before the first session. Fellows are required to attend the first session and expected to attend at least six sessions overall.  Those who participate fully will receive a certificate, a $500 stipend for their time, and other opportunities.

What Is the Approach?

Our Golden Repair Fellows Circle of Care is based on the tested model of a rigorous Luce Foundation funded program for Black clinicians, ministers and other community leaders piloted by the Braxton Institute during the COVID-19 pandemic. Though spiritual and artistic disciplines and contemplative practices, 2025 Golden Repair Fellows will learn and share spiritual disciplines for leadership and the fine art of witnessing our own and each other’s moral suffering as we practice extending compassion to ourselves and others. We use the word “spiritual” to mean the ways we tend to parts of ourselves that are about our deepest essence, our core beliefs, our moral character, and ethical lives, and that which relates to spirit in the widest sense. We welcome people of any, multiple or no spiritual or faith tradition to join us. Together, we will explore these questions:

  • How do we as committed Reparations leaders come to understand the contours of our personal integrity in the context of struggle and trauma?

  • What spiritual disciplines and practices---among them journaling, life writing, sitting meditation, ritual, prayer, and embodied experience--- can we employ to increase our capacities for staying grounded and balanced? -- especially when we are tired or when we are afraid?

  • How do we cultivate and model moral courage and the strength to resist in a way that diffuses conflict or makes it more manageable?

  • How can self-stewardship and care for others support narrative change and collective well-being?


Dates of the Summer 2025 Golden Repair Fellows Circle of Care:

Individual 1-1s with the facilitator will take place between April 29, 2025 - May 8, 2025.

A total of 8 Circle sessions occur from 6:00-8:00pm EST on the following dates:
May 14th, May 28th, June 4th, June 18th, June 29th, July 9th, July 23rd and August 6th, 2025.

Please observe the April 20, 2025 application deadline as this offering has generated a great deal of interest.

Disclaimer:  We are not a substitute for therapy and not a substitute for professional mental health care. Those seeking mental health care should reach out to a mental health care professional.