Our Mission
Mission: The Braxton Institute co-creates collective strategies to repair and heal harms and traumas of historically oppressed communities and to lift up legacies of resistance and joy. We do this by employing education, the arts, ritual and spiritual traditions to support leaders with marginalized identities, foster community building across generations, advance research, teaching, public dialogue and advocacy, and to provide healing, resilience and sustainability in dangerous times.
Vision: We envision a world in which -- through restorative justice and human creativity -- legacies of harm are transformed into patterns of peace and joy, embodied in just and sustainable communities; a world that affirms human ecology and biodiversity in all its forms, including race, gender and gender expression, ethnicity, sexual orientation, physical ability, religious affiliation, or lack thereof.
Our Goals are:
to generate public symposia and dialogues on resisting and thriving, led by activists, practitioners, scholars, faith leaders and artists; to foster sustainability for communities of resistance by harnessing the power of narrative to bring knowledge from the margins to the center of public discourse; to educate and inspire;
to foster education and research on reparations, health equity, and moral injury; to contribute to academic curricula in the liberal arts, law, religion/ethics, and healthcare, as possible;
to create and hold sanctuary space (retreats and restorative Circles of Care) for historically marginalized leaders of color (especially Black change-makers) in high stakes situations, to facilitate evidence-based strategies for self stewardship and self care; to harness the resources of the arts, humanities, and sacred traditions for spiritual grounding;
to advocate for public policy changes to advance justice-making and reparations (we are signatories to HR 40);
to promote greater understanding of the ways that perceptions of race, ethnicity, poverty, sexuality and sexual orientation, gender and gender identification and subtle and overt forms of discrimination influence personal, professional and collective life; to cultivate just and sustainable community-building by partnering with related organizations and efforts.
The Braxton Institute Model for Engaging Moral Injury and Collective Healing
This model informs our work and was designed to help sustain ongoing dialogue and discernment in pursuit of collective healing, sustainability, resiliency, and joy. We want to know: "What do these concepts mean for you and your community?"
A joint collaboration by the Braxton Institute, the Soul Repair Center, and Volunteers of America.
A Statement of Our Truth
Foundations
We are rooted in our faith, in an inclusive love of God, and in a compassionate embrace of humanity. We are students of the traditions of the Middle Passage and the quest of the Articulate Hero and the Outraged Mother of the fugitive slave narrative for freedom, justice and peace. We are steeped in Christianity, in Afro-Christian belief, in Conjure and in the healing practices of Afro-Indigenous peoples. We hold all life to be sacred.
Origins
In the beginning, there was Lamentation. Before BLM, there was Trayvon Martin. Almost 17 months before George Zimmerman was acquitted of Trayvon’s murder, the Braxton Institute was born on the steps of the Wren Portico at William & Mary on March 27, 2012.
Where were you when Trayvon was killed?
Together with Rebecca Parker, Jerome Carter and Ashley Pettway, I was at W&M, Frances L. and Edwin L. Cummings Professor of the Humanities, one of the founders of the Africana Studies program, and the new United Church of Christ campus minister, having realized that the work of social justice could not go forward without theological perspective or spiritual care. I was standing there a queer black woman scholar and out Christian minister in a psychic landscape littered with apparent contradictions. At my side was Rebecca, distinguished theologian, treasured colleague and my spouse.
Two of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence among those inscribed on the Wren Building wall carry the name I bear. Carter Braxton and George Braxton were wealthy businessmen, merchants, and – slave traders. I wondered about the names and the lives of the Africans who made the bricks and raised the walls. I embraced the work of the W&M Middle Passage Project, W&M’s The Lemon Project: A Journey of Reconciliation and the Middle Passage Ceremonies and Port Markers Project, and then Trayvon was killed, just as the Great Awakening United Church of Christ and the Eastern Virginia Association of the United Church of Christ and I were establishing our campus ministry.
For me, the slaying of Trayvon Martin, as for so many others, represents an act of unspeakable terror. It was also a major turning point in my life as an academic and a spiritual caregiver. When my then students, Ashley and Jerome, asked me to speak to the “care of the soul in this world” at a memorial Vigil organized by the Deltas, the Alphas and the local chapter of the National Black Law Students Association, I staggered under the spiritual magnitude of what they asked, struggling with what to say in the allotted five minutes and an awareness of their sacred trust and the preciousness of time. In writing these devotional advices, I recalled two poems: Gwendolyn Brooks’ “The Children of the Poor” and Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day.” I recalled Trayvon’s “one wild and precious life” cut down so soon and Brooks’ question, “And shall I prime my children, pray, to pray?” And in that moment I came to a conscientization that I had hitherto only partially realized. I had been training the minds of my beloved students with steel trap academic rigor and preparing them to do the work of social justice in this world without preparing them to take care of their souls in a way that would sustain them in love and joy that they might do the work. I struggled all night. I struggled all day. I struggled in the evening before I stepped forward to the microphone in my minister’s collar and my Oaklandish hoodie with the hood drawn up in solidarity with Trayvon and the students surrounding me.
Devotional Advices for Care of the Soul in the World
by Rev. Dr. Joanne Braxton, The Wren Portico, College of William and Mary
These words spoken at the university chapel, the same chapel where I was preaching and teaching, represent a primer to prayer for the children of the cosmos in a time like none other. Afterwards, my wife Rebecca came forward and led a moving Universalist prayer meditation. The entire courtyard of several hundred students lit by glowing candle luminaria was breathing together and singing together, holding space together, comforting each other. Today we might call the murder of Trayvon Martin and this moment an inflection point but for us on that day, we simply knew that our lives had changed and they would never be the same again. We might have called it a Sankofa moment because we knew that we were looking back into the ancestral past and forward into the future at the same time.
Not long after, Mark Osler, a W&M alum and by then a distinguished Professor of Law at St. Thomas University and President of the Association for Religiously Affiliated Law Schools, came back to speak in my life writing class and to preach in the Wren Chapel. Jerome and Ashley graduated, with Jerome winning notice as the first W&M Africana Studies graduate. Soon Mark and Richael Faithful, alumnus, activist, attorney and folk healer would join our work and we filed our papers of incorporation.
This is our origin. Before there was a Black Lives Matter movement, or at least simultaneous with its emergence, the Braxton Institute was born in struggle, in response to the same trauma and outrage and injury and the need for guidance, knowledge, inspiration and leadership in the struggle for which our hands and our voices have been made. Where were you when Trayvon Martin was killed? Do you remember? What will you pledge to uphold the sacredness of Life?
Trayvon Martin's mother Sybrina Fulton says that if society followed 'First, do no harm,' her son would still be alive. Specifically, she says, "When enacting legislation, it would be wise to follow the medical principle, 'first, do no harm.'" In the midst of the COVID 19 pandemic and Climate Change, rising movements of resistance and hope, courageous witness in the streets proclaiming Black Lives Matter, at this inflection moment in our collective history of struggle for liberation, justice, and sustainability…
We, the Braxton Institute for Sustainability, Resiliency and Joy, commit to:
Following the medical principle of first, to do no harm, to delight in this beautiful world, but, first, do no harm.
We commit to love as love does, with hope, trust, perseverance; to support the leadership of women, queer folk, and the oppressed; to be a force for healing and love in a divided world.
We commit to acting the ethics of our conscience, in recognition that while all voices are valuable, not all voices consider the moral mandates of this moment.
We commit to witnessing, holding, and moving alongside leaders who, within their deep service to others, are doulas to an emerging world order that prioritizes justice and liberation.
We commit to teach and learn spiritual practices—in our work with one another and with those we work alongside of—that strengthen solidarity among people; foster personal wholeness, integrity and resilience; connect individuals and communities to transcendent and immanent sources of healing, joy, creativity, compassion, and justice.
We commit to foster critical and constructive analysis of ideas, ideologies, and frameworks of meaning –including cultural, political, religious and spiritual frameworks—asking the question: in what ways does this framework/idea support the just flourishing of lives and ecosystems? In what ways does this framework cause, perpetuate, or sanction harm to lives and ecosystems?
We commit to promote reparative approaches and strategies for redressing legacies of harm to life (due to colonization, racism, sexism, militarism, heterosexism, ableism, economic injustice and greed, ecological exploitation) participating with willing spirits in collective healing and repair of harms we did not directly perpetuate as well as those for which we bear responsibility or benefit from unjustly.
We commit to create opportunities that engage the powers of the arts and ritual to name and transform injustice, celebrate and embody wholeness, beauty, and liberation.
“You know, if I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon. All of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves.”
— Barack Obama, 44th president of the United States of America