Arts and wellness programming & community arts opportunities in North Bay, ON 🎨🌻💻✨️
Holistically supporting lived experience youth at the LLC. 📚
Anishinaabemowin/Nishnaabemwin Language Deck download available for FREE at www.earthandskystudio.ca ❤️ Ways to Wellness Project (WTWP) will be supporting holistic wellness endeavours for North Bay & surrounding areas’ alternative high school students,
at the Laurentian Learning Centre. Inspired by Ontario's underutilized PPZ3C course code, we will help facilitate physical education, health, and mental wellness classes, addressing all well-being aspects: physical, cognitive, emotional, spiritual & social. Allie Travale and Chelsea Reid will be developing and facilitating WTWP through self-directed initiatives and integral community collaborations. Addressing current gaps in the education system, WTWP will support the learning and improvement of mental and physical wellness, health practices, and the understanding of behaviours that contribute to individual, generational, cultural and communal wellness. Inclusion of Indigenous cultural components, such as the creation of the Anishinaabemowin Language Deck (ALD), is also a key part of this project. The ALD will be a tarot style bilingual educational flashcard deck, designed to encourage and enable peoples everywhere to understand and speak the Anishinaabemowin language. Cards will be designed via student and Indigenous facilitator collaborations. The ALD will end up being an Open Education Resource (public and free for anyone to access/use) on www.earthandskystudio.com, with physical copies (a first edition print) being put out into communities as well in 2024. Who We Are ☀️:
Allie Travale is the grant writer and the Head Co-Management and Facilitation Lead of the Ways to Wellness Project running in North Bay, Ontario from 2022-2024. Throughout 2020-2022 she was Project Co-Lead of the program Creative ACE: Arts-Based Civic Engagement, a Laidlaw Foundation funded grant project dedicated to aiding North Bay’s alternative high school Laurentian Learning Centre (LLC) and its attending students. As a 2015 LLC graduate with a strong trauma and mental health lived experience background, she has a passionate vision to aid other lived experience youth, especially within the LLC/education system. The LLC structure, staff and general offerings played an integral, vital role in helping her life and wellness reroute towards a better place during difficult times. Allie is a local health store worker, a nature loving herbalism student, and an ever-growing arts aspirant in visual, digital, musical and literary forms. Chelsea Reid (MA:AHVC, BFAh) is the Co-Management and Facilitation Lead for the Ways to Wellness Project running in North Bay, Ontario from 2022-2024. Throughout 2020-2022 she was Project Co-Lead in the Creative ACE: Arts-Based Civic Engagement grant project. She is a Volunteer Coordinator for an Indigenous Child and Family Service organization, and is the Creative Director of the self-run film and arts studio Earth & Sky Studio. A member of Atikameksheng Anishnawbek, her postgraduate focus was digital archiving of Indigenous Knowledge. She filmed the Manitoulin Island Summer Historical Institute Conference via Ojibwe Cultural Foundation & York University in 2018, followed by At the Moraine: Envisioning the Concerns of Ice in 2019. After successful defence of her MA Thesis “Living Trees and Networks: An Exploration of Fractal Ontology and Digital Archiving of Indigenous Knowledge'' in 2020, she worked on several digital connection projects including Art Fix Nipissing’s free live PhotoShop sessions, the Maamawe Art Bus culture-revitalization project in Thunder Bay, and illustration work for the book Wise Practices: Exploring Indigenous Economic Justice and Self-Determination.
