Johnstad and Associates

05/17/2024

I spent the afternoon with Peace of My Mind Stunning stories capturing wisdom, and the power of ordinary people focused on making a difference. The result collective goodness and community change. Awesome project. Awesome storyteller.

03/30/2023

It makes me happy to see Minneapolis moving in this direction - I can't wait to open my windows and hear the sound carried on the winds of change.

03/28/2023

Seed sowing complete and might be slightly ahead of the melting snow cover. Learned lots with Tomia MacQueenWildflower Farms and all the lessons that go with homesteading and living with intention and beauty. Thanks Minneapolis Edible Boulevards - off to a good season of community building and skillshares.

03/28/2023

Wanting to spread the good news If you are in the Twin Cities, check out the events. If you are beyond the Twin Cities figure out how you can support or creating something like Irreducible Grace Foundation in your community. They would be impossible to replicate but a fractal pattern of IGF in every city would serve the world and young people in their healing/our healing.

Join us this spring for an event or class at the Black Youth Healing Arts Center!

03/25/2023

Earlier this week I was in a room that was filled with new work and expressions generated by Memorialize the Movement gathering. Grateful for these opportunities...artists, culture shapers and curators.

Collecting, Preserving, and Sharing The History of The Minneapolis Uprising of 2020 and The Journey Towards Racial Justice

03/13/2023

Appreciating the craft and artistry of writers.... Kristi Tippet's reflections on Isabel Wilkerson are the source of this morning post: Tippet writes about Wilkerson and Caste in her recent "The Pause." describing "her fierce heart for humanity that resides right alongside her ...... skill". The book is " ...inviting equal parts common sense, relief, and aspirational reach that do not often enter our fraught public sphere of grappling with race." "Caste, as Isabel teaches us, is communal infrastructure that organically arises in human societies, though far more malignantly in some times and places. It operates around deep, unreflected assumptions of human value — who matters more, and who matters less..... In the American context, she says, race is the skin, but "caste is the bones.".....She closes with her shared connection to Berlin and "the shocking admiration Adolph Hi**er had for the “American ‘knack for maintaining an air of robust innocence in the wake of mass death.’” I too have a long and complex history with Berlin - being in places of obvious and subtle divide. None the less, all versions of discrimination cut like a knife. How are we practicing to understand to heal and transform what is in my bones?

Sustaining a fierce heart for humanity

03/01/2023

2022 has been an incredible year for IGF. Our young people's dream of having a space of their own was realized with the purchase of 643 Virginia Street in Saint Paul. The Black Youth Healing Arts Center has been open for nearly three months and is becoming a space of communal healing, bonding, and c...

03/01/2023

Getting ready to join the launch of the Heads of Patient Experience (JoPE) network’s March online Storytelling Festival. Free. Virtual/ Powerful strategy for influencing systems disruption, skill and power building and the impacts of a network approach to social change. Join me for any of the 12 session this month - register through this link - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1j6G4-1tS2qD47qIS1oicqOtgvYc7SHvB/edit?rtpof=true

03/01/2023

Getting ready to join the launch of the HoPE network's March Storytelling Festival. Online. Free & a powerful strategy for influencing (and capturing the results) of intentional network building. Join me and others for any of the 12 sessions - click this link to get registration info. Lesley Goodburn Health and Social Care Alliance ScotlandThe Queen's Nursing InstituteThe Fetzer InstituteThe Health Foundation