The One Cranston Health Equity zone (OCHEZ) will hold a community conversation, on July 29 at the William Hall Library on Broad Street from 11 a.m. to 1 a.m., focused on “Embodiment” during their second annual cultural equity year-end event for the Community Connectors group.

Planned as a two-part event, it will be broken into two one-hour sessions. The first hour will be an in-depth look at ballroom culture, also known as the ballroom scene, which makes up an LGBTQ+ subculture that originated from gay African-American and Latino groups in New York City.

The Haus of Glitter, an LGBTQ+ fashion brand that aims to embody creativity, independence and empowerment through their products, will be running the workshop.

“The reason we really wanted to start there is that embodiment means so much to so many different people,” explained Project Manager Ivy Swinsky. “That’s just a really great case study of understanding how people are able to show who they are in different areas. Plus, it will be fun and people will be up and moving and dancing experiencing a fun way to bring people together.

The second portion of the event is the creation of a community fabric, which will weave pieces of fabric decorated by members of the Cranston community into a tapestry representing the people of the city. Hoped to be a continuing project, the creation of the combined fabric is being led by Jeanette Staley, a local artist, teacher and activist.

“I'm interested in the intersections, connections and boundaries between the individual, communities, environment and larger world: the subtlety and urgent necessity of interconnectedness,” Staley said. “This project gives us an opportunity to explore where we fit in, how we are connected and how we all fit together. We will each be adding our fabric to the larger piece, but it is also the connectors of that fabric that is equally important. This is the beginning of creating this social fabric and I'm excited to see what happens to it as I release it to the Cranston community.”

Swinksy said that everyone will be given a piece of fabric to decorate however they are excited to. People are also encouraged to bring their own fabrics to decorate.

Annette Bourne, a member of the Community Connectors group and resident member of the OCHEZ said that she had brought in one of her children’s old Cranston High School East band shirts, but she still plans to decorate her own piece of fabric. After all, as Swinsky said, she’s more than just a mom.

For the Community Connectors, who have worked with the Cranston Herald in the past to help bring the real life stories of everyday heroes and inspirations through the writing of the Humans of Cranston stories readers may have seen in past issues of the paper, this project is just another step in helping to bring the community together.

“Hence the One Cranston moniker that we continue to use. Last year was the first year was that we did an end-of-the-program year event that was really meant to capture, what I call, a cultural equity event.”

For the program’s first end of year event the OCHEZ held the World Drumming event, Bourne recalled. She explained that among those participating were percussionists from both of the Cranston high schools, demonstrators of Native American and traditional African drumming techniques and medicine singers, traditional Native American singers who sing in an Eastern Algonquian dialect.

Bourne went on to say that as the group’s work continued to feature community conversations around powerful topics like names, hair, race and ethnicity or gender and sexuality the idea of using “embodiment as a more holistic term” for what the group was trying to achieve.

With plans to continue their work and the release of a book documenting their first Humans of Cranston project, The OCHEZ and their Community Connectors are working hard to continue bringing the community of Cranston a little closer together.