In many ways The 5C Collective led to The Mindfulness Space. While there were several challenges that made it difficult to actualize using the area outside of the library, like permission from the schools, maintenance, and budget, we used the feedback to design The Mindfulness Space, which we had permission to use and easier access to. The photo below shows the area that we used to design the space. This room is called The Vault, an area inside The Hive, a 5C resource and maker space.
In order to reimagine The Vault for wellbeing and mindfulness practices, we made the vision board featured below. We started with the current layout of the space and decided what we wanted to add to it and change to make it more compatible with our goals. Adding things like beanbags for meditation, art supplies for self expression, and artwork for visuals and aesthetics addressed many of our core user needs.
Below you can see what the space looked like after we rearranged it. As you can see we are still missing things like the artwork, tea kettle, and plants, but moving the furniture around allowed us to create a foundation for adding in these other details. The leftmost photograph is the view immediately upon entry of The Vault space. We imagine that the table can be used for artwork and creative expression. The photograph in the middle features the low table that people can sit around and pay attention to their senses or quietly socialize and have deep conversations with peers. In the bottom right corner of the rightmost photograph you can see the chairs that we pulled in from another room in The Hive. These are in the back of the room and we imagine people will use them for meditation. As mentioned earlier, we would still like to add a couple things in here and do some more iterating based on the feedback we received. The first would be putting up some kind of cloth or divider to make the meditation area a bit more private and separate from the rest of the space so people will feel more comfortable using it. Additionally, we are considering having the lighting be dimmer in the meditation area and gradually become brighter near the art area.
In addition to having this space, we intend to incorporate in our idea of the workshops from The 5C Collective. We plan to host our first workshop, likely focused on Qigong, at the beginning of the semester in The Mindfulness Space. We hope that this gives students both the tools to practice mindfulness on their own and a safe space where they feel comfortable doing it.
In the midpoint feedback we got a question asking how we plan to make this space more inclusive to people of color. We hope that we can meet these needs by explaining the source of meditation and breathing practices from Eastern spirituality and eons of history and practice. We intend to do so by both having informational sheets about the history of these practices around The Hive as well as actively addressing them at the beginning of the workshops. By sharing the root of these practices as non-Western and emphasizing their importance, in turn, we hope to highlight the importance of POC and their space in our physical space. Also, for any workshops and activities we hold in the space in the future, we will prioritize the wellbeing of BIPOC students and specifically promote BIPOC leaders and identity-based clubs to engage with the space.
We also received a question about the more structural issues of mental health stigma and treatment at the 5Cs. While we have definitely discussed this and ideated on different ways to help with this problem, we also had a limited budget and wanted to be able to actually bring something to life. However, one idea that we might try to pursue in the future is somehow incorporating the workshops into the curriculum. For instance, if a student comes to a certain number of workshops each semester, they could be eligible for a quarter or half credit. This could help incentivize a more structural change in the way that we view a successful and wholistic college education that accounts for the development of the whole person.