The Emma L. Bowen Community Service Center wanted to showcase the Café Photovoice participants’ artworks and stories from their experiences throughout the second floor. The group of thirty-six matted and framed digital photographs, photomontages, photographic banners, graphic quotes, and wall lettering captures aspects of the health narratives and lived experiences of community members who volunteered to participate in this Photovoice participatory action research study. The participants’ artworks are now a permanent part of the existing Bowen Center legacy art collection. The gallery below features photos from our first visit to measure the exhibition layout on June 29, 2021. You are welcome to visit the Cafe Photovoice permanent exhibition at the Bowen Center; it is free and open to the public.

I can finally take the time to upload some photos from my graduate school experience. In August 2020, during the eery months, the news of a strange and deadly virus was vaguely far away in China. Before COVID-19 would envelop us all in a global pandemic shut-down, I was excited about the first day of my field placement internship at the Dutchess County Public Defender’s Office, where I would work with the alternative to incarceration workers (ATI) inside the family, criminal, and drug courts as part of holistic public defense. I was excited and nervous because I had no idea what to expect.

A year earlier, in 2019, I left my art studio to continue on my journey of service by pursuing a master's degree in social work. At the time, it felt like I was leaving behind a huge part of my intersectional identity. One friend said, “Social work, Shelita? You’re never going to make art again.” So, during the second year of my MSW program, the last thing I expected to encounter was a healing art practice in a social work master's program. However, that happened at Adelphi when my policy professor, Dr. Chrisann Newransky, invited me to a Photovoice Worldwide facilitator training and onto the Photovoice Participatory Action Research Team. There’s a lesson about trusting the path towards service because walking in beauty led me home to my true nature.

In 2021, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Drs. Newansky and Rozario invited me to join the Adelphi School of Social Work, Photovoice Community-Based Research Team, along with Rue Silver and adjunct professor Julissa Adames-Torres, the Ph.D. candidate. As part of a community partnership, the Bowen Center wanted Adelphi to investigate how vulnerable service users were experiencing clinical healthcare. The Photovoice action research methodology, originated by Wang and Burris (1993), puts cameras in the hands of people to tell their stories to shine a light on the marginalized to catalyze change.

©Photography by Shelita Birchett Benash, MSW & Lauren Weissler, Café Photovoice Permanent Participant Exhibition and Opening Reception, Emma L. Bowen Community Service Center, Harlem, NY, 2021-2022. Graphic signage design by Kayla McGowan.

Representation matters in social work and social science research. America has a deplorable history regarding Black bodies in science and medical research. Who gets to tell our stories? Who gets to bear witness? And through what lens are our stories being interpreted? Being Black, indigenous, Asian, and People of Color (BIAPoC), Adelphi Photovoice research team researchers provided a valuable insider/outsider perspective for the collaborative process with the study participants. Julissa and I shared essential connections, including race, ethnicity, language, culture, geography, and spirituality. Julissa is Dominican and Spanish-speaking, and I am African American and a former New Yorker. Julissa has roots in New York City as well. Coming to Harlem to assist with dismantling health disparities within the mostly LatinX, Black, and global diaspora community through trauma-informed social art, social justice, and storytelling was especially significant. I stand radically outside the traditional idea of what it means to be an academic. As an artist and Black woman of culture, I come to the research table with the urgency of my ancestors’ prayers for change, a prismatic lens with a multiplicity of invaluable intelligence that elicit intuitive and creative ways of knowing, seeing, being, moving, connecting, self-expression, spirituality, and meaning-making. Open-hearted compassionate leadership and loving-kindness are the roots of my clinical practice orientation and a commitment to collective liberation.

The Bowen Center is the heartbeat of the community. It’s old-school and without artifice in a way that doesn’t exist anymore. As a professional artist with a theatre background, it was an exciting opportunity for me to bring over 35 years of experience in storytelling, theatre arts outreach, public art, and gallery curation into leading the concept, design, curation, and installation of a permanent Cafe Photovoice exhibition and virtual exhibition website of the study participants' artworks. Over the next two years, as part of the research team, I collaborated with a courageous group of Harlem community members who braved coming out of the safety of isolation as they committed to sharing their health narratives and lived experiences relating to substance use and mental health treatment. Most participants remained a part of the study for over two years. I’m excited that the Bowen Center has invited the Cafe Photovoice Permanent Exhibition, participants to their community advisory board. I am grateful to the Cafe Photovoice study participants for their teaching.

During the Cafe Photovoice exhibition work in progress, my positionality and intersectional identities located me within being an interdisciplinary artist, neurodivergent non-traditional BIPOC MSW student practitioner, Adelphi IDEATE Integrated & Behavioral Health Fellow, graduate research assistant, post-graduate research consultant, and mid-life career evolver continuing the call to service. I embraced my graduate research assistant role with humility and a beginner’s mind: the Bowen Center and Drs. Newransky and Rozario shared power in presenting me with a transformative social work leadership experience. I led the concept, design, curation, and installation of the "Café Photovoice Permanent Participant Exhibition" at the Emma L. Bowen Community Service Center in Harlem, NY. I designed and built the "Café Photovoice Virtual Exhibition" website. As a result, I experienced a dynamic social work professional identity integration across the micro/mezzo/macro continuum. Through Photovoice action research, I embodied my personal core values within social work values and ethics by co-knowledge building through emergent arts-based research and utilizing technology as an immersive advocacy tool to amplify the voices of vulnerable community members amongst us. Gratitude.