Community Practice

Maceo "Paisley" Keeling is a dancer, designer, thinker and optimist.

For the past decade Maceo has danced professionally, performed on
national stages as a spoken word and performance artist and, as Executive
Director of the non-profit platform Citizens of Culture, he uses art to help communities and organizations develop critical thinking, emotional intelligence, and combat resource inequality.

Maceo is a Bronze Star awardee for his service in Iraq, in 2015 he was a participant of the Millennial Trains Project,and was a NBCUniversal Challenge Grant recipient, in 2016 he was a
member of the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs exhibition
SKiN, opened Nous Tous gallery and retail space in Chinatown, Los Angeles  and performance art exhibits with groups like Marciano Art Foundation, and (LAND) Los Angeles Nomadic Division in 2020 he was selected to be the Ford Curatorial Fellow at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.

Mental health is a human right. Our work de-stigmatizes mental health, and creates an accessible, affordable entry point for people to explore the benefits of becoming more aware of their thoughts and emotions to their daily life. We host group therapy & discussion, in person and online to ease the financial burden and leverage the strength of community in combating issues that make us feel isolated in our experience but can be more common than we expect.

Emotional Intelligence is a critical part of community mental health. But the ability to recognize our emotions and the emotions of others is not inherent, it must be modeled and learned. This is a fundamental human necessity regardless of race, age, gender, or socio-economic status that helps communities reclaim their agency to resolve conflict and collaborate more effectively. 

We are in the middle of a mental health crisis. Some of the symptoms are
political polarization, racism, and interpersonal, and gun violence. The time is now for critical reflection. We don't have many spaces to unpack our emotions in society and speak about delicate matters with honesty and empathy. Our emotions get in the way of our thinking, our thinking get in the way of our emotions. When this happens, and we loose track of our objectives it becomes more difficult to work together and resolve conflict. The soft skills of feeling, listening, and communicating are rarely modeled and seldom do we have a chance to practice them so unresolved issues in and between us, fester and contribute to greater social ills like domestic violence, racism, misinformation, and distrust of government.

This is a problem particularly in countries with colonized histories but can be observed throughout the modernized world. The same forces that contribute to establishing social order, contribute to oppression and repression. Critical reflection allows us to make connections between our belief systems, social structures, and decisions we make in our daily life.

Community Practice a scalable mental health framework. We facilitate group therapy sessions, advised by licensed professionals in regional cohorts (digitally and social distance). This creates a mental health pipeline that addresses mild, but chronic phenomena like loneliness and isolation, at the community level.

Through affinity and identity groups individuals to have access to more specialized care.

As members of a cohort, they have access to a shared therapist for 1-1 care, and recommendations to address acute care needs.

Our first line of defense is community care; an empathetic, caring population. We cultivate this this by providing space to reflect, learn emotional intelligence, and practice respect, verbalizing our needs, and learning to recognize when we need help.

In particular this project is designed to directly impact, marginalized people, who are just as busy as everyone else, but are disproportionately impacted by a lack of access to mental health resources to combat daily stress, racial trauma, and oppression.

The framework itself, is useful for anyone living in modern society. We have been hosting focus groups and maintaining in-person versions of this program for 3 years.

We understand obstacles for participation, which is why there is SMS chat functions available for those that do not have "smartphones" or video chat. This allows folks to call in, meet in person, or text relative to what their schedule can allow.

By connecting the groups regionally, folks have the ability to leverage social pressure to stay in touch with other cohort members, who can hold them accountable and check in on them to should they fall out.

We are creating a framework that works, not for some imagined constituency, across the world or on the other side of town, but for us, by us, in our neighborhoods, but sharing it with the world.

The mental health crisis we face, is hard to combat, in particular because it is complex hard to define, which actually compounds why it is routinely overlooked.

Amidst cultural differences we struggle to define, a clear mental health picture that is achievable and reasonable for Black Indegenous and People of Color, as well as other marginalized groups.

We all have specific challenges that come with navigating our imposed social hierarchy that are doubled on top of the constant challenge of living in a politically polarized,individualist, technology driven society that reduces the level of engagement we have with our own psyches.

The concept for Community Practice was born from a weekly discussion group hosted in Nous Tous Gallery in Los Angeles.  Citizens Of Culture has always been about fostering space for belonging and critical dialogue. Not until the gallery programs manager Jeanne Heo, expressed a personal need to combat loneliness she felt living in Los Angeles, were we committed to a weekly gathering.

From there we began piloting V.E.N.T. (Verbalizing Emotional Needs Together) with licensed clinical social workers Brittany Richards, and Sakeena Hakim as a social-emotional learning group that helped members of the african diaspora unpack their daily experiences with racial trauma.

With the COVID-19 pandemic we began to further see the need for structure community groups, as so many digital communities formed and fizzled, trying to figure out how to support each other.

This initative provides service and training resources to support organizers and mitigate burnout.

I am personally passionate about this project because this frame work has already personally helped me so much. When the news of unarmed black people hits a critical peak, during a global pandemic, we find that much of our coping mechanism, require that we come together. So It was crucial that I found theraputic community practice to stay functional and healthy.

Furthermore, I found that many organizers were facing burn out in this time while those in poverty, still had difficulty realizing where the services could be offered. It occurred to me to market mental health services where people were already going to receive physical aid, financial service centers, and food banks. So we could reach people where they were without having to add one more thing to their to-do list.

For the past 10 years I have worked as a cultural consultant, behavioral economist, and consumer insight specialist. Before that, I spent 5 year in the United States Army, I have been an artist my entire life and now spend a portion of my time curating social informed art exhibits.

I am not a psychologist, but I understand how important the intersection of community and discussion are to social health determinants.

In that time, I have amassed a network of therapists & social workers who CAN provide advisory to community programs. As well as a network of facilitators and teaching artists who know how to ground knowledge in experience and story.

Citizens Of Culture, has a small but mighty team managing a gallery and programs that specifically address social-emotional learning to support marginalized communities. We are ready!

Scholar and activist Angela Davis, says "Freedom is a constant struggle."

I actively seek out challenges that will help me grow. Be it leaning into criticism, or pushing myself through the last few miles of a marathon. I am a practicing optimist who believes that life's problems give us opportunities to emerge into newer versions of ourselves.

I spent 5 years in the United States Army, and that time has uniquely conditioned me to be someone who embraces adversity, as it was a daily occurrence for my 15mos of deployment to Iraq.

As an artist, dancer, and poet, I am always pushing myself to expand, and evolve my thinking and my practice. It is more than a response but a way of life.

If anything, adversity and challenges are more familiar to me than finding time and space to celebrate, and acknowledge my successes. Many entrepreneurs believe in failing fast and often, but few, understand the importance of taking stock of what you have accomplished and reconnecting to the impetus for all the work we do and sacrifices we make.

I am a lead from the middle type of person. Deeply I believe that each of us are leaders, and a strong vision, is as likely to emerge from any one on the team who is given the space to imagine what is possible for their team. It is up to those in power to facilitate the highest expressions for those they work with and for.

Earlier this year we had a homeless person sleeping in our gallery who was let in by one of our junior staff. I had to pause and first realize, that this was a very serious breach of trust, and illegal, the individual was operating from their heart and trying to be supportive of someone in need.

Instead of firing them, we folded them into the resolution process, coaching them into understanding why their actions were not aligned with the organizations policies and holding them responsible for participating in remediation.

They grew and I grew as a result, and we took a situation that could have harmed our team and instead strengthened it.