Educational, Advisory, & Support Services
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Calling is to flow like a river and be free like birds and share collective richness like a BLK Carrot. Educate. Advise. Support. Transmit Joy.
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My Black Carrot LLC is a mentoring hub for social change, providing Cultural Education, Mentoring Empowerment, Social Activation-Transformation Coaching, & Outdoor Nurture (CMEST). My Black Carrot Mentoring (MBC) Hub offers bi-relational and bi-directional Education, Advisory, and Supportive Services. The goal is to empower individuals, institutions, and cultures to achieve a full self-determination and ever expanding joyful existence. To this end MBC use innovative, grounded, and experiential methods to work collaboratively with the community towards achieving both individual goals and collective ecological promises.
The Why. The Story. Pt. 1
Jeremy Vincent “JP”, the Founder and Owner, noticed that “educational mentorship” and supportive care dynamics are often deficit-oriented rather than purposeful among youth, adolescents, adults, and elders. Although JP has had wonderful mentors throughout his life, much of his young adult mentoring received included “tough love.” JP coins this as a sort of “Mentoring Supportive Care Industrial Complex” that was birthed as a vestige origin in historical conception of apprenticeships which have been used for centuries to pass down hegemonic knowledge, skills, & social capital from one generation to the next.
While historical marginalized communities continue to have their own methods of passing knowledge, apprenticeships and mentoring tools were established in Europe during the Middle Ages and used in America during the Colonial Period. Apprenticeships included hands-on training and work experience that helped to ensure higher wages and long-term job security. Unfortunately, many pockets of communities were often excluded (via laws, policies, and norms) from the benefits of apprenticeships until the mid to late 60s. This exclusion can be traced to economic wellness disparities, systemic exclusion from opportunities, and whole mind-body-spirit disempowerment.
The Industrial Non-Profit Complex also emerged in the 20th Century, perpetuating harmful relationships between grant funding distributors, apprenticeships/mentoring, and job training programmers. Dangling a carrot resource with hopes of “fixing and changing the broken” rather than directly responding to the systemic consequences of oppression has been too common. JP regionally observes grant-making agencies reward the most unresponsive “evidence-based”/“comprehensive” programs and projects with more funding. This complex functionally incentivizes apathy at every level of oppression, misdirects resources, and reproduces power imbalances between grant funding distributors, apprenticeship/mentorship program designers and people, which further perpetuates systemic exclusion.
JP observes how colonial apprenticeship norms evolve with time and takes on new shape under the guise of mentorship. And the harmful values are reproduced in contemporary mentoring relationships and programming initiatives. These include harmful dynamics such as: one-way care extension, limited relational dynamics that focus mainly on instrumental skill building and psychosocial care extension, leaving little room for holistic care extension; pre-determined goals that often favor alternative interests and disregard consensual self-determined goals; power imbalance in mentoring dynamic that centers on "the mentor leader", leading to paternalistic attitudes in exchanges; lack of consideration for cultural location and context of all partners, leading to mischaracterization and pathologization; and mentoring being used as a tool for changing, fixing, and/or controlling.
JP also observes dynamics of individuals and organizational entities who are okay with “throwing some poorly framed mentoring or supportive care at people” instead of fully investing in individuals and community-level happiness, safety-security, or ensuring well resource sharing. In turn, maintaining the status quo of lack, depletion, and disconnection. JP believes that he would have been much “further along” in his holistic development and goal attainments if he had been exposed to educational, advisory, and supportive services that were restful in nature, loving, joyous, emergent, bilateral/relational, and elevated both acquired and lived experience as essential true knowledge. He believes in elevating the inherent and uninhibited wisdom of all involved in the mentoring and supportive care relationship with no shame, celebrating fractal/small approaches (*Adrienne Maree Brown), and adopting a liberatory/transformational oriented, experiential approach. He feels a personal calling to disrupt the social norm of rigid and limiting mentoring supportive care exchanges to help others become more free.
MBC's why, experiential exploration, and business impact may become the doctoral project. As the Founder and Owner, he would like to expand on his personal project “The Torpor Framework” for educational, advisory, supportive, individual, and collective community care use.
While historical marginalized communities continue to have their own methods of passing knowledge, apprenticeships and mentoring tools were established in Europe during the Middle Ages and used in America during the Colonial Period. Apprenticeships included hands-on training and work experience that helped to ensure higher wages and long-term job security. Unfortunately, many pockets of communities were often excluded (via laws, policies, and norms) from the benefits of apprenticeships until the mid to late 60s. This exclusion can be traced to economic wellness disparities, systemic exclusion from opportunities, and whole mind-body-spirit disempowerment.
The Industrial Non-Profit Complex also emerged in the 20th Century, perpetuating harmful relationships between grant funding distributors, apprenticeships/mentoring, and job training programmers. Dangling a carrot resource with hopes of “fixing and changing the broken” rather than directly responding to the systemic consequences of oppression has been too common. JP regionally observes grant-making agencies reward the most unresponsive “evidence-based”/“comprehensive” programs and projects with more funding. This complex functionally incentivizes apathy at every level of oppression, misdirects resources, and reproduces power imbalances between grant funding distributors, apprenticeship/mentorship program designers and people, which further perpetuates systemic exclusion.
JP observes how colonial apprenticeship norms evolve with time and takes on new shape under the guise of mentorship. And the harmful values are reproduced in contemporary mentoring relationships and programming initiatives. These include harmful dynamics such as: one-way care extension, limited relational dynamics that focus mainly on instrumental skill building and psychosocial care extension, leaving little room for holistic care extension; pre-determined goals that often favor alternative interests and disregard consensual self-determined goals; power imbalance in mentoring dynamic that centers on "the mentor leader", leading to paternalistic attitudes in exchanges; lack of consideration for cultural location and context of all partners, leading to mischaracterization and pathologization; and mentoring being used as a tool for changing, fixing, and/or controlling.
JP also observes dynamics of individuals and organizational entities who are okay with “throwing some poorly framed mentoring or supportive care at people” instead of fully investing in individuals and community-level happiness, safety-security, or ensuring well resource sharing. In turn, maintaining the status quo of lack, depletion, and disconnection. JP believes that he would have been much “further along” in his holistic development and goal attainments if he had been exposed to educational, advisory, and supportive services that were restful in nature, loving, joyous, emergent, bilateral/relational, and elevated both acquired and lived experience as essential true knowledge. He believes in elevating the inherent and uninhibited wisdom of all involved in the mentoring and supportive care relationship with no shame, celebrating fractal/small approaches (*Adrienne Maree Brown), and adopting a liberatory/transformational oriented, experiential approach. He feels a personal calling to disrupt the social norm of rigid and limiting mentoring supportive care exchanges to help others become more free.
MBC's why, experiential exploration, and business impact may become the doctoral project. As the Founder and Owner, he would like to expand on his personal project “The Torpor Framework” for educational, advisory, supportive, individual, and collective community care use.
An acorn does not have to say, ‘I intend to become an oak tree'. Natural intelligence intends that every living thing become the highest form of itself and designs us accordingly.”― Sonya Renee Taylor, The Body Is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love
*External Media Under Construction.