DELTA ROOTS FESTIVAL | ThirdWardZen

Ramping up

Our

Outreach

Toward promoting

Self-care in the MS Delta

— Our Vision —

Create and host a festival that transforms health and wellness in the Delta through movement, mindfulness, music, food, culture, and fun. By focusing on positive assets within the community and maximizing the richness of the Mississippi Delta to encourage individuals to live healthy and well, events are scheduled with experienced health and wellness practitioners. The festival includes movement activities ranging from low to moderate impact on the body, mindfulness and meditation sessions, music, and endless fellowship and fun!

— Delta Roots Festival 2024 —

Wellness Festival Conversation Series 2024 (2).png

In lieu of not holding our usual annual Delta Roots Festival, Third Ward Zen presented "Food, Movement, Yoga: A Liberation Praxis for Community Wellness," a 3-part virtual conversation. Through this event, our goal – to create and host the Delta Roots Festival with a vision to transform health and wellness in the Delta through movement, mindfulness, music, food, culture, and fun – continued. The series focused on:

Part I - growing food in the community. Our panelists (Demalda Newsome, Chris Johnson, Sheila Howard) work in the non-profit sector and work with youth to grow food.
Part II - moving your body as a personal and community wellness model. Our speaker, Dr. E. Gaynell Sherrod, is a full tenured professor in the Department of Dance & Choreography at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA.
Part III - supporting youth, yoga, and resiliency in the community. Our speaker, Shaka Jamal Redmond, is a culturally innovative artist, educator, and filmmaker; and the founder of Olu8 Film & Culture and Olu8 Records, based in Oakland, CA.

These virtual conversations can be found as part of our Table & Plate Project Delta Podcast, https://www.thirdwardzen.net/table-and-plate-project-delta.

— Delta Roots Festival 2023 —

The community's response to our first

Delta Roots Festival over the Juneteenth weekend in 2022 was a success! The positive feedback about the health and wellness activities from the event's participants let us know that this inspired them to come out and enjoy themselves— moving, stretching, dancing, and being in fellowship with friends and neighbors— and for some, discovering new and enjoyable ways of improving their individual health, stamina, balance and overall happiness. This welcomed praise inspired us to make the Festival an annual event.

Since we are all about Ramping up Our Outreach Toward promoting Self-care in the MS Delta all year round, we listened to feedback about scheduling the festival and added 3 quarterly events in September, December, and May. Video of the cooking demonstration during the May event can be found on our podcast page, www.thirdwardzen.net/table-and-plate-project-delta. For a summary of the Delta Roots Festival 2023, check out Delta Roots Festival 2023 (thirdwardzen.net).