Leaders Igniting Generational Healing & Transformation (LIGHT) is looking forward to hosting our Third Annual Virtual LIGHT Festival on Friday and Saturday, June 21-22, 2024. We are writing to extend an invitation to you to join us as a valued 2024 LIGHT Festival sponsor for this exclusive event.
Guided by the mission of LIGHT, this two-day event seeks to bridge the divide between health researchers and the public by creating opportunities for meaningful connection and conversations centered around the theme, Healthy Spaces and Places, expressed through various forms of art, storytelling, and poetry. As we thoughtfully prepare for this immersive, virtual experience, we are looking to connect with admirable individuals and organizations who share our commitment to reimagining and transforming public health, creatively.
LIGHT emphasizes utilizing creativity, such as art, letters, stories, and poetry to center the public in public health. Each year LIGHT presents two themed open calls for submissions, produces a magazine of creative works, hosts a virtual literary and arts festival, and organizes a summer camp for kids in St. Louis, MO. Generating healing and transformation through a marketplace of innovative healing ideas, LIGHT is a space where individuals and creatives alike can be challenged to share their public health story through new and imaginative ways. By connecting, curating, and creating, we boldly envision a future where people imagine, transform, and drive healing, creatively.
In the three years since LIGHT embarked on its imaginative and innovative journey, the public has shared over 820 personal public health narratives during open call contests and over 250 individuals have attended our first two festivals. We have been so fortunate to partner with a tremendous line-up of diverse and creative individuals, speakers, and workshop leaders in various sectors—art (including illustration, animation, comics, culinary arts, and painting), poetry, storytelling, and entrepreneurship—speak at our previous festivals. A few of these prominent individuals include writer Ijeoma Oluo; artist Morenike Olusanya (also known as @iamrenike); Houston’s youth poet laureate, Madison Petaway; poet Danez Smith; chef Eric Adjepong; mental health expert, Dr. Peace Amadi; Director of Health for the City of St. Louis, Dr. Matifadza Hlatshwayo Davis; and entrepreneur Kalilah Wright (Mess in a Bottle).
This summer during our two-day festival, we welcome our attendees to breathe and relax during two mindfulness and dance sessions, explore creativity in four guided workshop sessions, learn from eight diverse speakers, and meet the LIGHT open call finalists, a showcase of talent that will publish their creative works in the LIGHT Magazine.
We invite you to review the attached sponsorship package for more details on how you can get involved and the benefits of sponsoring the 2024 LIGHT Festival. With your support, we can decolonize the traditional methods of public health dissemination and research and instead, listen to the dialogue, language, and voices about how we can reimagine, transform, and understand one’s attachment and meaning to a healthy space or place.
Sincerely,
Carmen Dillman, on behalf of LIGHT
