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About Asé O

“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world”

–

Ancestor Nelson Mandela

Asé O: Descendants of Roots & Legacy is Sweet Herbal Honey Apothecary's Community Art and Wellness program that grounds itself in integrational bridging, inquiry-based learning, and the full-person approach to learning. Our program centers on wellness, arts integration, literacy, and social-emotional through the lens of life. Asé O partners with organizations, participating students, and creators interested in teaching their field of focus, creatively and with collective legacy at the forefront. Our program supports organizations, families, and individuals through teaching, coaching, and building integrative curriculums that expand our awareness about ourselves and the world(s) we experience.

Our entry point to collective legacy building and creative-based wellness centers in the traditional framework of each one, teach one mindset that investigates our role(s) in collective liberation. Asé O's approach to education builds and nourishes a sustaining foundation that uses creativity for expression, activism, community empowerment, emotional awareness, identity exploration, entrepreneurship, equitability, solution building, interpersonal development, and an understanding of systemic gaps that lead to community separation.

Introduction to Natural Dyeing & Painting Workshop:
"Mural to our Ancestors"
Partnership with Abundant Beginnings Freedom Forest School
Oakland, CA

Introduction to Natural Dyeing & Painting Workshop:
In partnership with Lion Creek Apartments || Teen Creative Camp
Oakland, CA

Our mission is to use creativity to expand minds and unveil new pathways that support individuals learning abilities, creative passions, careers, and potential teaching interests that welcome new ways to use their natural gifts and interest(s). This support in expansion and imagination brings forth the necessary tools that uplift healthy minds, expand hearts, and cultivate a brighter intergenerational future.

Asé O centers the exploration of life through the lens of creative practice that gives participants the nurturing space to explore and practice the research, discovery application, and radical action of using a creative expression for unpacking trauma and intergenerational patterns while embracing new perspectives of healing, personal fulfillment, global liberation, and social change.

This discovery constructs through the lens of the Socio-Ecological Model and Social Change Ecosystem of understanding our part in collective social change.

Community Care

Arts Integration

Legacy building

Each one, Teach one

Inquiry- based learning

Asé O Foundations

Empowerment

Cultural &Ancestral Awareness

Wholistic Development

Donor Spotlight:

BIG thank you to Michael Bobino, Co-Founder of F&M Publishing LLC in Oakland, CA for donating these phenomenal books! Learn more about F&M below

F&M Publishing merges Augmented Reality with literature to create fun, educational and interactive ways to experience reading. F&M provides an opportunity for artists to discover and showcase their literary talents. Expanding on their creations through the use of technology.

Social Emotional Learning/Understanding *(SEL)

Creative Entrepreneurship, Neighborhood Development

The Artivism of Environmental Healing Summer CAMP

The Artivism of Environmental Healing CAMPS

The Activism of Environmental Healing is a one or two-week youth-centered camp that unpacks the multi-purposeful collaborative effort of agricultural practices that foster healing, socio-historical understanding, emotional balance, exploration, water accessibility, creativity, and sovereignty. Through centering the power of land as a form of resilience, resistance, community healing, accessibility, and arts empowerment as social activism, participants will learn sovereign and creative healing practices that promote whole person and social-emotional learning.

The camp includes topics of herbal medicine, crop growing, poem writing, meditation, water projects, murals, nature photography, composting, and more to promote creative education and healthy living. This focus will introduce students to learning the power of ancestral indigenous land and allow them to leave this two-week camp experience with a wholistic understanding of the foundational pathways that produce self-sustainment, community service, teamwork, social liberation, environmental justice, meditation, and skill development through the creative arts.

“Environmental justice is the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies.” United States Environmental Protection

Host Our Camps

Camp Focuses & Themes

Purpose of Community & Urban Gardens
History of Farming & Neighborhood Effort
Community Art and Wellness
What is Economic & Environmental Justice?
What are Food Swamps & Deserts?

The Power of Intergenerational Care
The Gift of Community Service
Self-Sustainability & Sovereignty
Self-Care & Ancestral Understanding
Food Justice as Activism
The Power of Water

Sample Camp Lessons & Activities:

1. The Magic of Caring for the Land

2. Journal Making & Reflections

3. Agriculture & the Foundations of Soil

4. Documentation: Photography & Reflections

5. Poems to our Ancestors & The Land (mini book)

6. Herbal Medicine 101

7. Morning Water Meditations

8. Bridging the Gap Banners

9. ‘Give Thanks’ Mixed Medium Nature Altar

10. Yes H20! Water Cycle Painting Group Mural Activity

11. Life’s Balance: River Boats

12. Chanting to the River: Nature Instruments

and Singing Exercise

Jaee Sumter is the Artivism of Environmental Healing (AEH) camp coordinator and developer. To host AEH at your location and introduce to you community, please email us! We would love to work with you to share this precious and vital knowledge with your youth and/or adults. Alongside their teaching, Jaee brings on guest community educators to support with teaching these camps or works with your current educators to develop lessons that most align with your community!

Community Arts & Wellness

*How to implement Healing Arts, Health & Wellness into your institution and organization

The Full Implementation of 80 pages is available w partnership.

Includes exercises, lessons, videos, resources and ways to incorporate Healing Arts, Health & Wellness into any classroom, organization, home or alternative setting.

Developed by our Founder & Director, Janae' "Jaee" Sumter
All examples and samples are from five years Jaee teaching experiences.

To Partner with Ase' O

Interactive Installation: Community Mural & solutions Wall// Black Healing Summit in partnership with Community Interventions, Bakersfield, CA, February 2024

Story

Education is a powerful and accessible tool that leads to personal and collective freedom. Through Jaee Sumter's personal experiences and challenges with Dyslexia in the systemic education pipeline, their approaches to learning differed based on neighborhood and community. Jaee's migration of attending many educational environments taught them how to process information using methods that better suited their levels of understanding. This consistent practice supported them mostly beyond the classroom and in their communities that welcomed discovery as an explorative learning tool for comprehension.

Through inquiry and the mentality of trying something different, until understood, these discoveries began to build naturally as foundational ground due to the tangibility of understanding the mind and hidden interests that provided greater integration with piecing together information. Creative practice, healing artivism, and arts integration became a solid ground for learning, where beat-making, drawing and word-based flashcards, games, cooking, stepping, lists, singing as memory, vision boards, maps, movement, reading, and creative writing developed a sense of freedom, holistically. Using these practices of memorization, critical solution building, self & community awareness, consistency, legacy building, and inquiry-based learning still support their process of understanding the world from an eco-systemically and social change lens.

Over the years, this form of consistency in approach to learning and understanding supported them as a student of life and an educator. Through skill development, creative-critical thinking, and arts integration, these approaches began to support their overall confidence, organizational skills, socio-emotional understanding, and mindfulness. These approaches to learning develop as a toolkit for success that provides participants with the freedom to explore themselves, build community, and understand what liberation means to them, personally and collectively. Learning should be a daily practice of creation, information, inclusivity, liberation, and preparation for real-life experiences. Through those personal experiences and challenges, this has guided Jaee deeply in the educational field to provide supportive environments where learning is fun, mindful, and explorative, regardless of any challenges, interpersonal realities and disabilities.

Through this program, we support each person by using creative practice as a grounding point for discovering their learning styles, interests, and purpose in and beyond classroom settings, unpacking themes of social justice, and introducing new practices.

Ase’ O is a program that offers wellness, community arts, and activism to support youth and adults in learning. Jaee Sumter is our core educating artist who teaches Arts Integration practices, manages behind-the-scenes, and coaches new teaching creators for our Ubuntu project.

Through Ase' O, we use our community arts and wellness curriculum to teach in all spaces. Our curriculum development derives from Jaee's diverse teaching experiences of working in traditional and nontraditional learning environments within and beyond the U.S. We support interested creators and practitioners in teaching their practice to the communities of color that introduce these practices in building great understanding and toolkits for success.

Asé O: Descendants of Roots & Legacy

Asé O can be in your community space for one-time classes or semester/year-long projects.
Asé O does instruct in person and virtually to all age groups, including adults. Instruction includes traditional/nontraditional environments.
Asé O does table at events and offers creative workshops for events, small groups, organization team building, group professional development and classes.

Asé O: Descendants of Roots & Legacy

Educating Community Artist:

Asé O supports and coaches new and interested artists in teaching what they know to youth and adults, virtually and in person. We help you build and construct the necessary skills in your educational development within and beyond the classroom. This development includes community management, educating through the lens of your craft, curriculum building, lesson planning, teaching pedagogy, resume, etc...

Asé O welcomes all interested educators of all creative fields.

(Poets, comedians, visual artists, dancers, cooks, musicians, building/trade, public speakers, sex educators, herbalists, wellness practitioners, farmers, etc...)

Schools, Small Businesses & Organizations:

Asé O supports schools, organizations, DOE teachers, and individuals in curriculum building that supports arts integration and inquiry learning within new and pre-existing.

Asé O supports organizations and professional development workshops through community art, creative team building, wellness, and meditation.

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Our beliefs and values

Legacy work is vital in our journey toward personal and collective liberation. As we learn from each other through active participation, we create more blueprints and roadmaps that lead to social change. Generationally, we are the leaders of today and tomorrow. We each have the puzzle piece to collective social change.

We believe that --- as a people, we are all the past, current and future generations of world changers, visionaries, healers, free-thinkers, builders, educators, and movement shakers that will continue the torch in liberating our collective. We value integrative education as one of many forms of liberation that can thrive within and beyond the classrooms.

Sweet Care Introduction to Herbs Class
*Frame: herbs for dyeing, medicine and art making

Partnership with University of California, Berkeley, People of Color Co-operative House
Berkeley, CA

Letters to our Ancestors (Natural Dyeing Mural)

Partnership with Project Q, Queer Salon and free store || offers free resources for Black and Brown LGBTQIA+ shelter=less young people
Los Angeles, CA

Key Areas of Focus

Learning & Understanding

Collaboration & Community

Critical & Creative Thinking

Skill Development

Exploration
Learning
Practice
Expression

Self, Socio, Cultural & Global Awareness

Analyzation & Research

Problem-Solving & Inquiry based learning

Asé O Curriculum & Community Resources
Developed and designed by our Founder and Program Director, Jaee Sumter

Curriculum

Includes

- Lessons for English for Second language learners

- Highlights 208books from POC authors

- Community based lesson plans

- Printable worksheets

- Run of Shows for trips and art show

- Student examples

- Syllabus samples and artist studies

- Arts-literacy based homework

- Adult workshops

Community Framework:

Honoring Our Narratives

208 community-oriented books by POC authors for youth & adults

Book Themes:

Experimenting Visually
Exploring Poetry & Creative Writing
Understanding History
Remembering the Honoring: Times & Story tell Gifted by Our Ancestors & Elders Legacy
Caring for LGTBQIA & Gender Identity
Reclaiming Culture & Identity
Being Mindful with our Practices and Skills
Food for the Soul
Centering Multicultural Traditions
Fighting for Justice & Equality
Healing Community
Moving through and with Grief & Loss
Living joyously in our hair
Honoring the land: Herbalism & Farming
Embodying our Ancestors & Community Land
Self-love is Community Love
Celebrating Diversity
Aligning with our Dreams
Teaching Sex Education, Consent & Body Safety
Supporting Trauma Healing & Mental Health
Moving towards Financial Independence & Wealth

View Book List

Traditional:

Educational settings includes, but no limited to

Public, Charter, International, Alternative Schools: Elementary, Middle, High School, Alternative Centers and Colleges

when you learn, TEACH.

when you get, GIVE.

Ancestor Maya Angelou

Adult Workshops

Non-traditional school programming

In-School Programming

Educator & Art Show curator

Additional Resources
*created by Jaee Sumter

Meet the Asé O
Core Educating Community Artists

Janae’ “Jaee” Sumter (they/them) is a Oaxacan/traveling based arts wellness practitioner with a rich background in Visual Art, Arts Integration Education, Inquiry-based movement, Community Organizing, Event Planning, Life Coaching, Ancestral Crop Growing, Energy Healing, and Creative Entrepreneurship.

Jaee Sumter is a New Orleans native who has worked with many communities of color within the U.S. and overseas. Their holistic practice manifests through extensive creative healing modalities that initiate integrative awareness. These modalities support through unpacking frameworks of global integration, equability, sustainability, and accessibility. Jaee Sumter received their Bachelor of Art from Spelman College in Studio Art and their Master of Art in Integrated Practices from Pratt Institute in community art and healing justice. Their multidisciplinary practice uses collective storytelling and creative healing approaches as an educational tool for community empowerment, socio-emotional understanding, identity awareness, ancestral connection, liberation, and intergenerational healing with and for communities of color.

These approaches actualize through visual assemblages, movement, herbal medicine, community art activations, arts integration education, ancestral public altars, ritual practice, coaching, creative-based community fundraising, and trauma release work as a pathway for addressing the complexity of systemic oppression.

Jaee has eight years' experience in creative community organizing and five years of teaching all age levels in traditional and non-traditional educational environments. Jaee is the founder of Sweet Herbal Honey Apothecary LLC and the Asé O Community Arts Program.

Jaee Sumter (Mx. Jaee)
they/them

Arts Integration Educator

Arts Instructional & Creativity Coach

SEL & Arts Intergration Curriculum Developer
Ase' O Program Director

Artist

Janae' "Jaee" Sumter

Educator Portfoilo

Multi-Disciplinary Practice:
Drawing, Painting, Sculpture, Community Installations, Movement, Creative Entrepreneur, Ancestral Altars, Reiki Energy Practitioner, Digital Marketing. Photography, Nutrition, Agriculture, Ancestors & Altars, English Foreign Language, SEL, Arts Integration, Creative Writing, Natural Dyeing and Herbs, Nature Mediation Art and more...

Teaching:
- Introductory Classes for all age groups
-Curriculum and Lesson Plan Building, Portfolio Building,
- Community Intergenerational Workshops, Event/Show Curator
- Professional Development Coach supporting new educating artists,
Project Manager & Eco-Justice Camp Developmenet
-Experience in traditional and nontraditional education settings
-Mindfulness & Stress Managment Practices (youth and adults)

Age groups:
Works with all age groups, K-adults

Coaching

Arts Instructional Coach & Certified Creativity Coach ‘21

Jaee’s creativity coaching is similar to life coaching but centers on the personal and professional challenges that creative-based educators, artists, and entrepreneurs face. With in-depth experiences of moving through these liberatory pathways, Jaee uses their coaching to deprogram the starving artist narrative and uplift the power of creativity and arts integration whole person learning as pathways towards liberation and intergenerational bridging.

Jaee supports creators by working 1:1 with you to:

Explore creative self-marketing techniques (beyond socials)
Generate creative business and project proposals
Develop business cards, websites, portfolios, CVs/Resumes, and bios
Build creative programming (exhibitions, art shows, comm. circles, events)
Create multiple creative streams of income based on your creative field.
Develop arts teaching K-12 and adult curriculums (arts integration, social and emotional learning, community arts & artivism, traditional art techniques).

K-12 & Community learning curriculums fall under traditional and nontraditional environments such as public, charter, private, international, boarding, community, shelters, arts and service-based centers, exhibitions, and community spaces. (all from their personal experiences of teaching K-adults in traditional or nontraditional sectors). Through their creativity coaching, they work with creatives and creative-based organizations in all artistic disciplines. Jaee utilizes creative techniques and methods to support clients in overcoming obstacles, manifesting aligned personal and professional goals, and building upon skills and practices that foster sustainable creative lifestyles. Their Arts Integration instructional coaching support schools, arts organizations, and early or seasoned/independent or in-school arts instructors. For early and seasoned arts educators (in all creative disciplines), Jaee supports the successful development of their teaching pedagogy through classroom management, social-emotional learning (SEL), arts integration, and lesson/curriculum development that aligns with the discipline and teaching environment.

Arts Integrated Approaches include:

Arts and Literacy
Art and Foreign Language (English second learners)
Arts: Environmental + Healing Justice
Arts and Cultural Preservation
Arts & Teaching Portfolio Building
Creative Archiving/Storytelling
Ancestral Demystification through Arts
Arts and Entrepreneurship
Arts & Stress Management/Mindfulness

These approaches are actualized and achieved through developing arts-integrated curriculums and programs, creating enriching experiences for young people and adults (community service, camps, field trips), and introducing social-emotional learning as an interdisciplinary approach to teaching and learning.

Their coaching focuses on but is not limited to partnering with individuals, schools, and organizations in disadvantaged and under-resourced re-emerging communities of color between K-12 and adult