Community programs
Healing doesn't end when the seven weeks do.
TNJS is where most people start. These are the programs that surround it — art, gardens, murals, and community work open beyond a single campus series. Community is at the centre of everything we run, and what we run changes as the community's needs change.
All programs
Flagship series
Thriving, Not Just Surviving
The seven-week workshop series for college student survivors at UCSB, SDSU and SFSU. Free, no disclosure required, undergraduate and graduate groups, every academic quarter.
Public art
Community Mural Project
Survivors and neighbours make something permanent and visible together. Public art turns a private experience into a shared one — on a wall that stays up long after the paint dries.
Ongoing studio
The Painting Collective
A recurring space to paint alongside other people. No technique requirements and no critique — the point is the hours spent making something, in company.
Growing together
Community Cultivations
Community-led programming that grows out of what our participants say they need next. It changes as they do — which is the whole idea.
Hands in the soil
Community Garden
A garden tended by survivors and allies. Slow, physical, seasonal work that asks nothing of you except that you show up and water something.
Why art, why gardens
Because the body keeps its own timeline.
You can understand something perfectly well and still flinch at a doorway. Talking is one route through that; it isn't the only one, and for a lot of people it isn't the first one.
Making things with your hands, moving with other people, growing something over a season — these work on the parts of you that don't respond to explanation. They also do something quieter: they put you in a room with other survivors doing something ordinary. That, on its own, is the thing most people say changed everything.
Want in on one of these?
Community programs run on their own rhythms rather than a fixed calendar. Email the programs team and they'll tell you what's open right now.