Thank you for your interest in learning about CMC’s BEAR Committee!

BEAR (Belonging, Equity, and Anti-Racism) is an internal committee at CMC that facilitates discussion, intentional reflection, and Center-wide change for and within our staff, volunteers, group leaders, clinical faculty, and leadership.   The values that the BEAR committee embodies in its actions are: accountability, particularly for those with the most structural power; trust within inter-cultural and inter-racial collaborations; humility in centering worldviews beyond our own, and appreciating nuance in different lived experiences and realities.  Through resources, dialogues, reflection, and solidarity, the role of BEAR is to:

1) provide a forum for CMC staff, teachers, and participants to voice concerns, ideas and unexamined matters for CMC’s values, policies, procedures, and work culture, and recommend changes to CMC leadership
2) support CMC staff and teachers to actively reflect on their role in creating anti-oppressive culture within and beyond our organization 

3) prioritize anti-oppressive values in the operations of the BEAR committee itself

BEAR Leadership

The committee operates with an understanding that those with the most structural power (e.g., white, upper class, cisgender, male) have the main role and accountability in dismantling the systems they benefit from (e.g., white body supremacy) and creating culture (e.g., collectivist anti-racist white culture) that actively fulfills this aim, particularly within cross-cultural mindfulness teaching and research. BEAR has two affinity groups, a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color)/BAME (Black, Asian, and minority ethnic)* and a white affinity group, that meet regularly, and work in tandem and separately towards our goal of a workplace, and world, liberated from white body supremacy, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, patriarchy, colonialism, and all forms of oppression.  

We recognize that to create meaningful change, this ongoing work is deep and requires steadiness and commitment at all levels. Our intention is that this work will radiate out to our communities and all we serve.  

*We acknowledge the complexity and reductiveness of using acronyms.  BIPOC is a term more commonly used in the USA, and BAMe is a term more commonly used in the UK.

Current BEAR actions include:  

• Active engagement of all BEAR leadership and several CMC staff in the annual Seven Stones Embodying Anti-Racism and Healing Collective Trauma course

• Development of an internal 4-session white affinity group at CMC, offered 3-4 times a year with 6-10 staff members. Participants in the groups also get paired with one of their white peers to continue self-reflection on their own time outside of the groups. After the group, “alumni” are indefinitely sent biweekly resources and questions to engage with and reflect on within their pairs. Alumni continue their work following the 4-session group by participating in monthly white affinity group alumni meetings.

• BIPOC 1:1 mentorship and affinity spaces

• Curating a Center-wide feedback process focusing on questions to ask how well CMC is embodying anti-oppressive values, as well as to include gender-affirming language.

• Working with CMC leadership, BEAR uses tools from the Seven Stones course to regularly reflect on feedback given about CMC’s courses and processes 

• Actively growing anti-racist culture from the inside out during BEAR committee meetings

• As part of our role in dismantling the particular legacy of systemic, economic oppression of BIPOC, CMC offers a BIPOC scholarship program. Learn more here.

• Actively seeking BIPOC and gender diverse speakers to host our monthly Grand Rounds open to all Cambridge Health Alliance staff, volunteers, and the general public

"Shallow solidarity is based on the logic of exchange—You show up for me, and I will show up for you. But deep solidarity is rooted in recognition—I show up for you, because I see you as part of me. Your liberation is bound up in my own." — Valarie Kaur, See No Stranger (page 82)

“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” — Lilla Watson

“Becoming antiracist requires every individual to choose every day to think, act and advocate for equality, which will require changing systems and policies that may have gone unexamined for a long time.” 

"Whenever the antiracist sees individuals behaving positively or negatively, the antiracist sees exactly that: individuals behaving positively or negatively, not representatives of whole races. To be antiracist is to deracialize behavior, to remove the tattooed stereotype from every racialized body. Behavior is something humans do, not races do." https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/54999/how-ibram-x-kendis-definition-of-antiracism-applies-to-schools

On Scholarships at CMC

Our BIPOC scholarship program is one of the actions CMC is taking to directly dismantle a systemic structure of historic and present-day oppression against people of color.