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MINDFUL AFRICAN ART WORKSHOP PROGRAMMES
Corporate Art Wellbeing Workshops
Boost employee engagement, strengthen leadership skills and improve community engagement through corporate art wellbeing workshops.
I’m proud to deliver workshops for corporate organisations who are committed to improving employee experience. Developed to support Fortune 500 companies, these one-off sessions and programmes improve performance across a wide range of organisational areas, to:
Boost employee engagement - improve well-being, employee satisfaction and motivation through recognition, empowerment and by reducing the risk of burnout.
Increase emotional intelligence - crucial in leadership and conflict resolution.
Unlock creative potential - inspire employees to embrace play and experimentation as a pathway to new ideas.
Improve customer and community engagement - support CSR initiatives and create interactive art experiences that engage customers in innovative ways.
I can host these one-to-one and collaborative workshops in your workplace, on team away days and retreats, or at product launches.
Explore my offerings below and get in touch to schedule events that support diversity and inspire your employees, colleagues and customers to invest in themselves and your business.
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Art workshops to celebrate awareness days
What happens in the art workshops
Corporate art workshop offerings
Art workshops to celebrate awareness days
I’m experienced in working with corporate clients to plan and host workshops for awareness days that celebrate, support and honour underrepresented people, including:
Awareness days for women
International Women’s Day (March)
UN: International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women (November)
Awareness days for people with disabilities
Mental Health Awareness Week (May)
World Mental Health Day (October)
UN: International Day of Persons with Disabilities (December)
Awareness days for black and global majority
UN: International Day of the World’s Indigenous People (August)
World Afro Day (September)
Black History Month (October)
Awareness days for creativity
Creativity Month (January)
Creativity and Innovation (21 April)
Awareness days for the environment
World Environment Day (5 June)
National Tree Week (November)
If you’re interested in exploring ideas for a key date that supports your organisational values, please get in touch two months ahead of time.
What happens in art workshops?
Each of my workshops, retreats and programmes are structured to deliver to three key fundamental human needs that nurture self worth and connection:
Mindfulness - we engage the five senses through nourishing breathwork, aromatherapy, mindful movement, grounding rituals and therapeutic sound healing.
Playfulness - I introduce your employees to use artistic materials and offer prompts to help them explore their curiosity through written or artistic exercises. As a self-taught collage artist, I strongly believe you don’t need any artistic experience to express yourself through play.
Belonging – your people are invited to share their thoughts and artistic responses to help them express their authentic selves and connect with their colleagues on a deeper level.
Mindfulness through the senses
AI proof your people. Give them time to feel.
Through sensory prompts and mindful exercises, I invite your team to consider what wellbeing looks, feels, tastes, smells and sounds like.
We enjoy tea and fresh tropical fruit, inhale aroma therapeutic scents, and explore a variety of vibrant African materials to express with whilst relaxing to music.
I encourage your people to express their creativity around a question or shared corporate goal through artworking. Or not. There is no prescribed outcome.
Your colleagues are welcome to be.
Protection through play
How are your employees protecting their wellbeing?
We consider and express how your people can nurture themselves through making shields inspired by East African tribal designs.
I demonstrate and coach your team to play with bamboo, tactile banana fibres and raffia palm and vibrant African print fabric, using accessible stitching, cutting, weaving methods.
Participants will build a shield to take home to embody their boundaries, and are also invited to contribute to a collaborative shield that embodies protecting and nurturing communities.
Future self portraits
What would it look like if all your dreams came true?
Creating self-portraiture and writings helps people to unmask and connect with their present, own their history, and imagine their future. A liberating opportunity for neurodivergents and those with attention anxiety to harness their power of vivid imagination and hyperfixtate on their dreams!
Drawing on the transformative healing effect of my personal self-portrait series, I support participants through creative self-reflections, helping them to embrace their identities and reveal aims and ambitions through their art making.
Let’s encourage your team to design their futures and align to your corporate vision.
Embroidery doodle
Practise feeling confident in action, not frozen by perfect plans.
Experimental stitchers unite! Here we doodle with fabric to practise taking small steps; using art as a rehearsal for life.
African print textiles tell stories with symbols and bold colours. I show participants accessible techniques to reinterpret them using embroidery, weaving, glue and attaching natural fibres and fabric.
Your team is invited to play with colour, form and texture and make their own one-of-a-kind tapestry. As well as to contribute to a large collaborative textile artwork that encourages us to go slower and deeper, together.
Mindful African Art workshop programmes for community groups
You are allowed to be who you are. To desire. To know your ideas are valid. And above all, to feel safe.
My mindful workshop programmes nurture the marginalised and burnt out to experience art as a way to process complex emotions. To explore curiosity, expression and to rehearse how to be well and live better with others.
I partner with community, education and art groups and charities to research the restorative practice of making. And help corporate organisations who are committed to change to improve their employee experience through equity strategies that incorporate distinct anti-racist, ableist and sexist methodologies.
My art and research focus on fostering the conditions in which to imagine liberation from anxiety and social injustice, and to live well with others. Through writing, doodling, self-portraiture and collaborative making, we can express curiosity, embrace uncertainty and stimulate imagination and empowerment.
In a world that celebrates doing, art is a way of reclaiming our humanity as the glorious human beings we are.
What happens in Mindful African Art workshops for community groups?
My workshops run as mini retreats, where I create a space for resolution and connection. To sit, feel and rehearse wellbeing.
I invite participants to play with natural fibres from East Africa to find their voice through making and better understand their relationship with the earth.
Every workshop is different and can be designed around your organisation’s needs, desires and goals, but each is grounded by three core elements…
1. Stimulating the senses
In safe and nurturing spaces, we’ll engage the five senses through nourishing breathwork, tea, aromatherapy, mindful movement, grounding Ugandan rituals on woven palm mats and therapeutic sound healing.
2. Exploring your authentic self
Once we’ve acclimatised to ourselves and each other, I’ll introduce participants to use artist materials and offer prompts to help explore their authentic selves through a written or artistic response. As a self-taught collage artist, I firmly believe you don’t need any artistic experience to express yourself.
3. Sharing transformative experiences
Sharing our expressions and ideas is transformative. But as with everything in the workshops, sharing is an invitation. Nothing is mandatory, and I always provide space in which to be alone. It’s incredibly important to me to create an environment in which everyone feels included and safe.
Workshop Programmes for community groups
I currently offer two programme options, each designed for 20 participants.
Past, present and future-self programme
People with marginalised identities move through the world burdened with society’s projection of who they are on their backs. Creating self-portraiture and writings helps people to unmask, own their history and courageously write of their future.
Drawing on the transformative healing effect of my personal self-portrait series, I’ve developed and hosted past- and future-self programmes for marginalised business students at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Black and Asian women for Colours of Redbridge (with the Arts Council England Creative People and Places fund). I am now evolving this to include the present.
In this three-part workshop programme, I’ll coach each individual in the group through creative self-reflections, helping them to embrace their identities and reveal dreams in their art making.
We'll write to our past, present and future-self through time travel prompts:
What does your past-self want to tell you?
What you are grateful to your present-self for?
What do you love about your future-self?
Then express these reflections visually, using paint pens and gold thread on tactile natural fibres native to Uganda, including bark cloth, banana fibre, raffia palm, African print fabric, hessian/jute and linen.
Finally, I’ll curate these portraits and writings in an exhibition and facilitate a presentation to give participants a chance to tell their story and be seen as they truly are. This tightens the bonds of community groups, as members recognise each other through their courageous and vulnerable artworks.
Dreaming out loud and looking towards to the future is a powerful first step towards self-determination.
Enquire about this programme or discuss your bespoke need.
Wellbeing through the senses programme
In this five-part sensory programme, I invite participants to explore what wellbeing looks, feels, tastes, smells and sounds like. From this, I guide them to create archival artworks or a collective artwork.
Artworks will always be unique, but you can see an example of artwork I helped residents of Walworth dream up for the ‘Weaving Interdependence: Archiving Communal Wellness’ project with Healing Justice London, here.
Each workshop will have sensory prompts, to help participants mindfully engage their senses and express their unique vision in individual textile artworks and a collective tapestry of wellbeing.
What do you want to see?
What is your favourite taste memory?
What sensation feels curious today?
What do these scents invoke?
What rhythm can you hear in your body?
Through these mindful sensory exercises, I’ll help participants to express their ideas using materials and natural fibres of cultural significance, accessible tools to connect pieces, and a collective wellbeing poem.
The programme will culminate in a presentation of individual and collective textile artworks and poetry, to reflect on the impact of taking this sacred time to explore creativity and archive collective wisdom.
Enquire about this programme or discuss your bespoke need.
Testimonials
My previous partnerships include:
A two-part programme inspiring Black womxn to contribute creative writing and artwork towards an anthology project, for the Black Woman Kindness Initiative. Through the Mindful Past and Future workshops, I helped participants to relax, reengage with their senses, culture, memories and hopes in creative writing and artistic responses.
“I’m interested in Birungi’s work as an artist but also her focus on wellbeing and culture. The atmosphere she brings to her sessions transcends a simple visual workshop. The workshop was a healing space for all and left everyone feeling like they could creatively unwind without judgement.
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“Thank you so much for delivering such a warm, inviting and authentic session today. Thank you so much for bringing your authentic self to the sessions. The feedback I have received says the women really enjoyed and were impacted by your sessions.”
“We’ve had 3 sessions with Birungi and I feel my creative side is beginning to blossom, particularly after the second session. I feel like I have realised my new talents and I am feeling really excited about that. And in other areas, I am finding myself more creative, wanting to share my creative talent with others. I am starting to explore poetry, maybe looking at open mike sessions and I never had the confidence to do these things before so it’s a whole new adventure for me. And I put most of that to Birungi. Not only me, she’s lit a light in my colleagues that go to the [wellbeing] hub and lots of people are feeling “I can do this, I can do more, I can be creative” It’s very exciting times and that there’s something in the air. I think the book that we have published, even though Birungi’s name is not in it, her hallmark is definitely within that book. Definitely within that book. So I am delighted to give this honest testament.”
“I had a first session, a few months ago, that I went to which was absolutely amazing, as I had not done anything creative for such a long time. I couldn’t remember! I felt like I was going back into my childhood to a place of innocence and I untaped these memories without using words, by using pictures and images and my senses. It actually changed my life because, you’re at this place, where you think you have everything, but something’s missing and then you connect on a spiritual level with this type of activity and with others and you see as a result of these experiences how much your life has been enriched and blessed. I would recommend Birungi to anyone that wants to untap their future potential with creativity, fun and joy.”
Engaging marginalised business students at Royal Holloway, University of London, to imagine their highest selves through future-self portraiture and writing, to help raise their ambition and self-efficacy; with survey results showing an overall improvement in hopefulness and self belief.
“You helped me get to know my students and look at how they are connecting with each other and themselves!”
Designing an accessible six-part workshop to explore Walworth Living Room users’ experience of health on a personal, community, institutional and systemic level. The programme used quilt making, natural fibre exploration and conversation guided by research questions from Healing Justice London and Pembroke House to share hopes and strategies to support health.
“The workshops expanded the understanding of health and wellbeing by acknowledging that even if you are ill you can still thrive, create, contribute and feel valued by taking part in the creation of something. The act of doing this communally was also an example of how anxiety can be allayed and people can support and take care of each other.”
Sharing the dance practice of the Ganda tribe of Uganda for Kauma Arts for Royal Borough of Greenwich, a borough with a significant Ugandan community. As well as screening a film I co-produced, ‘Learn about Kiganda Dance by Aminah Namakula’, I recruited Judith Palmer MBE to teach the principles of Baksimba dance and delivered an art workshop; encouraging participants to make collage artworks inspired by images of the Kiganda dancers to memorialise the experience of dancing together.
““It felt so good to be in my body, dancing with family and other families who haven’t danced to drums in forever. We really needed this!””
“Your workshop was like a retreat! I came across the intentions I set at your workshop and I am doing many of them with recent vigour without realising the connection, so I just wanted to say thank you xxx”
“It has been such a joy learning about Birungi’s practice and seeing how her energy can transform a room of strangers into a space for laughter, focus and making. Her work is beautiful and playful, tapping into memories of celebratory fabrics and diaspora making home. She is a treasure and I can’t recommend her enough”
“In your workshop I reconnected to myself - your art class is a gift for the soul!”
“We loved, loved, loved [our online collage workshop] it! Thank you so much! It was SO much fun and relaxing and it was such a joy to do it with you. We will definitely be spreading the word about your online workshops – it was brilliant.”
“Great event. Informative, calming fun and easy to fit into a busy life. Thank you.”
“Thanks so much for another wonderful session yesterday! The workshops have been enjoyed by the young people, they were so relaxing and it’s been an absolute pleasure working with you. :)”
education research
Empowering marginalised students to make a difference
For Black and Global Majority Women
Helping Colours of Redbridge find their creative voice
YOUNG CREATIVES
AMT Youth Programme: Empowering Young Black Creatives
students
Protecting Wellbeing with the National Saturday Club
ugandan culture
Celebrating Greenwich’s Ugandan Heritage Through Dance, Film & Art
“It felt so good to be in my body, dancing with family and other families who haven’t danced to drums in forever. We really needed this!” - A. Kiwanuka
Social justice research
Weaving Interdependence: Archiving Communal Wellness with Healing Justice London