This program is being offered virtually through Zoom. In order to participate and receive the Zoom link, you must register here or by emailing carla@smithcenter.org
with Ravenna Raven
If you’re a good listener, people will trust you with their stories. The Good Listening Project is a nonprofit that promotes cultures of listening to support healing. In this interactive workshop, Listener Poet Ravenna Raven will share tips about her process from starting a conversation with a stranger to creating a poem for them, and will invite you to try these techniques with someone else in the group.
Suggested Donation: $10
About Ravenna Raven
Ravenna Raven is a poet, educator, and sewing artist living in Washington, D.C. She spent her childhood in a 250-year-old farmhouse in rural New Jersey, reading and writing stories to entertain herself. While studying poetry as a graduate student at the University of Maryland, she began developing and teaching courses for creative writing, reading development, and inquiry research. Ravenna is a listener poet with a nonprofit that promotes good listening in hospitals and healing spaces while supporting patient and staff wellbeing and the humanization of healthcare. Her upcoming projects will combine her love of language with a passion for sewing and garment design to create custom, one-of-a-kind wearable poems.
About The Good Listening Project
The Good Listening Project is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that helps build cultures of good listening to support resilience and healing in healthcare systems. Our Listener Poets speak with people in healthcare settings and write custom poetry based on these conversations.
Why We Listen
By modeling good listening and writing poems, we help people feel safe, human, and heard. By publishing and promoting the poems and stories of our participants, we seek to highlight the humanity within the healthcare system.
We also host webinars and interactive workshops about how to be a good listener. The organic ripple effect of good listening fundamentally shifts how it feels to work and receive care at a hospital.
We envision a more resilient world where all people experience connection and belonging.
