*Quarantined*

Francesca Bonifacio : Civic Designer, Student, Baker : Baltimore, MD

March 26- April 2, 2020

“I wish we could transition to a life of being, not doing. No productivity as purpose, no working for anyone who doesn’t care about you on a deep human level. Just us outdoors laughing and peeling oranges in the shade. Everybody deserves care. Everybody deserves to take it slow.”

Francesca Bonifacio is a singular human. She is as deep and multilayered and openly honest as the cakes and pies she bakes. She is a Manila-born, Chicago raised babe who is currently living in Baltimore while she gets her Masters in Social Design at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

When I first learned that she was going to study Social Design, I had no concept for what that was, until she explained it to me and I realized how brilliant and necessary a field it is. In her words, Social Design is “a creative practice dedicated to understanding social problems and supporting positive social change through design thinking and research”. This is EVERYTHING for how we distribute information. Think about how information gets passed through social media so quickly - think about what posts you pause a couple seconds on versus the ones you browse past. It usually has nothing to do with the content, but everything about the presentation. We are a visual culture - this is not necessarily bad, but how can we use that to affect change? Well, Fran, thank the gods, is studying this.

In her Field Notes she parses through the struggles of studying such a thing in a time when it seems like jobs are becoming more and more scarce and the need for “frontline” help is increasing. I thank her for her honesty in sharing that with us.

Before the pandemic hit, Fran was doing a paid fellowship as a civic design fellow with the City of Baltimore Mayor's Office of Performance & Innovation (OPI). They were working on two mayoral priorities centering youth justice and city cleanliness before the pandemic hit. OPI has now shifted to supporting the Baltimore City Health Department with COVID-19 relief and communications.

Her graduate capstone project explores how we might design a culturally responsive mental health care model for Filipinx-Americans in the United States. This has been the focus of her spring semester. Thanks to serendipity, she’s teaming up with a DC-based organization to implement a pilot program in Baltimore called "Achieving Whole Health", which focuses on culturally relevant approaches to mental health by nurturing the mind-body-spirit connection. It was specifically designed by women elders in the Asian-Am/Pacific Islander (AAPI) community for AAPIs and Native Hawaiians. They plan to launch the program in late summer with a group of Filipinxs and Filipinx-Americans. The motivation behind her capstone is the disconnect between the high prevalence of depression in Filipinxs-Americans and the low rates of mental health help-seeking. It explores the hypothesis that Filipinxs-Americans aren't seeking care at the pace of diagnosis because Western biomedical models of therapy lack the cultural relevance to be truly beneficial to their population.

And if that wasn’t enough inspiring and creative things going on in Fran’s mind and universe, she just launched a project focusing on culinary identity called Foraged where she gathers stories from various humans and where they have found their culinary identity and does it in a handwritten format, much like Field Notes! HIGHLY recommend giving it a follow and checking it out!

So without further ado, spend some time with Fran while she dreams of Timothee Chalamet and takes a trip to the ER: