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The Blaque Awareness Network (BAN)

P.O. Box 2172
Sinking Spring, Pennsylvania 19608
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Founder and CEO / Ellesia Ann Blaque, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Africana and Ethnic Literatures, History, and Culture




Welcome!
The Blaque Awareness Network (The Network) is an Afrocentric forum where new knowledge can be both acquired and applied.  It is a practical, inter-related cluster of programs targeting the minority community, but made accessible to anyone willing to both learn and teach.  BAN is influenced by Pan-Africanism and Black Nationalism, resulting in a focus on ethnic minority communities, businesses, and social service agencies. We offer workshops, seminars, retreats, and conferences to both members and guests for nominal fees/donations.  Although each program is geared toward a specific audience with a specific learning outcomes, each works toward a single goal: to better the lives and communities from which participants come.  However, BAN goes much farther than the average non-profit agency in that The Network's activities connect people, cultures, and communities goals to one another, thereby expanding The Network.  In addition, BAN also serves as the cohesive entity for all agencies and companies organized under the BlaqueAdemics™ banner.

Tools of an African Warrior


The Workshops
Our workshops are designed with history in mind and offer opportunities to learn and apply specific knowledge for the target audience. BAN has begun building these workshops by offering what we believe are the two most important:  the Family Workshops and the Teen Workshops.




Black Health Workshop
History tells us that African Americans, 13% of the total American population (U.S. Census 2000), make up an overwhelming 49% of all the HIV/AIDS population. This is a health emergency often minimized in and by the black community. Therefore, the most important of the three workshops on black health offered by The Network is that concerning the level of HIV/AIDS contraction in the black community. While the workshop offers the standard components-knowledge, diagnosis, and treatment-our participants are further engaged using a learning module exclusive to BAN. In it the socio-psychoanalytical concerns about the disease and how they serve as the catalysts to the 'why' of minimization in the black community are addressed, including homosexuality and MSMs, fear of testing results as avoidance from testing, and the fear based social stigma suffered by those having contracted the disease. This additional component is critical to the eradication of HIV/AIDS in the black community, as the knowledge of HIV/AIDS is not properly applied. The Network's HIV/AIDS workshop is designed to fill that void. As we continue to grow, there will be workshops on Sarcoidosis, Diabetes, Heart Attack and Stroke. To be placed on the mailing list for more information and to express your interest in upcoming workshops, please send your contact information and mailing address via our Comments link.
African in BW
Teen Workshops
These workshops target troubled teenagers and serve as an alternative to State programs. It is the understanding, and therefore the practice of The Network, that parents who are willing to turn look to the government for resolutions to problems in their families are, without doubt, making a mistake. We must approach our circumstance differently and access the known history, which reminds us that the same institutions to which we turn to for temporary care, juvenile detention/prisons, boot camps, and group homes-are not concerned with the improvement of our families, but rather the long term capital gain earned from housing people.

In the 1980s, prison financing changed drastically, opening up ownership to the private sector, which resulted in profit earnings and sharing. Since then, "the 204 new facilities built between 1995 and 2000, 154 or three quarters were privately owned, as prisons are now an industry, and as such, minorities and the poor must take that knowledge and apply it to our lifestyles. In other words, knowing that the any industry exists to generate wealth, that wealth can only be acquired through capital gain, which requires product generation, and African Americans, other minorities, and the poor are the industry's product to be generated in American prisons, it would be wise to apply that knowledge by keeping our children and young adults out of the system.

The idea that families can solve their own problems must be supported in order to take control of their communities, which begins by addressing issues within the family as a family. This is particularly important to minority and poor teens, who have traditionally been mistreated by governmental agents and their agencies, such as police and parole officers, juvenile judges, penal codes, systems of incarceration, group homes, and foster homes. The Network believes that with the right guidance, families can no only resolve their own issues, but contribute to the care of children who have been abandoned to the system. Critical attention must be paid to the ways in which State programs treat children when shuffled off to state institutions for help.

The Network's teen workshops offer an alternative to such measures and are facilitated by leaders, educators, and professionals in the local community who not only support BAN's methodology, but who also have a stake in the results of what we do. It is important that we assure our youth are critical thinkers about all that they contemplate; that they can differentiate between the images in the latest music video, which are commodifications of our experiences, and the application of knowing the historical truth about who they actually.

To achieve our learning and application outcomes The Network uses history, literature, music lyrics, critical essays, poetry and spoken word, role playing, and autobiographical presentations to share information, gain new knowledge, and make concrete life plans-the application of that knowledge. Our goals is to send participants home with a practical 10 year life plan that is not only achievable, but worthy of achievement. Most importantly, we do not preach to them, but rather demonstrae to them the tools they need and how to apply them to reach their respective goals.

Black Flowers

Our Mission
The BlaqueAdemics™ "Freedom Celebration" Annual Conference coming soon. . .
2008-2009 Workshops and Lecture Series Schedule
2011-2012 Workshops and Lecture Series Schedule coming soon. . .
Send us your comments!
Our Founder, Ellesia A. Blaque





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