The Curb Center

Leah is a native South-Carolinian and half-Ghanaian with a lifelong interest in how the stories we hear, tell and believe about ourselves and others shape our quality of life. Her work investigates how moral and religious experiences shape expectations about ourselves, our communities, and those we deem as “other”. Leah is particularly interested in the formal and informal processes by which we manage moral disappointment both publicly and privately. This interest is steeped in a curiosity about relationships between organizational and personal values, particularly as they relate to work-life boundaries for health practitioners

Academically, this translates into the study of social-ecological models of healthy community development and the connections between our social, mental and physical health. Her current work uses a bifocal lens of community psychology and social ethics to explore how moral formation and socioeconomic socialization shape individual and collective responses to sociopolitical disappointment.

Leah’s Curb Scholar project leveraged mindfulness-based play to help build sense-of-belonging as well as interpersonal, intergroup and intercultural emotional intelligence. The project takes the idea of an oppression “card” seriously and seeks to answer one question well. What work could a tangible “race/class/sexism card” do to help those who both experience and perpetuate micro-aggressive or overt bullying?