From April through June, Waiting for Beds partnered with the Minnesota Department of Health’s Data Equity Community of Practice to bring the project to MDH staff through exhibition, storytelling, research, and facilitated discussion. The partnership focused on data equity, mental health, houselessness, and the ways lived experience can deepen how institutions understand and respond to community needs.

 

Moira Villiard and Carla Hamilton worked with MDH to plan, curate, install, and present the exhibition, pairing the visual work with facilitated conversations and storytelling. Willard Malebear Jr. and Annette Bryant joined Moira and Carla as featured speakers, sharing perspectives grounded in lived experience, while Katie Boone presented research that helped connect the stories represented in the exhibition to broader data and systems.

 

A central part of the partnership was creating space for lived experience to be treated as knowledge, not simply as an illustration of data. Presentations were offered both in person and virtually, allowing MDH staff to engage with the project in multiple ways.

 

Through the partnership, Waiting for Beds brought research, art, data, and personal narrative into the same conversation, encouraging participants to consider how data is collected and interpreted, whose experiences may be obscured within systems, and what more responsive approaches to mental health and houselessness could look like.