How's Your Five: Focus on Love in All Forms

Hear from the BIA's Wellness Director, Bethanie Mangigian, LMSW, about how we can prioritize love in all its forms this February.

As 2020 takes its shape, the BIA Wellness team is excited to continue serving individual and community wellbeing. Starting in 2018, we began a partnership with the Mercy Center to promote a new and different way of engaging one another: “How’s your 5?” This framework refers to the five domains of human experience—eat, sleep, love, play, work—and it offers us a chance to have deeper conversations than just, “How are you?” Every month this year, you’ll be hearing from a valued member of our wellness team on this blog as we engage each of these five aspects of wellbeing in our community conversations.

As we kick off the month of February, with Valentine’s Day right around the corner, we are focusing this month’s spotlight on LOVE in all its forms: love of self, family, and community.

How do we operationalize love as a wellness team delivering services across all of Broadmoor? We think it means bringing relationships and social connection to the forefront of what we do, whether we are providing support for a 311 complaint, offering affordable counseling services, or delivering emergency food assistance. And we aren’t alone in this belief. Broadmoorians agree that it is the quality of our relationships that is the secret ingredient to Broadmoor’s success; of the 100 Broadmoorians who participated in our Fall 2019 community-wide survey, the majority agree that it is the people, diversity, and sense of community amongst Broadmoorians that are the neighborhood’s greatest strengths. Get a full review of the survey in our last blog post.

Additionally, our residents proudly note that the numerous programs offered at the AWC and Rosa F. Keller Library and Community Center are what facilitate the sense of connectedness in our neighborhood. At our recent January neighborhood meeting, a longtime resident noted that Broadmoor neighbors intentionally decided to forego the creation of a security district in favor of prioritizing an improvement district that would uplift neighborhood wellbeing through quality of life improvements and programming. A decade later, 95% of survey respondents talk to their neighbors—nearly 80% on a weekly or daily basis. Furthermore, when asked about the future that residents envision for the BIA’s services, the top priority stated was programming that prioritizes neighborhood cohesion. We believe that this matters tremendously. We know that social connection and mutual aid are key pillars of a healthy community. We also know that when we experience love and feel connected, we can bounce back from difficult experiences even stronger. That’s what Broadmoor has always done, and that is what we will continue to do.

If you are seeking love and a sense of connection for yourself and your community, we invite you to join us this month for dinner, free childcare, and conversation at our upcoming February 17th neighborhood meeting at 6:30 pm at the Broadmoor Community Church, where we will be prioritizing our Broadmoor residents’ values. If you can’t make it, we welcome you to come to a future monthly meeting or stop by the Arts and Wellness Center to say hi and find out how to get involved! You make our community special and we are glad you’re here. Will you be our valentine?

With love,

Bethanie Mangigian, Wellness Director, and the BIA Wellness Team