Photo by Andrew Joslin
The Old Oak Dojo is stewarded by Deborah Frieze, an author, founder, professor and musician. In 2012, after 10 years of working with leaders around the globe, Deborah was inspired to return home and build her own urban learning center. She stumbled across 14 Chestnut Place in Jamaica Plain in January of that year, and that was the beginning of listening to what this place would like to become.
The inquiry that called her to create the Old Oak Dojo is: How do we create and sustain healthy, resilient, inclusive and creative communities? The initiatives she’s spent the last few decades creating—Walk Out Walk On, the Boston Impact Initiative and the Old Oak Dojo—are profoundly interdependent. Perhaps the future we wish for resides at the meeting place of our beliefs about change, the flow of resources and the spaces in which we create new possibilities.