With health care premiums skyrocketing, a national government that appears to be moving away from affordable health care and wide pockets of poverty around Dane County and Southern Wisconsin — particularly in communities of color — having a more streamlined one-stop shop for healthcare could be vital for thousands of people.

The organization addresses the fatigue of both an external and internal racial battle among people of color, as well as the fragility displayed among white people. By bringing awareness to racial biases, particularly in the mindfulness movement, [Mindfulness for the People] aims to disrupt the systematic racism we are so accustomed to.

Linda Ketcham, executive director of MUM, said a realistic goal would be to one day fund 75 percent of the program through sales. But skills, rather than sales, are the ultimate goal, she said. “It’s really about how do we get people on a pathway out of poverty? How do we get people job skills and help them find and retain a job that pays above a minimum wage?” she said. “That’s our real purpose and goal.”

“The way they were going to recruit for the course spoke to the mission of it,” said Carla Garces, co-director of the Latino Academy. “A lot of people would want to take this course, but their focus was people who were unemployed or underemployed, people from communities who don’t normally get this opportunity. For us that was attractive.”

Black describes Mindfulness for the People as a “for-profit, Black-owned social impact entity that is radically re-imagining the mindfulness movement.” Judging from the reaction she got at the conference we both attended, Black is well on her way to just that kind of radical reimagining.

As a participant in the Social Good Accelerator, a program to help entrepreneurs achieve social good, Diming has also been working on a new project: A safe house where black teenage girls can go to get one-on-one mentorship with Diming, and to learn “self-love, confidence and dignity.”