Introducing: Rehearsing Freedoms
Today, we start building towards a complete reimagining of our health systems — to emerge from a period of discovery, imagination, and collective growth together with ideas for a just and equitable system of community-centred health. This is Rehearsing Freedoms.
Decades of violent state austerity and welfare reform are killing us. Existing health systems are unresponsive and fail to serve our communities because of deliberate actions and decisions made by those with the least to lose.
Access to quality, healing-centred public health systems is key to our collective liberation. Some politicians and policymakers try to divide us across lines of race, gender, sexuality, ability, class, and geography — but we know that our health is connected. When any one of us faces barriers that prevent us from detecting, treating or recovering from illness, all of us are at risk.
Rehearsing Freedoms is a two-year programme of community-based healing, radical imagining, structural interventions, spaces for collective capacity building, joy and restoration. All while practising the collective skills we need to realise liberatory health and sustainable futures.
It is inspired by Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s concept that we need to ‘rehearse the social order coming into being’ in order to collectively envision and practice futures free from oppression.
Rehearse the social order coming into being, as against recite the complaints or the demands for that other path, the one that I don’t want to take anymore, is fundamental to where we’re at now […] rehearsing things like the possibility of retaking the streets as public space and then thinking about what does that mean – what does public mean if not some ability to continually do and do again what we are demanding in the short run, we need to be able to do for ourselves.
– Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Together, we are exploring the potential of public health for all of us when it is determined by more of us. Join us on this journey towards liberated, community-centred health.