Health and healing are critical for collective liberation. Without them, the injuries of racial capitalism, oppression, and generational trauma will fester, keeping us chronically fractured, unwell, and under-resourced.
Healing Justice Ldn is investing in the patterns, postures, and practices we need to enable reverberant impact throughout our communities. Community infrastructure is our surest path to survival and communities will be the stewards of the spaces and structures we need to support us all.
We are building towards a world with abundant and accessible community health and healing. This vision for the future includes liberation from structural and systemic oppressions including carceral systems and securitisation with freedom from intimate, intergenerational, and interpersonal violence.
Healing Justice is an evolving framework that invites us to interrupt and intervene in interpersonal, structural, and intergenerational violence for the sake of just and health-filled futures.
At HJL we engage with the healing justice framework through:
We were introduced to the phrase healing justice at the INCITE! Colour of Violence Conference and by peers at the Allied Media Conference. They described it as “an evolving political framework that … seeks to transform, intervene and respond to generational trauma and violence in our movements, communities and lives — and to regenerate our traditions of liberatory and resiliency practices that have been lost or stolen.” Cara Page, one of the architects of the healing justice framework, traces its origins to the visionary work of many in the US south, “deeply rooted in Black feminist traditions and southern Black radical traditions of the global south”.
This gave language to the work we were already doing but not inventing. In the UK, Healing Justice Ldn is part of a legacy and continuum of movements and initiatives building capacity for and with marginalised people. Our work is inspired and built alongside other community led efforts such as Voices That Shake!, Imkaan, Civic Square, Dark Matter Labs, Skin Deep, Resolve Collective, Migrants in Culture, MAIA Group, 4Front, Kids of Colour, Level Up, Project Tallawah, Numbi Arts, NSUN, Disability News Service and No More Exclusions among many others.
Abolitionist principles undergird all of HJL’s strategies and interventions. We know that state violence, organised abandonment, and carceral systems are active threats to life and living well therefore abolition is essential and inevitable for true community-led health and healing.
Somatics enables us to connect our embodied experiences to the collective and supports us to access deeper understandings of ourselves and each other. We leverage somatics and embodied leadership practices as tools to support the sustainability, power, and strength of our movements.
“All bodies are unique and essential. All bodies are whole. All bodies have strengths and needs that must be met. We are powerful not despite the complexities of our bodies, but because of them. We move together, with no body left behind. This is disability justice.” – Aurora Levins Morales and Patty Berne
We are living in traumatising conditions. Our approaches are deeply shaped by the lived experiences of our communities and have evolved from the legacy of trauma-informed care and practice.
Skills, solutions, and alternative infrastructures already live in our communities – in the relational networks that keep us fed, cared for, resourced, safe, and connected. The knowledges that live in – and are borne of – our communities are the most valuable tools as we build towards collective liberation.
Healing Justice Ldn’s strategies are rooted in building and remembering alternative infrastructures, knowledges, practices, and strategies to enable us all to be well – we call this propositional work. This is work that sees and understands the conditions that shape our current systems and ushers in experiments and alternatives that render the current systems redundant.
We work alongside and support our peers doing oppositional work, including campaigning, direct action, and more with respect and solidarity.
“Abolition is not absence, it is presence. What the world will become already exists in fragments and pieces, experiments and possibilities. Abolition is building the future from the present, in all of the ways we can.”
– Ruth Wilson Gilmore