Movement Medicine
Centering on Purpose, Strategy & Collective Transformation
Radical social change is only as effective as it is made sustainable. As an issue which often goes unaddressed in our movements, we see how burnout, lack of resources and the ongoing impacts of trauma and conflict affect our ability to drive transformation. Our Movement Medicine work looks to grow the capacities, skills and resources of grassroots movements, community health providers and those at the frontlines to become sustainable and adaptive in contexts of oppression that rely on our un-survivability. Focused on strengthening our collective capacity and resourcing our creativity, trauma work, movement health and interdependence, we come together with movement leaders and health and healing justice practitioners to become skilled at building alternatives. Our aims are to bring about conditions for meaningful movement making and liberation.
Movement Medicine has two tracks:
We work with movement leaders and health and healing practitioners to:
- Explore the embodied skills, relationships and ways of being that support healing justice – building and extending trust, holding contradictions and complexity, visions for the future, holding the short and long term, consent, discernment and boundaries, and more
- Develop a shared radical vision, analysis, and understanding to navigate our current conditions and politics, and to build together toward our vision
- Explore and interrupt some of the trauma based reactions within movement culture- shift, from slitting to interdependence, from pulling each other down to building each other up, from criticising risk taking to celebrating experiments, and more
- Understand how trauma healing serve movement building, sustained relationships and strategic experiments
- Learn about conflict as generative – discerning our triggers, deepening trust and learning across conflict
- Explore and converge on what we are transforming toward
Our ongoing training and support programme goes on to focus on testing, iterating and building alternatives through practice labs and discussions. These spaces are designed to enable us to imagine and iterate alternatives, and also hack at some of the most pressing issues threatening the sustainability of our movements.
Our two-year programme Rehearsing Freedoms is inspired by Ruth Gilmore Wilson’s concept that we need to ‘rehearse the social order coming into being’ in order to collectively envision and practice futures free from oppression. Our current public infrastructures (health, housing, education etc) are not only failing but are actively perpetuating and contributing to harm and ‘premature deaths’ of marginalised people. It is against this ‘organised abandonment’ on a systemic level that Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls for a movement-centred approach to create “life-affirming institutions.”
Our first steps towards imagining what life-affirming institutions we can build will be based around movement-centred practice labs. These co-created labs support leaders and practitioners to imagine, design and bring to life a reality grounded in justice and abolition. The labs, envisioned as a series of workshops happening across different tracks, will allow leaders an opportunity to test, hack at, imagine, surface tensions and think together around a range of either practical movement/organisational needs, theory/language or practice.
