Sixteen Crossroads Fund grantees and allies gathered bright and early Wednesday morning to talk about Healing Justice. Over the last two years we’ve been hearing more and more from our community about the need for self care and healing in our activist work, and about the growing healing justice movement. As part of our ongoing Technical Assistance workshop series, Crossroads Fund invited local healing justice activists Tanuja Jagernauth and Stacey Erenberg from Sage Community Health Collective to facilitate an introduction to healing justice at the individual, institutional and city-wide level.Healing justice is “a framework that identifies how we can holistically respond to and intervene on generational trauma and violence and bring collective practices that can impact and transform the consequences of oppression on our bodies, hearts and minds. Through this framework we build… political and philosophical convergences of healing inside of liberation.” As Tanuja and Stacy explained, with help from everyone present at the workshop, healing justice comes from the belief that injustices cause emotional, spiritual and physical trauma in ourselves and our communities. Healing justice involves addressing both individual healing, and also transforming the institutions and relationships that are causing the trauma in the first place.The workshop attendees shared the need for healing from everything from war and colonialism to domestic and community violence to organizer burnout and inter organizational conflicts. Through skits and drawings, they presented examples of healing justice in practice at the personal, organizational and city-wide level. Want to learn more about healing justice? Check out these great resources:More on healing justice from Cara Page: http://inciteblog.wordpress.com/2010/08/05/reflections-from-detroit-transforming-wellness-wholeness/Other groups doing healing justice: http://www.kindredhealingjustice.org/On healing justice and health justice: http://www.organizingupgrade.com/2010/11/just-healing/ On community care: http://nayamaya.wordpress.com/ On transformative justice: http://tjlp.org/aboutwho.html More on transformative justice: http://www.project-nia.org/about-us.phpHave an idea for a workshop that might be useful for grassroots groups in Chicago? Let us know!
