This session will invite participants to share their current definitions of and orientation to community healing and healing justice. The workshop will analyze the current climate of racial justice and de-carceral movement work and explore the various cultural nuances of healing to explore how healing justice practice can be leveraged across cultures and communities. Using the St. Louis-based InPower Institute’s Black Healers Collective as a case study, we will invite participants to share how healing justice frameworks can be effectively applied.
Participants will be invited to identify the ways in which they already practice healing work, and dream up strategies to build and sustain community-led approaches to care and crisis intervention in the midst of co-optation by state and corporate entities, relationship ruptures, and deep burnout. Leveraging somatic models and practices such as sites of shaping, we will identify the deep needs and strengths that must be highlighted at individual, interpersonal, local, and organizational levels to recover and move forward in our local work toward racial justice and non-carceral approaches toward safety and accountability. The workshop will end with experiential healing and embodiment practices that participants can bring back to their communities and teams.