Winter 2022 - Digital Issue

New Narratives for Health

Winter 2022: Volume 29, Issue 4

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• Welcome

• What Is Healing Justice?
  

  “Healing justice work honors ancestral and Indigenous wisdom in an effort to respond to generational trauma, facilitate collective healing, and transform systemic oppression. It proposes that healing and joy are essential elements of liberation.”

  by Nineequa Blanding

• Writing New Narratives for Health

  “We need new narratives to push the boundaries of what health can be in this country and to challenge mainstream narratives, whose ongoing power is reflected in the Supreme Court’s recent stripping away of reproductive rights and in ongoing structural racism and economic exploitation.”
  

  by Sonia Sarkar

• Birthing Black: Community Birth Centers as Portals to Gentle Futures

  “BCE was founded on values of safety, abundance, and liberation to grow and sustain birth centers led by Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color........Together, we are building community among birth center leaders of color, growing efforts to transform the culture of  birth,  and  stewarding  capital to seed vibrant and lasting community birth infrastructure for generations to come.”

  by Leseliey Welch and Nashira Baril

• Redesigning the Birth Experience of Native Parents: A Case Study of Community Codesign

  “Too often, the joy of a Native family’s birth experience is tainted by fear, ignorance, and racial bias. Over the last year, parents and leaders from tribal lands in and around Humboldt County in Northern California and medical practitioners from the local Providence St. Joseph Hospital have been working to better the birthing experience of Native parents.”
  

  by Adene Sacks and Thomas Both
  

• Living into a Childhood Commitment: A Conversation with Cyndi Suarez and Kaytura Felix

  “When I saw patients in Washington Heights, in New York City, Black and Brown people would  come in about their blood pressure—they were worried about the violence in their communities, they were worried about their grandchildren in jail. It was the violence in the streets, it was the family problems they were having that consumed them........ So, what I’ve been really concerned with is working upstream......... Upstream is where small, just actions can have big impacts on many people.”

• Evolving a Culture of Care: Lessons from Third Root Community Health Center

  “We all belong. We are all healing. We are all welcomed in our wholeness.’ As we sunset our cooperative, it is our deep wish that these words and our lessons learned can seed the next generation of healers and healing justice practices.”

  by Vanessa Nisperos, Emily J. Kramer, and Julia Bennett

• Healing and Joy as Resistance: Words of Wisdom from a Beloved Activist

  “For Dr. Hunter-Fowler, this work to uplift and celebrate the voices and experiences of trans people, particularly Black trans women like herself, is a joy and a dream come true. The impetus for starting TWOCC—to create healing spaces in response to the fatal attacks of trans people—still holds precedence today. For years, with the ongoing violence coupled with systemic oppression, many Black trans women have operated under the notion that their life expectancy is no more than thirty-five years. As such, Dr. Hunter-Fowler states, ‘Every breath a trans person of color takes is an act of revolution.'"
  

  by Nineequa Blanding

• “There’s No Such Thing as a Single- Issue Struggle”: A Conversation with Kitana Ananda, Naa Amissah-Hammond, and Quanita Toffie
  

  “We often raise up Audre Lorde’s words, ‘There’s no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.’ Our grantees are telling us over and over that we can’t have this conversation about abortion in Black communities if we’re not also talking about maternal health. We have to be talking about the full spectrum of reproductive healthcare. And we also need to be organizing in that way, because that’s what brings the most people along in our fight.”

• Eliminating Healthcare Debt: A Liberatory Approach
  

  “To fully protect people across the nation from bills they can’t afford to pay, policy-makers and advocates will also have to take on the elephant    in the room: The United States has the most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet for all we pay, it is failing to deliver safe, affordable, and efficient care—across multiple dimensions.”
  

  by Chuck Bell

• Disability Justice—in the Workplace (and Beyond)

  “If you are working with young people, with Black and Brown people, with queer/trans people, chances are that a critical mass of your constituents manage disabilities in some way or another—so it’s important to understand what the historical connection is and how ableism shows up in their lives and in their experiences.”—Adela Ruiz
  

  by Sonia Sarkar

• Rest: A Middle Finger to Oppression, a Road Map to Justice

  “The stresses that come from constant worry about basic life necessities, concern over personal safety, and persistent cuts from racial microaggressions all add up and create yet another form of inequality we rarely talk about and only vaguely understand: rest inequality.”
  

  by Shawn A. Ginwright

• How Can We Support Youth Mental Health?

  “Now that youth mental health has been declared a national emergency, how might we galvanize efforts that center representative voices—including those of girls, youth of color, and LGBTQ+ youth—to develop practical solutions for meaningful change?”
  

  by Nineequa Blanding

• Transforming Our Systems, Transforming Ourselves: The Pivotal Role of Healing in Social Change Work

  “I believe—and what I’ve seen through movement—is that where our wounds are unaddressed, where our own story is not understood, is exactly the same place where the fractures in our organizations occur and the fractures in our movement occur.”
  

  by Prentis Hemphill

• ENDPAPER - UNIVERSE