Q&A with Healing Justice Practitioners
In Fall 2020, the Hive Fund hired the Ananse Consulting team of three healing justice practitioners to conduct a reflective listening praxis over a four-month period to gauge grantees’ experiences and better understand the healing and security practices they already use and their healing and security support needs. We’re sharing some findings from that inquiry in our Learning Lab, but we also wanted to share some perspectives on healing justice from practitioners themselves. Ananse’s Principal and Founder, Omisade Burney-Scott, and Emanuel Brown sat down with Melanie Allen to talk about this growing field of practice and how important it is to movement work. *Marisol Jimenez is also a member of this consulting team and is putting healing into practice by honoring her sabbatical.
Melanie: How did you come to focus on healing justice, and why you view it as essential?
Omisade:
I came to the work that would eventually be called healing justice from my own personal journey and evolution in the social justice movement space. So much of movement work is relational. Being in intentional relationships with people who were older than me, or people who had been doing movement work longer than me and seeing the places where they needed healing, seeing places where the impact of the work that they were shouldering, the impact of them moving in the world with these multiple identities was showing up in the work. And of course when Cara [Page—healer and activist-- one of the primary architects of the healing justice framework, who also consulted with the Hive Fund on healing justice and holistic security] and a whole group of people were like "We have to do better by ourselves, and we should be explicit. We should name it, we should study the context, we should develop a praxis,” I was like, "Count me in.”
Emanuel:
I was on the track to become a therapist, and I was a community mental health social worker and a program director in the nonprofit system. And that experience really showed me, these structures of service provision are not getting it. This whole system is unwell.
As I was starting to dip my toe into organizing work, I was already noticing the way that relationships, and relational skills, and relational boundaries and how people could deal with past relationships was impacting what they could or how they could organize, and what they could organize for. I saw Black women in my community rising into their leadership, and I saw that the system that was there was not a system of care to receive them. I was like, "Oh, hold on. Let me step in and use these care tools to create spaces where Black women can feel themselves, see themselves reflected in the person who's also offering them support." And so that was my beginning,
Melanie: What is your vision for Healing Justice – where does it lead us:
Emanuel:
How can I get us further and further along down this road where freedom isn't just a vision into the future, but it is what we get to have access to right now, despite whatever conditions are being thrown at us? That is my daily call to this practice of healing and justice. And it is both the practice of it and the major impact and outcome of it, which is to create space where people can experience freedom right now.
Omisade:
Right. We talk so much about getting to liberation or what will happen when we get to liberation. You can actually engage in liberatory practices right now, inside your own body. But people just need a way to do that and they need support.
Emanuel:
And we can actually collectively get there. Whether that's through this practice space or whether that's through really being in creative space or collaborative space with each other.
Melanie: So if someone is just coming to understand healing justice or holistic security and what it is, what are some practices or technologies that might seem familiar.
Omisade
I think about the work that people have done around organizational culture-- models of healthy organizational cultures or capacity building. But you are at the end of the day talking about the currency of relationships. What you're really trying to get people to do is figure out how to be healthy and be in a healthy relationships with each other to that end to achieve liberation and equity.
Emanuel:
One of the things that came to mind was people's deep commitment to hospitality. [When] people walked into spaces and organizations and offices, there was always a receptionist, right? Somebody to receive you at the door. "Hi, how are you? Can I offer you a glass of water? We got these little peanut snacks." For most social justice organizations that I've worked with, I've been able to use those very basic things that they do to show people that they are in a safe place to say, "Okay, how do we take it up a notch? How do we translate [that welcoming space] to our onboarding staff procedures? How does that translate to what you want to do bigger, what you want to do for your staff, or what you want to do in connection with other organizations in your community?" To be able to take those very basic elements of hospitality and care, and just keep applying them in different situations and scenarios has been very helpful.
Melanie: what do you wish funders understood about Healing Justice, about what it is and what it isn't?
Omisade
This is a model that should be given leeway and space for people to adapt it and figure out how they're going to integrate it into their work. But you can't invisibilize its origin story. [The framework for] Healing Justice was intentionally co-created by Black, Southern, queer folk. So with the adoption of it, the adaption of it, the integration of it, you have to hold the core of the origin story with reverence, respect and with transparency. Also, Healing Justice is a practice and a commitment. It is not a one-off. So if you think it's a one-off and you can dabble in it, then you don't understand what it is.
Emanuel:
It is something that philanthropists themselves need to be engaged in in a deep collective way with each other, where they too are practicing the intimacy of what it means to give money and speaking how vulnerable of a process that is for them.
I would say that healing justice is very much in alignment with a reparatory framework. This is what should have been the whole time that this sector began, right? We should have always been offering people more than just money to respond to the systemic oppression people are experiencing. We should have always been doing this.