By Guadalupe Chavez
DPN Health and Wellness Director

Healing requires that we pay attention to the whole body, this includes the emotional, spiritual, and psychological bodies. Today we are launching a Healing Justice Toolkit that outlines the past seven years of DPN’s Healing Justice work. This toolkit is a communal offering that joins the lineage of healing justice work that communities across the world have engaged in for survival, strategy, liberation, and assurance to future generations. It is important to acknowledge that there has been generations of work done throughout the U.S. and internationally that has fed this current iteration of liberation work, which we call Healing Justice. Healing Justice’s birth story is ancient, and I want to honor the past twenty years of work being led by organizers in the South, including organizations like Kindred, SONG, and the work of Cara Page, Susan Rafo, Adela Nieves, and many more.

In our own organization, Dignity & Power Now! (DPN) was founded with three foundational pillars in mind; Abolition, Transformative Justice, and Healing Justice. These values require that we invite ourselves into radical imagination, forward thinking, and a commitment to deep healing of chronic trauma. At DPN we have spent our first seven year cycle dedicated to experimenting how to best live out these three pillars not only externally but internally in how we run and take care of the health of the organization. We see Abolition as part of a larger vision for a healthier world where people and the earth are treated with dignity, care, and respect. Abolition invites us into creative and courageous conversations about how we can envision a different world that does not repeat the same cycles of violence we are impacted by through systems or in our interpersonal relationships.

Healing Justice and Transformative Justice has given us ample trial and error space to learn what works best for our communities to not only heal in, but learn to thrive after tragedy and harm caused by state violence. We understand that violence is going to happen therefore our rapid response framework includes asking ourselves three questions:

1. How do we create spaces where people can practice care, dignity, and healing with each other while organizing for justice?
2. What programs can be put in place to help prevent, confront, and heal crisis?
3. What is the role of healers in social movements? How can DPN organize healers to not only be a part of our rapid response network of support but also how can they play leading roles in supporting our families and members in reclaiming their dignity after trauma?

With these questions in mind we have created on-going healing justice programing that in their essence uplift DPN’s Healing Justice principles:

• Without healing there is no justice. We understand that healing is a lifelong process and that often we never fully heal, especially when our loved ones are killed unjustly. We also understand that if we do not participate in a process of healing, the pain caused by state violence can overwhelm us as well as our communities. Holding these two truths we honor the need to be in healing processes, including the process of demanding justice for our loved ones.
• Justice should address the whole person. We acknowledge that systems of power and oppression impact our minds, bodies and spirit, therefore we have to address this impact on all three levels.
• All minds and all bodies deserve justice. In a system that targets people with disabilities and produces disabilities through violence, confinement and medical negligence and abuse, we must build a movement that achieves justice for all people; including those with physical and mental health disabilities.
• Our work must be trauma informed and resilience-centered. Trauma functions to create long lasting impacts on our lives. We must build practices and containers of resilience that not only support impacted communities in healing from harm but invite us to imagine and practice being in community without systems of harm.
• Resilience is strategic. We support the healing of our communities not only because we deserve wellbeing, but also because the power required to win our people’s wellbeing is the power required to win all other visionary demands for justice.

Examples of how we have been able to experiment with these questions and principles are shared in the Healing Justice toolkit. Highlighted in the toolkit are our free Community Wellness Clinics- large scale clinics featuring holistic, indigenous, and western modalities of healing; Freedom Harvests- wellness & art pop-ups outside L.A county jails; monthly Family Meeting; Building Resilience- our collective of healers and artists that sustain our healing justice programing; and our on going rapid response work. The intention of this toolkit is to share our practices in centering healing justice in rapid response work. As in any other resource, we hope that communities can take what is useful, adapt the tools shared, and what does not feel useful is left on the pages. Myself and Building Resilience healer recently attended a Wellness Clinic organized by the Orange County Rapid Response network who adopted DPN’s model of our free community wellness clinics. Gratitude and excitement filled us as we witnessed how this group had taken the model and adapted it based on the needs and resources available to their community. What we have learned at DPN is that rapid response is not only about responding to crisis in the moment but creating systems and structures that communities can plug into on an on-going basis both for prevention of crisis when possible and for healing after trauma.

To learn more about our work contact me at guadalupec@dignityandpowernow.org.

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