Collective

Southern Healing Justice

KINDRED

In solidarity with Whitney Spencer’s “An Open Letter & A Call for True Healing Justice”

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Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective (conceived in 2005) is a Black feminist led, multiracial, intergenerational southern based collective of healers, health practitioners, birth workers, therapists, social workers and organizers seeking to transform generational trauma by building practices of safety and wellness that sustain our collective emotional/spiritual/physical/psychic and environmental well being. We would like to show […]

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The Kindred Collective is a network of grassroots energy, body and earth based healers and health practitioners seeking to create mechanisms for wellness and safety that respond, intervene and transform conditions of generational trauma and violence in our communities and movements.

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We know that to build movements, we must work together to build healthy spaces, and embed in our organizing strategies health, and healing work to sustain ourselves and our movements.

We are developing synergies of activism, organizing and healing across generations and cultures, to promote a deeper commitment to building a better world, and generating grassroots solutions to the issues we face. We want to share information, resources, strategies, and commitments to move our health, and healing practices in a process that deepens and broadens the movement building work to which we are all committed.

Thank you for your interest in helping to create this vital space for strengthening our movements as we seek to build, integrate, and transform models for health and healing work inside of our social justice movements and communities for our emotional, physical, spiritual, and environmental well being.

Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective Needs Statement

Change makers are dying as a result of spiritual and physical depravation from trauma, stress and unrest in our movements. Many organizers are either without health insurance and do not seek care or are not supported to sustain their well being as a result of overextended work cultures in our movements. We have seen an increase of suicide, depression and long term illnesses impacting organizers at much younger ages. We have lost many valuable people to illnesses, compounded by the stresses of organizing, that were undiagnosed, untreated or poorly treated. Our organizers are coming from communities most physically and emotionally affected by trauma and violence, and yet we are not given models of intervention and prevention to sustain ourselves, let alone the next generations of leaders. At the same time, our communities are under resourced to respond to systemic conditions of trauma, violence and abuse. Western-based health models in the U.S. are based on profit-making privatization that isolates the individual from their community in the process of their healing or treatment. Often this model only relies on modifying the individual’s behavior without addressing their social conditions. Simultaneously, many of our communities have been forcibly removed from land and resources that traditionally enabled us to communally respond to the emotional and physical needs of our communities. This loss of connection from our traditions has severed our cultural memory of how to build wellness into our daily practices. Additionally, the health care crisis, caused by privatization of services, lack of adequate public health care, and the onset of dangerous environmental health conditions has reached a climax in the southeast. The aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita unveiled the disturbing reality of the state’s inability and unwillingness to care for low- income communities of color in the Southeast. This same public healthcare system is riddled with a history of unethical practices and testing (eg. southern sterilization laws and the Tuskegee experiment) which pathologize women, people of color, immigrants and refugees, people with disabilities, and the l/b/g/t/i/q communities. These western based models that do not incorporate holistic modalities or natural care, nor do they offer collective models of wellness that reflect many of our political and cultural beliefs. As a result, our limited use of this “health care” does not empower the individual or community as a whole, keeping us further isolated.

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Declaración de Kindred, la Colectiva de la Justicia Sanadora del Sur

¿Cuáles son las necesidades? Quienes trabajan por las transformaciones sociales están muriendo como resultado de la depravación espiritual y física generada por el trauma, el estrés y la tensión en nuestros movimientos. Muchas personas organizando procesos de transformación social no cuentan con un seguro de salud y no buscan atención médica o no reciben el apoyo para mantener su bienestar, como consecuencia de las culturas de sobrecarga de trabajo en nuestros movimientos. Hemos observado un incremento del suicidio, la depresión y las enfermedades de largo plazo que impactan a estas personas de edades cada vez menores. Hemos perdido mucha gente valiosa debido a las enfermedades, agravadas por el estrés que forma parte de la manera en la que organizamos a nivel comunitario, que no fueron diagnosticadas ni tratadas, o fueron tratadas de manera insuficiente. Las personas organizando procesos de transdormación social con quien trabajamos provienen de las comunidades más afectadas física y emocionalmente por el trauma y la violencia. Sin embargo, no recibimos procesos de intervención y prevención para sostenernos y, mucho menos, mantener a las próximas generaciones de líderes. Al mismo tiempo, nuestras comunidades no cuentan con los recursos suficientes para responder a las condiciones negativas estructurales del trauma, la violencia y el abuso. Los modelos de salud occidental que se practican en los Estados Unidos están basados en la privatización con fines de lucro que aíslan a la persona de su comunidad en el proceso de su sanación o tratamiento. Con frecuencia, este modelo únicamente busca modificar el comportamiento de la persona sin tener en cuenta sus condiciones sociales. Simultáneamente, a muchas de nuestras comunidades se les han arrebatado la tierra y los recursos que tradicionalmente permitían responder comunitariamente a las necesidades emocionales y físicas. Esta pérdida de conexión con nuestras tradiciones ha fracturado nuestra memoria cultural de cómo practicabamos el bienestar en nuestro diario vivir.
Adicionalmente, la crisis de nuestro sistema de salud, generada por la privatización de los servicios, la falta de atención pública y la presencia de enfermedades relacionadas con peligrosas condiciones medioambientales, ha llegado a su punto más álgido en el sureste de los Estados Unidos. Las consecuencias de los huracanes Katrina y Rita develaron la inquietante realidad de la incapacidad y la falta de voluntad estatales para hacerse cargo de las comunidades pobres y de color en el sureste. Este mismo sistema público de salud está plagado de una historia de prácticas y pruebas poco éticas (por ejemplo, las leyes de esterilización del sur y el experimento Tuskegee) que patologizó a mujeres, personas de color, inmigrantes y refugiadas, con discapacidades y comunidades LGBTIQ. Estos modelos occidentales no incorporan las modalidades de salud holística ni los cuidados naturales, ni ofrecen modelos colectivos de bienestar que reflejen muchas de nuestras creencias políticas y culturales. Como consecuencia, nuestro uso limitado de esta “atención de salud” no empodera a la persona o a la comunidad como un todo, lo cual nos mantiene en mayor aislamiento.

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