Mission / Vision
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.
The Kindred Collective’s Organizational Mission is to intervene, interrupt and transform generational trauma and violence in our southern communities and movements. We will do this by honoring and resourcing integrative healing traditions and practices as tools for our collective resiliency and survival. We are a collective of anti-oppression grassroots healers based in the traditions and practices of energy, body, earth based traditions, and birth workers grassroots health practitioners, social workers, nurses, counselors, cultural workers and organizers who are based in the South.
The Scope of Kindred’s Work: Kindred is building a collaboration of southern healers and organizers who stand ready to respond to trauma through collective models that sustain our communities, and our movements in order to prevent isolation, early burn out, and emotional, physical, or spiritual deprivation.
Health and Healing Justice and Liberation Values
This working definition of Values reflects our role as healers and organizers inside of our movements and communities. We write this document with the understanding that we are part of a legacy of practitioners. We challenge co-optation of traditional healing practices that have been forcibly removed from our communities and then sold back to us. We bring forward practices that are rooted in our cultural and political traditions.
We are learning and creating this political framework about a legacy of healing and liberation. This document is meeting a particular moment in history inside of our movements that seeks to: regenerate traditions that have been pushed out & lost; to mindfully hold contradictions in our practices; and to be conscious of the conditions we are living and working inside of as healers and organizers in our communities and movements. Through these practices we seek emotional, physical, spiritual, psychic & environmental well being.
Collective wisdom, well being and memory
We value our collective wisdom and memory towards our collective well being
Practices & intentions that support this value:
- We believe that wisdom of health is within us and that our bodies communicate what we need. Therefore we have the ability to intuitively heal ourselves.
- We honor individual agency, and therefore honor people’s right to make decisions about their own bodies.
Wellness and Liberation
We value wellness as a tool of liberation
Practices & intentions that support this value:
- We value individual and collective wellness and healing towards total liberation (mind, body, spirit and soul).
- We will sustain our individual and collective wellness as a response to transform generational violence and trauma
Interdependence
We value our interdependence
Practices & intentions that support this value:
- We acknowledge that everything is interconnected with everything else.
- We understand that the ways we live with and treat each other has direct impact on our wellness and collective well being towards liberation, healing and transforming our conditions.
All bodies
We value all bodies and the conditions that we live in
Practices & intentions that support this value:
- We name and honor our conditions and bodies by creating & sharing memories and storytelling.
- We accept the experience of pain, grief and trauma as indicative and interrelated to the process of healing, health and well being.
History
Kindred a southern healing justice collective was a project conceived by healers and organizers in the South, in 2005, as a response to the crisis of trauma, violence and social conditions in our region. Cara Page, a healing practitioner, artist and organizer based in Atlanta, GA, began holding conversations with southern based spiritual and healing practitioners and organizers to assess the need to build a collective that would centralize healing resources, build the capacity to respond to trauma in our southern movements through holistic healing models, and create new healing models within a social justice context that supports and sustains the well being of organizers. Through these conversations many organizers and healers identified a need for this collective due to the increased state of burnout and depression in our movements, systematic loss of our communities healing traditions, the isolation and stigmatization of healers, and the increased privatization of our land, medicine and natural resources that has caused us to rely on state or private models we do not trust and that do not serve us. Following the devastation of Hurricane Katrina it became even more critical to seek ways to respond to the emotional, physical and spiritual impact of traumatic injustices happening in our region.
At the 2006 Southeast Social Forum and the 2007 US Social Forum, the Kindred began building a collective of southern based healers and organizers seeking to deepen the capacity and wellness of our movements. Our Mission is to honor and resource healing traditions as tools for liberation and individual/collective transformation within our southern movements. We envision social justice movements and a world free of trauma, violence and abuse. We seek to manifest and sustain the physical, environmental, spiritual and emotional well being of our movements and communities by creating healing models that intervene and transform trauma, violence and abuse in our lives to have collective healing responses for sustaining organizers. We will achieve this by naming and responding to the impact of oppression on our minds, bodies and spirits through transformed systems of wellness, resiliency, and sustainability within a context of political strategies and organizing.
Kindred is building a collaboration of southern healers and organizers who stand ready to respond to trauma through collective models that sustain our communities, and our movements in order to prevent isolation, early burn out, and emotional, physical, or spiritual deprivation.
The Team
Founding Members of Kindred Collective:
Cara Page
Eesha Pandit
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Kate Shapiro
Caitlin Breedlove
Sonali Sadaquee
l’erin alta
Kindred Collective Core Leadership:
Cara Page (current)
Tamika Middleton (current)
Paulina Helm-Hernandez (on hiatus)
Mara Collins (former)
Rita Valenti (current)
Sonali Sadaquee (current)
b. sokari brown (current)
Kate Shapiro (current)
Tamika Middleton
Tamika Middleton is a principal consultant with Winds of Change Consulting. Previously she served as the Black Organizing Co-Coordinator of the National Domestic Workers Alliance. She is an organizer, doula, midwifery apprentice, and unschooling mama. She is a co-founder and facilitator at the Anna Julia Cooper Learning and Liberation Center, a Community Advisory Board member of Critical Resistance, a Leadership Team member of Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, and serves as board treasurer of the Organization for Human Rights and Democracy. Tamika is a member of Echoing Ida, a community of Black women and nonbinary writers, who has been published in Creative Loafing Atlanta, Colorlines (both digital and the now defunct print magazine), Talk Poverty, Voices for Human Needs blog, MomsRising.org, CommunityChange.org, Black Women Birthing Justice blog, and BlackGirlNerds.com.
Cara Page
Cara Page is a Black Queer Feminist Queer cultural/memory worker, curator, and organizer. For the past 30+ years, she has fought for LGBTQGNCI, Black, People of Color & Indigenous liberation inside of the racial & economic justice, reproductive justice and transformative justice movements. She is co-founder of the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective & the Atlanta Transformative Justice Collaborative, and former ED of the Audre Lorde Project. She has worked with such organizations nationally & internationally as: Southerners on New Ground (SONG), Project South, INCITE!, the Young Women’s Empowerment Project, the Committee on Women, Population & the Environment and the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice. She is a recent recipient of the Soros Equality Fellowship and lead organizer & curator of her new project, Changing Frequencies, an archival and memory project on healing and generational trauma. (https://carapage.co) @changingfrequencies
Sonali Sadequee
Sonali Sadequee is a southern Muslim queer wholistic practitioner and organizer who believes in the transformative power of trauma and resilience-informed relationships for influencing social change. Conscious communication, yogic lifestyle, collective-care, and self-care practices are her medicine of choice. She is also the founder of Sustainable Wellness, a wholistic coaching practice that supports community leaders and individuals to reverse the impact of chronic stress and generational trauma. Sonali is also a co-founder of Kindred Healing Justice Collective and Atlanta Transformative Justice Collaborative. She also serves on the board of directors of National Coalition for Civil Freedoms, a social justice organization that challenges state suppression and FBI entrapments of Muslims. She also serves on the Board of Directors of Imago Relationships of North America, a national non-profit group of mental health practitioners and educators who support individuals and groups that are empowered with communication skills to cultivate safe and transformative relationships and communities.
Rita Valenti
Rita Valenti is a Registered Nurse with over 30 years of practice. She worked at Grady Memorial Hospital in trauma intensive care units and at the Grady Infectious Disease Clinic. Her experiences at Grady reinforced her fierce advocacy for her patients and underscored her work to create and envision a truly just and equitable healthcare system. She was elected to the Georgia State Legislature in 1990 -1993. Working with Georgians for a Common Sense Health Plan and the nursing community, she introduced legislation for a single payer plan in the State. Rita joined the National Nurses Organizing Committee of the National Nurses United at its founding in 2004 and actively works with NNU around the South. She is a founder of Project South, the Institute for the Elimination of Poverty and Genocide and a member of Physicians for a National Health Program. She is on the Board of Healthcare-NOW, a national organization that educates and organizes for single-payer, Medicare for All! She is active with the Southern Movement Assembly and the Southern Workers Assembly. Rita educates and organizes bringing the critical issues of healing justice into the movement for universal, comprehensive and equitable healthcare for all based on need not income.
Kate Shapiro
Kate Shapiro was born in Durham, North Carolina, and raised in Atlanta Georgia where she still lives. She has had the great honor to work in the service of US Southern freedom movements for gender, sexual, racial and economic justice for the last 12+ years. She is a trainer, master gardener, popular educator and grassroots campaign organizer. She recently left Southerners on New Ground (SONG) after 8 years on staff, where she helped build SONG into the largest grassroots multi-racial LGBTQ membership organization in the South, that wages and wins intersectional direct action organizing campaigns on life and death LGBTQ issues. Her roles while at SONG included lead organizer, Membership Director and Special Projects Director. Prior to SONG she worked with and learned from SEIU International Union, The Beehive Design Collective, Spark Reproductive Justice Now and the Center for Participatory Change. She currently works as the Organizing Director for the Women’s March. Kate has been on the vision and strategies council of Kindred since 2008.
b. sokari brown
b. sokari brown (MSN, RN; RYT-200), is an activist, a trauma-informed Advanced Practice Registered Nurse, certified yoga and meditation teacher, and founder of Courageous Space Yoga and Wellness. She began working with KSHJC as an intern in 2011, mapping healers in the South and Southeast regions, in addition to providing educational offerings on healing justice and collective trauma and resilience. She is certified as a teacher of yoga for 12-step addiction recovery, yoga nidra, and Accessible Yoga. sokari is a fierce advocate for mental health, inclusivity, and trauma-informed care for all. She offers support for yogis, clinicians, wellness professionals, activists, and healers who provide care and/or hold space for others during difficult times. sokari is committed to working within the community to transform personal, collective, and generational trauma by building practices of safety and wellness that sustain our collective well being. In her free time, she enjoys time with family and friends, traveling the globe, and spending as much time outdoors as she can!
Paulina Helm-Hernandez (on hiatus)
Paulina is a queer artist, trainer, political organizer, and strategist from Veracrúz, Mexico, who has made the US South her home for more than two decades. She currently serves as the South Eastern Program officer at the Fund for a Just Society. For eleven years, she was the co-director of Southerners on New Ground, a social justice advocacy organization supporting LGBTQ people in the US South. Prior to that she coordinated the Southern regional youth activism program at the Highlander Research and Education Center. Paulina has a background in farmworker and immigrant/refugee rights organizing, anti-violence work, and gender and sexual liberation work that centers people most affected by poverty, war, and racism. Paulina is always exploring ways to deepen political unity with people and institutions willing to demand and organize for collective liberation.