# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
FREE, Virtual, Native Focused 40-Hour Sexual Assault Advocacy Training

Central Standard Time

Description
*ASL interpretation provided

See Full Agenda: HERE

FREE Virtual Event via Zoom: 12:30p-4:30p Central, each Tuesday and Thursday, January 7-30, 2025

Log in Here each Tuesday and Thursday January 7-30, 2025

https://miwsac.co/ZoomLinkForAll8Sessions-Jan40-Hr

The Training will begin at 1pm Central, concluding no later than 4:30 Central. You are welcome to join at 12:30p central for OPTIONAL casual check-ins/visiting. We will stay logged on after for an OPTIONAL debrief session.

We encourage you to prepare for each training session by gathering items from our 4 sacred elements: Water: Water, Tea, Coffee, Juice Earth: A Stone, a Plant, a piece of Wood, even some Sand or Dirt Fire: Light a Candle, Sage, Cedar, Sweetgrass, Incense Air: Sit near a Window, small Fan, Humidifier, or Scent Diffuser.

We know that sexual violence happens across all age, gender, racial, religious, socio-economic, and other spectrums.

This particular training is Native-focused sexual assault advocacy and names explicitly the impact of oppression and other root causes both historically and at present.

This can be triggering for a variety of reasons. Please wear comfortable clothing, eat & sleep well, use our Earth Medicines, (Water, Earth, Fire, Air) and take gentle care each day!

Talking about sexual violence is often very personal and can be difficult. We place high value on being tender-hearted and kind to one another!

Our days together are sacred, but still public! We will be recording each session to send out to participants each evening, so please be ever-conscious of respecting confidentiality.

You are welcome to join at 12:30p central for OPTIONAL casual check-ins/visiting. The Training will begin at 1pm Central, concluding no later than 4:30 Central. We will stay logged on after for an OPTIONAL debrief session.

We are a VERY large group! The Chat Box will be our main source of communication, but feel free to jump in with a comment or question!

Moderators will be taking care of the Zoom Chat. Every Zoom Chat will be saved and reviewed each night so that we can follow up as needed.

We encourage you to partake in beading, sewing, drawing, or other artforms during the sessions. Feel free to share with us as we go!

Please expect to participate in all 8 sessions to receive your Certificate of Completion.

Important Information:

Please contact us with any questions!

Cristine Davidson: [email protected] or text 612-849-4684

Lisa Iyotte: [email protected], or text or call 253-316-7502

Warmly,

The MIWSAC Team

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
FREE, Virtual, Native Focused 40-Hour Sexual Assault Advocacy Training

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
ASL interpretation provided See Full Agenda: HERE FREE Virtual Event via Zoom: 12:30p-4:30p Central, each Tuesday and Thursday, January 7-30, 2025 Log in Here each Tuesday and Thursday January 7-30, 2025 https://miwsac.co/ZoomLinkForAll8Sessions-Jan40-Hr The Training will begin at 1pm Central, concluding no later than 4:30 Central.

# data[].attributes.body
By : CAT-911

# data[].attributes.body
By Birthworkers of Color Collective https://www.birthworkersofcolor.com/abortiondoula

# data[].attributes.headline
Xinachtli Youth Rites of Passage Program

# data[].attributes.subject
Xinachtli Youth Rites of Passage Program

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Xinachtli (She-nash-tli) Blossoming Seed

The Xinachtli program and curriculum is a cultural and gender-specific rites of passage program developed by Sara Haskie-Mendoza. The curriculum recognizes the value of cultivating the capacity of those who are most impacted by systemic inequities as they are the closest to the solution. In doing so, Xinachtli supports interested Districts, communities and organizations to fill the significant gap in culturally competent services to families and communities of color.

Xinachtli facilitates the healing and community building for Chicana, Latinx, Indigenous cis and trans girls, femmes, and non binary youth while catalyzing intergenerational organizing power.
Methodology
The curriculum is based on the Mexica Dialectic Process whose foundation is on the sacred hoop and its four cardinal points. The curriculum process is cyclical in its implementation. As the young women are walked through the four learning cycles of Reflexión, Creación, Concientización, and Acción, the process is then repeated with each group addressing the same session and new session themes. The continued implementation of Xinachtli is designed to encourage facilitators to input their creativity so that they may develop a comfort and claim to the process and philosophy of Xinachtli.

The program was born in Highland Park, California. Sara, with the support from Christina Regalado at the California Wellness Foundation, began to write and to establish this program with a core group of 13 girls. Only after eleven years of implementing Xinachtli that it was decide to train the trainers and young adult women in the program with those working with youth.

Today there are over 700 Xinachtli facilitators working with youth in community, School Districts, CBO's, County Departments, including police and YAs.

Youth and facilitators now make up the Xinachtli Comadres National Colectiva.

Xinachtli Comadres National Colectiva (XCNC)

MISSION

XCNC is an extended kinship network centering girls, Fem(mes), and Gender expansive youth of color, vitalizing deep and lasting connections between Indigenous/Chicana/Latinx girls and their communities, to cultivate intergenerational, healing-informed leadership for community health and systems transformation through:

Indigenous values and rites of passage teachings for youth

Culturally rooted campaigns for prevention & health justice through girls' leadership, voices and agency in healing-informed strategies based on equity and social justice.

Critical femm building spaces for kinship and allyship building between Xinachtli facilitators and advisors through community exchanges, tools, technical assistance and healing retreats for youth and adult facilitators meaningful

Creative communications strategies for youth leaders to connect and transform harmful narratives, amplifying girls' voices while promoting social and emotional transformation
Call us at 818-400-3886 and follow us at @Xinachtligirls to know more about our network.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Xinachtli (She-nash-tli) Blossoming Seed The Xinachtli program and curriculum is a cultural and gender-specific rites of passage program developed by Sara Haskie-Mendoza. The curriculum recognizes the value of cultivating the capacity of those who are most impacted by systemic inequities as they are the closest to the solution.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Your Healing is Killing Me — Virginia Grise

# data[].attributes.headline
Inner Healing Paths Podcast: Dr. Patty on Healing Through Leadership, Social Justice, and Curanderismo

# data[].attributes.subject
Inner Healing Paths Podcast: Dr. Patty on Healing Through Leadership, Social Justice, and Curanderismo

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
On Healing Through Leadership, Social Justice and Curanderismo with Dr. Patty Ramirez

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Listen to this episode from Inner Healing Paths on Spotify. This episode is with Dr. Patricia Ramirez. She is the founder of KLBRI which is an organization that focuses on healing through traditional ancestral, cultural and social justice modalities.

# data[].attributes.headline
Kolor with KLBRI: A Healing- Centered Coloring Book for Leaders and Advocates

# data[].attributes.subject
Kolor with KLBRI: A Healing- Centered Coloring Book for Leaders and Advocates

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Amazon.com: Kolor with KLBRI: A Healing-Centered Coloring Book for Leaders & Advocates: 9798429155197: Institute, KLBRI, Neuenkirk, Arianna, Ramirez, Dr. Patricia, Palomares-Michael, Elizabeth, Tricoche, Vanessa, Mendez, Lisset: Books

# data[].attributes.body
Self- Care and Wellness Tools and Affirmation Candles

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Wild Luna Botanicals- where healing and brujita magic come together.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.authors[].name
Zahabiyah Yamasaki (Author), Evelyn Rosario Andry (Author)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Trauma-Informed Yoga for Survivors of Sexual Assault: Book and Card Deck Set

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Trauma-Informed Yoga for Survivors of Sexual Assault: Book and Card Deck Set [Yamasaki, Zahabiyah, Andry, Evelyn Rosario] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Trauma-Informed Yoga for Survivors of Sexual Assault: Book and Card Deck Set

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
About | Reclaiming Our Own Transcendence

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
through healing justice frameworks that embolden practitioners to integrate radical love and belonging in their homes, classrooms, communities, and beyond.

We envision a safe and equitable world where restorative interactions transform individuals, relationships, communities, and systems through the prevention, repair and deep healing of harm.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
through healing justice frameworks that embolden practitioners to integrate radical love and belonging in their homes, classrooms, communities, and beyond. We envision a safe and equitable world where restorative interactions transform individuals, relationships, communities, and systems through the prevention, repair and deep healing of harm.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Racial Healing Handbook: Practical Activities to Help You Challenge Privilege, Confront Systemic Racism, and Engage in Collective Healing

# data[].attributes.subject
The Racial Healing Handbook: Practical Activities to Help You Challenge Privilege, Confront Systemic Racism, and Engage in Collective Healing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Racial Healing Handbook: Practical Activities to Help You Challenge Privilege, Confront Systemic Racism, and Engage in Collective Healing

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Premier Online Bookstore for Bestselling and Classic African American Books.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Woman Who Glows in the Dark Introduction
In the Beginning
Chapter 1. Curanderismo: Health Care for the Body and Soul
Chapter 2. Doctora Corazón: The Training of a Curandera
Chapter 3. Tools and Ceremonies of a Curandera
Chapter 4. The Weeping Soul
Chapter 5. The Twisted Heart
Chapter 6. Apprenticeship: Student Teacher, Teacher Student
7. The Gods That Refused to Die: The Future of the Medicine of the People
Index

And go from well-read to best read with book recs, deals and more in your inbox every week.

And go from well-read to best read with book recs, deals and more in your inbox every week.

Become a Member

Start earning points for buying books! Just for joining you'll get personalized recommendations on your dashboard daily and features only for members.

Success!

Your account has been created. Upload book purchases, access your personalized book recommendations, and more from here. GOT IT

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Woman Who Glows in the Dark by Elena Avila, Joy Parker, Clarissa Pinkola Estes: 9781585420223 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Woman Who Glows in the Dark IntroductionIn the BeginningChapter 1. Curanderismo: Health Care for the Body and SoulChapter 2. Doctora Corazón: The Training of a CuranderaChapter 3. Tools and Ceremonies of a CuranderaChapter 4. The Weeping SoulChapter 5. The Twisted HeartChapter 6. Apprenticeship: Student Teacher, Teacher Student7.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma a book by Bessel Van Der Kolk

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
1 New York Times bestseller "Essential reading for anyone interested in understanding and treating traumatic stress and the scope of its impact on society." --Alexander McFarlane, Director of the Centre for Traumatic Stress Studies A pioneering researcher transforms our understanding of trauma and offers a bold new paradigm for healing in this New York Times bestseller Trauma is a fact of life.

# data[].attributes.headline
For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts

# data[].attributes.subject
For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The founder of Latina Rebels and a "Latinx Activist You Should Know"( Teen Vogue ) arms women of color with the tools and knowledge they need to find success on their own terms For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts , she offers wisdom and a liberating path forward for all women of color. She crafts powerful ways to address the challenges Brown girls face, from imposter syndrome to colorism. She empowers women to decolonize their worldview, and defy "universal" white narratives, by telling their own stories. Her book guides women of color toward a sense of pride and sisterhood and offers essential tools to energize a movement.

For generations, Brown girls have had to push against powerful forces of sexism, racism, and classism, often feeling alone in the struggle. By founding Latina Rebels, Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez has created a community to help women fight together. In

May it spark a fire within you.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts: A Love Letter to Women of Color

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For Brown Girls with Sharp Edges and Tender Hearts: A Love Letter to Women of Color - Kindle edition by Dorcas Mojica Rodríguez, Prisca. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets.

# data[].attributes.body
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/radio-cachimbona/id1240386895

# data[].attributes.body
https://open.spotify.com/show/5CwCOvW8nhOgCRTpvRy82t?si=f4c5c53b93ed4dae

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Listen to Healing Generations on Spotify. Healing Generations is a podcast that addresses the question of how we transform and heal generations of trauma and inequity in our society today.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Time is Now for Healing Justice Leadership by Dr. Patty Ramirez

# data[].attributes.subject
The Time is Now for Healing Justice Leadership by Dr. Patty Ramirez

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Photo by Kelly Lacy

A 2019 study around activist burnout revealed that approximately 72% of social justice and human rights leaders who identify as black, indigenous, people of color, report experiencing higher rates of chronic illness, mental health issues, and burnout as a result of physical, mental, and spiritual deprivation from race-based stress and trauma (Gorski & Erakat).

Social justice and human rights leaders are then told to practice self-care to cope with the impact of the trauma and stress they experience only to return to the work, organizations, and movements where trauma and oppression are often re-enacted.

This alarming statistic is exacerbated by the current political context of racial trauma, police brutality, unaccompanied minors, family separation, and mass incarceration which is threatening the sustainability of social justice leaders, organizations, and movements.

The current self-care trend paradigm of bubble baths, meditations, and yoga often fails to address the root cause of racial trauma and unrest that impact black, indigenous, people of color social justice leaders. In addition to this, nearly 81% of report barriers to using behavioral and mental health services that are culturally relevant ( Robinson, 2019).

Organizations encourage their social justice and human rights leaders to practice work-life balance and self-care to cope with the impact of the trauma and stress they experience only to return to the work, organizations, and movements where trauma and oppression are often re-enacted.

82% of racial justice leaders identified the behaviors and attitudes rooted in white supremacy and structural racism within racial and social justice spaces as a major source of their burnout (Gorski & Erakat, 2019). This study captured the detrimental impact of race-based stress. Social justice and human rights leaders experience retraumatization as a result of in-fighting, internalized oppression, implicit bias, interpersonal violence, and the fear and reality of state violence against black, indigenous, people of color has left many disillusioned.

Healing Justice offers a framework to transform, intervene and respond to intergenerational trauma and violence by uplifting cultural and spiritual healing pratices (Chavez-Diaz & Lee, 2015). It's not enough to practice self-care or to cope and tolerate the harm that they are experiencing. We need to take a good look at the conditions of our work, our organizations, and our movements and ask these questions:

1. Do my leadership and organizational practices embody anti-racism, collective healing, and community care?

2. Do I feel safe and supported in my work?

3. Do I have individual and collective healing systems in place?

4. Am I connecting to my cultural or ancestral healing practices?

If we shift how we lead, and anchor our leadership to our own individual healing, we can then change the ways in which we show up in our leadership, organizations, our communities, and our social justice movements. Dr. Patty Ramirez, DSW, MSW Sources: is a transnational social worker based in Los Angeles. She is a Healing Justice and Trauma Informed Consultant and earned her Doctorate of Social Work from USC's Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. Dr. Patty Ramirez is a founding member for the first-ever Los Angeles County Crime Victim Services Advisory Board and the founder of the Healing Justice Transformative Leadership Institute, committed to advancing collective healing, transformation, and liberation for black, indigenous, communities of color.
Chavez-Diaz, M., & Lee, N. (2015). A Conceptual Mapping of Healing Centered Youth Organizing: Building a Case for Healing Justice. Urban Peace Movement.

Ginwright, S. (2018). The Future of Healing: Shifting from Trauma Informed Care to Healing Centered Engagement. Kinship Carers. https://medium.com/@ginwright/the-future-of-healing-shifting-from-trauma-informed-care-to-healing-centered-engagement-634f557ce69c

Gorski, P., & Erakat, N. (2019). Racism, whiteness, and burnout in antiracism movements: How white racial justice activists elevate burnout in racial justice activists of color in the United States. Ethnicities, 19(5), 784-808.

Robinson, B. (2019, December 23). Thrive Global: Stories. Retrieved from Thrive Global Website: https://thriveglobal.com/stories/the-2019-rise-in-job-stress-and-burnout/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Time is Now for Healing Justice Leadership

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A 2019 study around activist burnout revealed that approximately 72% of social justice and human rights leaders who identify as black, indigenous, people of color, report experiencing higher rates of chronic illness, mental health issues, and burnout as a result of physical, mental, and spiritual deprivation from race-based stress and trauma (Gorski & Erakat).

# data[].attributes.headline
What Is Healing Justice? - Non Profit News | Nonprofit Quarterly

# data[].attributes.subject
What Is Healing Justice? - Non Profit News | Nonprofit Quarterly

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In public health, we often talk about "closing the gap in health inequities" in order to create conditions for optimal health for all. These discussions reflect a growing consensus that health is a human right, which sets the stage for a shared vision of health justice. They also mirror ongoing efforts to achieve racial equity by addressing structural racism and its attendant injustices, in the process expanding the health focus from the individual to the collective and society. These conversations and the work they inspire position the field of public health as a major actor in helping to protect, promote, and preserve our well-being.

Health is a state of physical, mental, and social well-being, not merely the absence of disease. It is a " dynamic state of well-being emergent from conducive interactions between individuals' potentials, life's demands, and social and environmental determinants." Although our collective health and well-being depend upon mutuality and our ability to heal, these critical concepts are often missing from public health discussions centered on addressing health inequities.

Focusing on mutualism and healing builds a shared understanding of our interdependence and our inherent capacity to heal. As we strive to create conditions in which everyone can thrive, we all must collectively heal from the trauma caused by structural racism and understand that our connections with one another are inextricable from our ability to improve our health. These efforts lead to new approaches that draw upon our shared strengths and shift us away from focusing on perceived deficits. As NPQ contributor Sara Horowitz notes, "mutualism is not about charity, it's about human beings' strengths-our powers, our magic ... mutualism calls on these to be in a reciprocal relationship."

What strategies will enable us to understand our interconnectedness, leverage our shared power, and heal from the trauma caused by structural racism?

A movement is underway to create spaces that allow for an exploration of practices to transform oppression-within our bodies, our communities, and the systems that perpetuate it. Even longtime freedom activist and scholar Angela Davis-who has more than 50 years of experience leading social justice movements-highlights such healing-based transformation in her work. Davis says, "Self-care and healing and attention to the body and the spiritual dimension-all of this is now a part of radical social justice struggles."

In part, this shift in the social justice struggles that Davis references is the emergence of healing justice, launched in 2007 by the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective (The Kindred Collective). Cara Page, one of the leading architects of healing justice, defines this work as one "that identifies how we can holistically respond to and intervene on intergenerational trauma and violence." This movement, which is quickly gaining momentum, draws upon the historic ways that communities have resisted systemic oppression and thrived.

The Kindred Collective states, "we do not seek to promote single healers as one model, nor models of healing as singular, nor to build individualized care; but to build mechanisms and systems that build collective wellness; transform generational trauma and violence; and build quality care that is accessible to all."

Thus, 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.

While healing justice initially developed in the Southeast region of the US, healing justice-centered approaches are evolving and being led by a growing network of global healers and change makers who seek to forge an accessible path to our collective wellbeing, both within communities of color and across cultures.

The Kindred Collective outlines a framework for healing justice which centers on four main values -some of which are absent from both traditional public health frameworks and approaches to advancing equity:

1) Our Collective Wisdom and Memory Enables Well-Being
"We value our collective wisdom and memory towards our collective well-being"
-The Kindred Collective

A major aspect of healing justice involves naming the historic and present-day violence and oppression imposed on communities of color by government and healthcare, criminal justice, education systems, and more. According to The Kindred Collective, healing justice work acknowledges that our collective well-being is "integrally connected" to "abusive experiences based on a legacy of trauma, control, and genocide of communities." This view uplifts the notion that individual and collective trauma are in fact linked.

Healing justice draws upon cultural wisdom that understands our individual health is dependent upon our collective well-being. Current research provides evidence that supports this understanding. Recent developments in epigenetic studies are now confirming that trauma is passed down through generations, which can shape quality of life and ultimately, life expectancy.

The longstanding history of oppression-in the form of anti-Blackness and structural racism-and its impact on our health is made visible through modalities such as community storytelling, accounts of visceral experiences, and decades of social and biomedical research. In Medical Apartheid, for example, author and medical ethicist Harriet Washington documents-in over 400 pages-stories of the multitude of traumas imposed on Black people in the name of science. One of these harrowing stories is that of Saartjie (pronounced "SART-kay," which means "little Sara" in Afrikaans) Baartman-famously known as Sarah Baartman.

As Washington recounts, at the age of twenty-one, under the guise of promised prosperity, Baartman was forced to "enter an arena where she would become an object of unbridled medical curiosity and physical lust." She was taken from her home by British surgeon Dr. William Dunlop and subject to years of anatomical scrutiny. "Men of science made pilgrimages to London's academic and medical settings to sketch, measure, and endlessly analyze" her body. After years of being subjected to rape and countless supposed medical examinations-actions justified, in the name of science, by racist ideology that permeates our medical system today -Baartman "died from an infectious illness at the age of twenty-seven."

After her death, her body was held captive by scientists and placed on public display in Paris' Musée de l'Homme until 1985. Baartman's story is one of many examples of the "medically exploitative display of Black people." Widespread systemic trauma such as this creates intergenerational ripple effects that are further compounded by present day oppression.

Racial inequities persist across all social systems, not just in healthcare, and they are driven by historic and present-day oppression and violence that rely for their justification and normalization on ideologies similar to those that normalized Baartman's subjugation. In response, healing justice honors "individual agency, and people's right to make decisions about their own bodies."

Healing justice sheds light on oppression and simultaneously uplifts the power of community to heal. "We see that health and healing can be achieved by returning to ancient [and] traditional healing and earth [and] nature-based modalities and creating new practices to respond to our political and social context." In our time, where so many systems are working to remove the autonomy and agency we have over our bodies as individuals, these practices are needed.

2) Wellness is Liberation

-The Kindred Collective

Healing justice values wellness as a path to liberation. The Kindred Collective notes, these efforts work to "sustain our individual and collective wellness as a response to transform generational violence and trauma." Healing justice addresses "racism and oppression as a public health issue and social illness that informs our physical, emotional, environmental, spiritual, and psychic well-being." It uplifts the strength and inherent capacity of communities to harness our own power and transform oppression through healing.

In this way, healing justice pushes the existing health justice and health equity frameworks beyond what is currently considered to fall within the rubric of health. It brings attention to the inequities-the systemic injustices-that shape social determinants of health, but it also goes deeper by focusing on the traumas that have resulted from historic, intergenerational oppressive social relationships and that impact individual and community health today.

Healing is restorative and essential to our well-being. When we create the conditions for healing-an intrinsic process-to occur and actively engage in our own healing, we harness our individual and collective strength to move beyond trauma. This work creates a path for the healing of both people and systems, fostering new ways of being. Healing justice offers a way for us to reimagine how we show up for each other and how current systems dictate communities' trajectories.

Artist and healer Londrelle notes, "The thoughts we feel create our reality. If our minds are rooted in fear, our vision becomes clouded, and it becomes difficult to see the abundance that surrounds us." When we allow ourselves to heal from fear caused by systemic oppression, we operate from a place of power and can shift our thinking from a scarcity mindset towards abundance, creating new possibilities for ourselves and our future generations.

3) Our Interdependence Is Essential

-The Kindred Collective

As noted by The Kindred Collective, healing justice values "dignity for all life" across all races and identities. This framework centers on an understanding "that the ways we live with and treat each other have direct impact on our wellness and collective well-being towards transforming our conditions." Our wellness is reliant upon our relationships with individuals, our communities, society, and all life within earth's ecosystem.

NPQ contributor, Shawn A. Ginwright, speaks to the need for this work in a recent article on healing-centered leadership:

The only path to reimagining the future is through healing our collective trauma and restoring a sense of possibility in our work. This can only happen when we foster a collective imagination that restores communal wisdom and sets a path toward more humane ways to show up in life.

Ginwright highlights a key aspect of healing justice-our individual healing enables a shift in how we relate to one another, co-create community, and transform systems.

The healing justice framework also values and is "conscious of the connection of our health to the environment and the healing of the earth." As climate change affects every country across the globe, keen attention to and a shared understanding of our interdependence is needed. In Design as Politics, Tony Fry notes, "No matter the differences of our circumstances as individuals, cultures, or nations, we now share a time that is new. We all share a continual moment of the diminishment of time. The actual finite time of our life on the planet (and the life of much else) is being reduced by our own destructive actions as a species."

4) Our Wellness Requires Honoring All Bodies
"We value all bodies and the conditions we live in"
-The Kindred Collective

The healing justice framework provides an opportunity to expand the ways that public health examines inequities. This country's systems are entrenched in structural racism and white supremacy, and this ideology shows up in how population health data is collected, analyzed, and utilized to develop interventions. Without an intentional effort, public health data approaches can perpetuate long-standing inequities rather than address them.

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) speaks to this issue by noting,

We use the category of race as a means of identifying and measuring disparities. However, race has no biological meaning; it is a social construct designed intentionally to relegate people and communities of color to second-class status and to privilege white people. It is the racism that accompanies [unfounded] racial hierarchy that has profound health consequences. The gaps and failures in our public health data systems today, in fact, stigmatize entire communities instead of doing what data can and should do: provide the roadmap and path toward systemic change.

At present, there is a tendency to compare outcomes for Black, Indigenous, and people of color to their white counterparts. Yet, in the absence of efforts to counter unfounded racial hierarchies, this approach can unintentionally uplift white supremacist ideology. The health outcomes of white people cannot serve as the gold standard that people of color strive to attain. Our ideal should be grounded in a vision of collective liberation, healing, and well-being.

Healing justice requires expansive thinking beyond limited notions of good versus bad health and honors all bodies. As noted by Adaku Utah, of Harriet's Apothecary, this framework is "informed and grounded by economic, racial, disability and reproductive justice movements."

Further, tracking and analyzing data through this demographic lens places the onus of health inequities on individuals and communities rather than addressing the social ills and systemic oppression that create these injustices.

A New Vision for Addressing Structural Racism

The US is residentially segregated by race. Public health studies show that life expectancy rates vary dramatically by neighborhood and, therefore, in conjunction with race. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, for example, has mapped life expectancy rates by neighborhood across the US. In some areas, there is a 30-year gap in life expectancy between neighborhoods that are positioned just a few short miles apart but have different racial makeups. Structural racism, not race, drives these stark differences.

Racism impacts everyone, inhibiting our ability to attain optimal health as a whole. Although structural racism traumatizes people of color most, studies show racial trauma also affects white people. Structural racism structures opportunity in ways that sap society's strength by wasting human resources. It is also arguably the most significant barrier to racial and health equity.

Recognizing the debilitating impacts of structural racism across systems, local jurisdictions across the country have galvanized to formally acknowledge racism as a public health crisis and create policies and practices that aim to transform the social determinants of health (SDOH), which influence how communities live, grow, work, and play. These determinants include housing, education, economic stability, neighborhood environments, social cohesion, healthcare, food security, water access, civic engagement, incarceration, and more.

In an October 2021 report, the American Public Health Association (APHA) revealed its analysis of 198 declarations and 38 accompanying strategic actions to promote health equity. The report details the growing movement within local government to finally acknowledge that structural racism is a threat to public health. Since 2018, APHA has tracked 250 declarations issued by high-ranking government officials and adopted by entities such as city/town councils, county boards, governors and mayors, education boards, public health associations, and public health departments. The number of these declarations increased at the height of the pandemic, as COVID shed light on longstanding injustices faced by Black and Indigenous people and people of color.

APHA's analysis revealed that nearly all the declarations include a commitment to some level of data collection, analysis, and reporting, with varied commitments to creating a taskforce to ensure accountability. More than a third of the declarations outline an obligation to forming and strengthening partnerships with community groups and organizations that are addressing racism, and almost half of those declarations include strategic action to promote an "equity in all policies" approach to future policy development along with a commitment to reviewing existing policies and programs through a racial equity lens. Leading with a racial equity lens enables examination of how policies impact people's experiences along racial lines, shaping opportunities, outcomes, and power.

While significant efforts are underway in local jurisdictions to address systemic racism as a public health crisis, strategies that foster community healing to address the harms caused by structural racism are not at the forefront of these efforts' strategic plans. This prompts the question: what if healing justice efforts served as a guidepost, as the foundation of a collective vision, for all government strategies to address structural racism?

What would our future look like if we all operated from a place of healing? Arguably, it would be a world where we value wellness as liberation, appreciate our interdependence, are in-tune with our inherent capacity to heal, honor the wisdom of all cultures and bodies, and are guided by a shared understanding that our collective health is inextricable from our relationship with the earth. Healing justice is critical for catalyzing the type of systems transformation that enables such as a vision to become reality.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What Is Healing Justice? - Non Profit News | Nonprofit Quarterly

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In public health, we often talk about "closing the gap in health inequities" in order to create conditions for optimal health for all. These discussions reflect a growing consensus that health is a human right, which sets the stage for a shared vision of health justice.

# data[].attributes.headline
Centering in Collective Healing in the Midst of White Supremacy

# data[].attributes.subject
Centering in Collective Healing in the Midst of White Supremacy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
I am angry.

I am appalled.

I am afraid.

I am numb.

I am disappointed.
I am not shocked.
The systems have been working exactly as they were intended to - many Black, Indigenous, folks of color are activated, traumatized, and triggered in the midst of the current political moment. Others are numb and desensitized because they have bared witness, yet again, to another act of white supremacy, rage, and violence. People are tired.

I have no words of comfort. I will not suggest that we calm down, attempt to cope, dismiss, or self-regulate away from numbness, triggers, anger, sadness, fear, or any other emotion or response you, the reader, are feeling. Any and all of these emotions that you may be experiencing hold wisdom. You do not have to change anything about you because there is nothing wrong with you.

I do, however, want to reflect how in the present moment we may feel restless and unsure of how to release or transmute the pain, the anger. These emotions and stress responses coupled with the historical racism and anti-blackness that are embedded in our current experiences - which have been transmitted intergenerationally - can keep us in a space of disembodiment. Some of us are functioning from a space of disembodiment and have been for a while.

The collective trauma we are experiencing can impact our ability to build health, wellness, equity, and collective power.

Healing from racial trauma and white supremacy is a longstanding vision for communities of color who are trying to survive within systems that were not built for them.

The collective trauma we are experiencing can impact our ability to build health, wellness, equity, and collective power.

A practice of "centering" can be helpful in supporting us as we sit with the emotions that are coming up. Sitting with and feeling our full spectrum of emotions is not a bad thing. However, it may keep us in a state of chronic stress which can affect us in many ways.

Centering as a practice is a "way to find balance within the chaos that might be surrounding us". Centering is an ancient visualization technique that is popular in Aikido - the Japanese defensive martial art of "spiritual harmony." It teaches you to focus on the here and now, taking power away from outside concerns and negative thoughts. Centering redirects negative energy in a beneficial way.

Centering in radical love and collective healing that is grounded in our ancestral and cultural healing practices allows us to come back home to ourselves and recognize the resources that are immediately accessible to us that can help replenish our mind, body, heart, and spirit.

You know yourself best and I encourage you to look at these suggestions, while honoring yourself, your intuition, and your existing practices.

Here are four strategies that I put together for the Healing Justice Transformative Leadership Institute to center yourself in the midst of collective trauma. This is meant to be a starting point.

You know yourself best and I encourage you to look at these suggestions, while honoring yourself, your intuition, and your existing practices.

Four Strategies to Centering in Collective Healing

MIND: Disconnect and unplug from social media and news outlets

...Even if it's just to reconnect with your breath.

It can be overwhelming to be exposed to images and videos of white supremist violence especially when it is clear that the response by law enforcement is significantly different. This may keep us in perpetual rage, and rightly so.

Sometimes when we are in a state of panic and trauma, we forget to do even the basic functions like breathing. We can feel like you can't breathe. I like to use the following box-breathing technique to ground me in my breath. After a few practices you can add visualizing the energy being expelled through your exhale.

● Inhale and stretch arms out for 4 counts
● Hold breath / stretch for 4 counts
● Exhale and release stretch in 4 counts
● Hold and rest for 4 counts
● Repeat 2 more times
BODY: Find a way to exert energy- move that body, dance, walk, run, push against a wall. HEART: Connect with people who are supportive, empathetic, and can allow you to safely process your emotions.
I cannot stress this enough, just move. If this is accessible to you, find a way to move the energy through your body. You can stretch, dance, walk briskly, run, push against a wall, do jumping jacks. Whatever feels safe and gets your heart rate going. When we move our bodies and allow ourselves to take up space, we are no longer shrinking or hiding. Practices that allow you to ground yourself in your body can provide centering You can even add a gratitude practice to your movement. You can add a statement of gratitude to communicate to your body for all it provides for example, "I got you," "thank you body for protecting me and helping me heal myself."

You are worthy of being supported. Collective healing and community care is an act of healing in community and leaning on one another. Therapists, energy healers, spiritual healing practitioners are often holding group healing circles, providing community chats, meditations, and other community and relational supportive spaces. If you do not have access to this, identify one or more people who you feel safe to reach out to.

Relationships can increase the opportunity to process your feelings, hold space for one another, or you can even create boundaries for one another if you do not want to talk about what is happening and instead want to send cute baby animals memes.

Honor yourself and communicate what you need and have capacity for. Consent is key, so it is a good practice to ask your supportive people if they have the energy to process.

SPIRIT: Create a space for you to connect to your ancestral and cultural medicine.

Traditional healing practices like Curanderismo teaches us that we are physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual beings ( Avila, 1999). Individual and collective trauma can result in what is referred to as susto (soul loss) which can lead us to feeling like we are not fully present or like our spirit has been violated. It may feel appropriate to reach out to traditional healers that can assist you and facilitate a supportive space for you to connect to your ancestral and cultural medicine. However, you do not need to go outside of yourself to start connecting with your medicine.

Tending to and healing our spirit may include activities that allow us to pour some warmth back into yourself. These activities may also help us heal our mind, body, and heart. Some activities can include connecting to the moon, engaging in tarot/ divination, reading, listening to music, engaging in art, sitting outside in the sun, connecting with water and nature. This may also include working with your favorite healing crystal, intention candles, making a comforting tea blend, taking a bath and using a bath soak with the intention to remove energy that is not serving you, meditation, and breathwork.

Prentis Hemphill shares that:

"to be centered in this moment - is not to ignore what's happening, or change the moment/make it different. To be centered in this moment it's to be present with what is - if we're afraid, concerned, allow it. This is not to eliminate uncomfortable feelings, but to be more choice-full"

Adrienne Maree Brown reminds us that:

"the white rage that is unfolding in D.C. is viral energy - inside of all this, it is likely not gonna stop anytime soon. This is a long piece of work, inside of that, remembering to center is helpful. We can center and be scared, we can center and be angry, we can center and be disappointed, we can center and be critical...There is something we are longing for - that we love and care about. We are shaping so much change, we have to stay centered in that, we are not done yet."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Centering in Collective Healing in the Midst of White Supremacy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I am angry. I am appalled. I am afraid. I am numb. I am disappointed. I am not shocked. The systems have been working exactly as they were intended to - many Black, Indigenous, folks of color are activated, traumatized, and triggered in the midst of the current political moment.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
KLBRI is a grassroots organization and fiscal project of Los Angeles Indigenous People's Alliance (LAIPA). KLBRI was founded by Dr. Patty Ramirez in response to the political context of unaccompanied minors, family separation, migrant caravans, racial trauma, police brutality, and mass incarceration. These along with a global health pandemic functioned as exacerbating factors on the impact of race-based stress that has fatigued black, indigenous, people of color social justice leaders threatening the sustainability of social justice organizations and movements.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
KLBRI | 133 followers on LinkedIn. KLBRI pronounced koh-lee-bree We envision a world where advocates thrive. | KLBRI is a grassroots organization and fiscal project of Los Angeles Indigenous People's Alliance (LAIPA). KLBRI was founded by Dr. Patty Ramirez in response to the political context of unaccompanied minors, family separation, migrant caravans, racial trauma, police brutality, and mass incarceration.

# data[].attributes.body
Follow us on Facebook

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Circles International - Resilience & Wellness for Social Justice

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Stop nonprofit burnout and sustain your work in social justice. Coaching, training and keynotes on resilience, organizational culture, equity and inclusion, and more.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Our Radical Healing process gets people off the path of the discouragement and onto the path of possibility and hope.

Radical Healing practices and principles restore hope, power, and possibilities in schools and youth serving organizations. Radical Healing builds relationships that improve organizational climate and support the well-being. We help youth-serving institutions incorporate powerful strategies and more effective policies to support young people by boosting their culture, agency, relationships, sense of meaning, and aspirations (CARMA).
WE TEACH PEOPLE TO:

1. Be more effective in building individual, collective, and organizational well-being.

2. Create approaches that improve young people's social emotional well-being.

3. Develop strategies that heal rather than harm young people.

4. Cultivate practices that improve school and organizational climate and racial equity.

5. Form networks for innovation and learning.

6. Adopt the right metrics to gauge progress toward well-being and equity.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Flourish Agenda | Creating Strategies That Allow Young People To Flourish!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Radical Healing practices and principles restore hope, power, and possibilities in schools and youth serving organizations. Radical Healing builds relationships that improve organizational climate and support the well-being. We help youth-serving institutions incorporate powerful strategies and more effective policies to support young people by boosting their culture, agency, relationships, sense of meaning, and aspirations (CARMA).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Our mission is to educate, train, and challenge Black and Latinx youth to become leaders in designing healthy and racially equitable communities. We're challenging the belief that only adults with titles (e.g. mayors, CEOs, etc.) have the power and right to challenge racial and health inequities. However, we're conscious that young leaders and adults alike must collectively design a world centered in equity.
Join us in building a movement of Redesigners for Justice!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Our mission is to educate, train, and challenge Black and Latinx youth to become leaders in designing healthy and racially equitable communities. We're challenging the belief that only adults with titles (e.g. mayors, CEOs, etc.) have the power and right to challenge racial and health inequities.

# data[].attributes.headline
Healing-Centered Leadership: A Path to Transformation

# data[].attributes.subject
Healing-Centered Leadership: A Path to Transformation

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Click here to download this article as it appears in the magazine, with accompanying artwork.
Editors' note: This article is from the Winter 2021 issue of the Nonprofit Quarterly, "We Thrive: Health for Justice, Justice for Health," and was adapted from The Four Pivots: Reimagining Justice, Reimagining Ourselves by Shawn A. Ginwright (North Atlantic Books, 2022).

The uncertainty in his voice was evident, even through Zoom. All the teachers in the meeting were frustrated by the lack of leadership and guidance regarding how they were supposed to teach and provide after-school programming in the midst of a pandemic. There just wasn't a blueprint for that.

Everyone could tell that the new Black superintendent was in over his head and didn't want anyone to know it, and was pretending that he had all the answers. The truth, of course, was that no one had the answers for how to support students and their families when schools had to close unexpectedly and for an unknown length of time. Some teachers expressed concern that the central office wasn't listening to their requests for guidance about how to teach virtually. A few teachers raised their voices in anger in response to the superintendent's inadequate comments, and others hurled insults at each other. The Zoom meeting was thick with tension, and nearly all thirty little square boxes neatly and clearly framed an angry face. The meeting itself, however, was anything but neat and clear.

You Can't Solve Deep Problems With Shallow Tools

All leaders at some point come face to face with moments like this-when the answers we need don't come easily, and the solutions can't be found neatly tucked away in leadership textbooks. For leaders of color, these leadership challenges are exacerbated by racism, intensified by inequality, and compounded by injustice. Inequality, in all its forms, doesn't only block opportunities; it also breeds distrust, skepticism, and fear. Researchers have studied this process among folks of color; they call it racial "weathering." ¹ The term refers to the ways that poverty and social, political, and economic exclusion create stress and insecurity and, over time, like paint on a house, weather away our health and clarity. This is precisely what was occurring during that Zoom meeting. These educational leaders were trying desperately to solve deep problems with shallow tools. Sometimes, in our efforts to change systems and improve communities, we simply don't have the right tools to name and heal from the wounds inflicted by racism, sexism, and uncertainty in our work.

Somewhere along the way, however, we have bought into the myth that grinding harder, creating the perfect strategy, or having a deeper analysis of our problems is enough to solve them. Grinding harder, creating the perfect strategy, or having a deeper analysis of our problems doesn't get at the deeper, more fundamental issues that plague our organizations and movements for justice. Trust, vision, wholeness, humane relationships, and hope are the tools required for deep change in our work. Yet these spaces do not exist in our work as we now know it. As a result, this absence has been the Achilles' heel of our efforts to transform our organizations in a deeper way. Transformational change requires that we explore a few myths about social change.

Four Myths About Social Change

Myth 1: Deep Change Can Be Achieved through Shallow Solutions

I've heard from policy-makers, educational leaders, social justice advocates, and community organizers that all that really matters in community change is that we remove the barriers to fairness. This is not to discount the efforts of folks who tirelessly work to reduce the structural impediments to equitable healthcare, employment, housing, jobs, and police accountability. These inequalities, to name just a few, are indeed barriers, and their removal is important in order to improve the quality of life for individuals and communities.

Yet, we must recognize that deep change cannot be achieved through shallow solutions. Our solutions rarely address the root of the problems we are trying to solve. Fear, scarcity, division, distrust, isolation-all are at the root of many of our organizational and social problems. Rather than trying to heal fear, scarcity, division, distrust, and isolation-which is a very hard thing to do-we choose to address the symptoms of these fundamental problems. We address racist policies but never address the xenophobic fear that created them. We respond to gender inequality but leave in place the toxic masculinity that created it.

When we focus on solving surface problems, it's like we are playing the game Whac-A-Mole, because it puts us in the position of having to respond to the next problem that shows up-and the next, and the next. For example, I understand why our communities have advocated for policies requiring police officers to wear body cameras. However, body cameras are just a surface solution to a deeper issue. Body cameras don't train police in antiracist behavior, and they fail to address racial fear and anxiety officers hold about Black people. Body cameras don't require police officers to unpack and reflect on their subconscious (and conscious) biases. Nor do they do away with the historic and current racism that lies at the root of policing in this country, which supports those biases. Deep change in policing and community safety will require us to rethink policing as we know it.

Myth 2: The More Power We Have, the More Change We Can Create

For years, I have worked with community organizations and young people, and have focused on building power. I learned that I had been thinking about power as a collective action attained by withholding labor, boycotting, or raising awareness about an issue in order to force some desired change. The one problem with this form of power building is that it doesn't address our collective trauma or our need for individual healing. Our definition of power is too narrowly defined and externally focused on activities that influence resources and policy. But power also comes from our capacity to heal our collective pain resulting from intergenerational trauma, present- day hopelessness, and persistent rage against injustice. This alternative form of power is an "inside job" that is cultivated when we speak our truth, fostered when we are vulnerable with one another, and strengthened when we take time to reflect on our relationships with others.

This myth about power is not one to be taken lightly. Consider how community organizing can lead to important structural policy-change wins yet is unable to account for the stress and emotional toll that it can have on individuals, families, and organizations. The power we gain from healing our relationships and restoring hope provides us with the deeper transformative changes we need.

Myth 3: We Can Strategize Solutions for Social Change

Most of us spend time creating really precise maps to vague and unclear destinations. The lie we tell ourselves is that if our strategies (or maps) are clear and precise, we can solve the problems of income inequality, climate change/environmental injustice, and structural racism. We focus on creating the perfect strategy (map), because we believe the myth that we can strategize solutions to achieve deep change. (By "strategizing solutions," I mean the mechanistic and technical application of data, information, and plans to solve intractable social problems.)

This myth showed up in my work with a division of a large city government that wanted me to support them in building equity into their systems and to design ways to train their workforce in healing-centered strategies. My team quickly learned that the city division viewed racial inequality and exposure to trauma in the city entirely through the lens of sophisticated population data: If X population has Y exposure to trauma, then the solution should involve higher doses of Z. They were searching for the perfect evidence-based strategy that they could plug into this equation. The issue (racial inequality and trauma exposure) was approached as a type of math problem, ignoring the nuances of human emotion and community resilience. Additionally, the levels of bureaucracy in the division had created a technical and mechanistic way of thinking about the issue: efficiency, order, redundancy, inputs, and outputs. The division's leaders were largely removed from the issue they wanted to solve, and they wanted my team to engineer a solution rather than work with the community to discover one.

Myth 4: "Us Versus Them" Is Concordant with Social Change

Oftentimes, we view social change as "us versus them"-and it's hard not to. Our history and our lives remind us every day which groups we belong to and which groups we don't. In fact, research shows that humans are wired for this. Anthropologists and primatologists have observed that "us versus them" exists in the natural world and has contributed to human survival.

But even though there is a natural human tendency to see the world as "us versus them," it's a myth when it comes to transformative social change. In fact, it's important to work against this tendency. "Us versus them" breeds "othering"-the process of labeling groups of people with negative attributes and then identifying with the positive attributes of one's own group. This process ultimately draws thick and hard boundaries around who is human and who is not. "Us versus them" thinking is precisely what created slavery, Jim Crow racism, the lynching of African Americans, the genocide of Native Americans. "Us versus them" is a deeply colonized way of thinking- it is the root of the white supremacy that created the conditions for dehumanization globally.

Capitalist culture has cultivated this way of thinking, and it can be seen in our work every day. Take, for instance, how foundations often view nonprofit organizations as "grantees," a term that centers power and enshrines the privilege of the donor. "Us versus them" thinking has shaped the ways that foundations conceptualize how change occurs, how we interact with community partners, and how we choose who gets funded and who doesn't.

Pivot To Healing-Centered Leadership

Our challenge is to let go of these myths and embrace a set of truths that can effectively guide our work and our lives. What does it take to heal a broken society? How do we begin to pivot toward values that build greater connection and meaning? The solutions to these challenges require a deeper shift in our values and in our ability to heal from the wounds of racism, sexism, and homophobia. This change will require a new form of leadership that is based in cultivating empathy, compassion, and connection. When we do this, we begin to heal ourselves and our communities. The bottom line is, when we let go of these myths, we begin to embrace a healing-centered form of leadership.

Our sector needs a fundamental shift in our values-a pivot in how we think, connect, act, and work. A pivot is a small change in direction from a single point where we are now. It means that through one small change in direction, over time we can get to where we want to be. A pivot is not a complete abandonment of what we know; rather, it braids together what we know with how we feel and who we wish to be. For example, in basketball, a pivot requires four interwoven and seamless steps. When a player has the ball, they pivot in order to advance the ball downcourt. This pivot requires that (1) they stop momentarily and reflect on what is happening; (2) they have awareness of the relationships of other players around them; (3) they maintain focus on the goal without distraction; and (4) they calmly and confidently flow into another direction. You don't see all of this, of course, because it happens in an instant. That's healing-centered leadership, and precisely what we need in times of deep uncertainty and trauma.

Healing-centered leadership acknowledges how we all have been harmed, and focuses on restoring relationships across differences. This means that healing-centered leaders practice empathy over blame, compassion over complacency, and curiosity over criticism. The only path to reimagining the future is through healing our collective trauma and restoring a sense of possibility in our work. This can only happen when we foster a collective imagination that restores communal wisdom and sets a path toward more humane ways to show up in life.

Specifically, healing-centered leadership is based on our ability to make four pivots. The first is a pivot from lens to mirror. Instead of viewing the world through a thick lens-that is, as analysts of social problems-we must view it as a mirror of ourselves. This involves the practice of self-reflection and exploration of who we are as individuals and how we contribute to the world we wish to create.

The second is a pivot from transactional to transformative relationships. Most of us have been trained to lead, teach, and work with others in highly technical ways. Transactional relationships are efficient, but insufficient for healing. Transformative relationships in our professional and personal lives cultivate deeper human connection through vulnerability, empathy, and listening.

The third is a pivot from problem fixing to possibility creating. Historical exclusion, scarcity mindset, and zero- sum thinking resulting from structural racism and inequality come with a psychic cost. Leaders often focus more on eliminating problems and not enough on creating possibilities.

The last is a pivot from hustle to flow -transforming our addiction to frenzy, which is one toxic result of our capitalist culture, into the calm awareness of how we create quality space and time for the things that matter most. We all know what it feels like to be addicted to frenzy. Our days are filled following the commands of our to-do lists. We are always busy, behind on pesky tasks, overcommitted, and in a rush to the next meeting or event. If we can admit it to ourselves, we know deep down that we get a great deal of satisfaction from this particular addiction. We say to ourselves, "If I'm busy, I'm important and I matter." However, like any addiction, this gratification obscures a core truth: that our addiction-in this case, to frenzy-gets in the way of our healing and well-being by keeping us forever focused on the "next thing."

Our Only Path Forward

We have an opportunity before us to transform and reimagine our work for social change. Our society sits directly between trauma and transformation-an old world and a new one. Our goal, as leaders who have dedicated our lives to improving our society, is to move boldly into a new world, leaving the trauma from the old world behind. But to do this, we will need new tools-new ways of thinking and relating to one another that heal us all.

Perhaps that is what the superintendent learned during that heated Zoom meeting with teachers and educational leaders. Without warning, he did something transformative. He lowered his head, closed his eyes, and paused in silence. He took a deep breath and exhaled-and when he raised his head, we could see that his eyes were watering, and we could feel that something important had shifted. He said, "The truth is . . . I don't know what to do! I'm sorry if I've been hiding that from you. The only thing I know for certain is that we have to work together as a team-no, no, not a team, but a family -in order to get to the other side of this." The superintendent's heartfelt confession created a shift for everyone almost immediately. Little red hearts began to pop up in those little square boxes, and the tone of the meeting became more humane-kind and contemplative. The meeting's mood transformed after that, as if his confession had cleared a path forward, removing the emotional clouds of confusion for everyone.

NOTE

Fathima Wakeel and Anuli Njoku, "Application of the Weathering Framework: Intersection of Racism, Stigma, and COVID-19 as a Stressful Life Event among African Americans," Healthcare 9, no. 2 (2021): 145.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Healing-Centered Leadership: A Path to Transformation - Non Profit News | Nonprofit Quarterly

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
What does it take to heal a broken society? How do we begin to pivot toward values that build greater connection and meaning? The solutions to these challenges require healing our collective trauma and restoring a sense of possibility in our work.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Flourish Agenda is proud to present The CARMA Chronicles. A podcast where we interview the world's leading Healing Centered practitioners. Listen to their stories, ideas and examples of how they are implementing Healing Centered principles in their communities. Enjoy!Visit us at: https://flourishagenda.com/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Flourish Agenda is proud to present The CARMA Chronicles. A podcast where we interview the world's leading Healing Centered practitioners. Listen to their stories, ideas and examples of how they are implementing Healing Centered principles in their communities. Enjoy!Visit us at: https://flourish...

# data[].attributes.headline
The Power of Self Care: A Bridge to Communal Care 

# data[].attributes.subject
The Power of Self Care: A Bridge to Communal Care 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Click here to download this article as it appears in the magazine, with accompanying artwork.
Editors' note: This article is from the Winter 2021 issue of the Nonprofit Quarterly, "We Thrive: Health for Justice, Justice for Health. "

In recent years, a growing uneasiness and an undercurrent of anxiety have emerged in the United States. Psychologists, therapists, social workers, and doctors across the medical spectrum agree that we are in the middle of a genuine national mental health crisis. A time like this can serve as an impetus for reclaiming self-care as a movement, which could have a profound and lasting impact on this country and the world. As the late beloved activist and writer Audre Lorde said, self-care is not "self-indulgent" but rather an act of "self-preservation." ¹

Self-care reaches beyond the individual. In Sanskrit, the term for self-actualization and individuation is samadhi, which means enlightenment or union with the divine. This word recognizes that we are more than just our individual selves: we are a sum of all the parts that surround us. Every life is of value, and we are all connected; when we recognize this, we can embark on the healing work that addresses the traumas of our culture.

Today, we are seeing calls for change and transformation of our world. We are seeing people rise up in their power to assert that their lives are important, valuable, and worth fighting for. We are also showing solidarity by giving our friends and loved ones messages of strength and support as they dismantle systems that are oppressive and archaic. By starting with the inner work, we address many of our root issues and work our way through them. If we all simultaneously commit to healing ourselves and healing our trauma, our own healing becomes a contribution to the health and wellness of our communities, our descendants, and the world.
Take a moment to imagine the power of a self-care movement-a wave of kind care connecting communities, healing our bodies and minds, sustaining our energy and momentum, and helping us all live healthier, happier, and more balanced lives.
Self-Care as a Movement

As a movement, self-care has a rich and radical history. ² It was born at the intersection of the women's liberation movement and the civil rights era-a time when courageous individuals and communities fighting relentless prejudice and discrimination created the first formalized communities of care, which allowed them to stand strong together in the face of seemingly impossible challenges and unspeakable treatment. In fact, a core piece of what civil rights activists were and continue to be fighting for can be seen as the basic human right to self-care-for when the government turns its back on its people, self-care literally becomes a matter of life and death. Often denied medical treatment at hospitals and healthcare centers in the past, and facing any number of dangers stemming from unequal and unjust treatment in the present, part of what people of color are fighting for is the freedom, time, money, and resources to care for themselves. In this exhausting battle, often the only support they find is with one another and within themselves. Thus, civil rights leaders made healthcare a priority. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, "Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health is the most shocking and the most inhuman." ³

What has been true for the civil rights movement has also been true for the women's liberation movement. Women across the board have viewed controlling their own health as a corrective to the failures of a white, patriarchal medical system to properly tend to their needs. Self-care, as described by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, an associate professor of history at the New School, in New York City, became "a claiming [of] autonomy over the body as a political act against institutional, technocratic, very racist, and sexist medicine." ⁴

In this age of the industrial wellness complex-an era of bath bombs, drop-in meditation studios, and self-help quick-tips lists-capitalism ignores that for populations most in need, self-care is neither frivolous nor easy. As a movement, self-care and communal care make the declaration that we don't just deserve to be alive, we have the right to live our best lives. Genuine self-care and communal care are long and hard paths. They require diving beneath the surface problems, which are just the symptoms of the deeper, more enduring traumas that all of us carry. What we need, and what this movement seeks, is-to use a concept coined by Ghanaian playwright and journalist Esther Armah- emotional justice. ⁵ Emotional justice can provide us with a steady undercurrent, like a river flowing beneath the exterior crust of the Earth, as we embark on dismantling and rebuilding social systems that don't work for us. Emotional justice depends upon our commitment to doing the inner work; it cannot exist without it.

This type of work can show up in different forms, like healing from an offense that was never recognized by the offender or by society, or having the courage to speak up for ourselves and write our own stories. Individual inner work is not enough to support a movement. In social and political movements, commitment to community care, which means our own and others' emotional justice, is a fundamental building block. What defines any movement- including the self-care movement-is people coming together with a shared purpose to create change that benefits everyone. Movements need people with skin in the game and the energy and desire to move the needle and drive change.

Standards of Self-Care

I define self-care as the practice of taking an active role in protecting one's own well-being, pursuing joy, and having the ability, tools, and/or resources to respond to periods of stress so that they don't result in imbalance and lead to a health crisis. Ultimately, every person should have access to the caregivers, transportation, treatment, and funds needed to properly address their health. Building a self-care movement-one that can support every other movement in turn-requires incorporating it into our communities and workplaces so that communities of care become part of our culture.

The slow adoption of self-care in our culture is in large part due to a lack of definition. Standards for self-care have never been clearly established. Creating a well-defined vision for self-care grounded in clear principles and standards is a good first step to take, because defining the standards and providing a clear road map for people to follow helps to legitimize the cause. It allows people to create plans, measure progress, and make changes based on realistic and achievable goals rooted in sustainability, which in this hyperproductive capitalist culture is rarely if ever prioritized.

In terms of movement work, exhausted leadership is poor leadership. The reward for productivity should not be the assignment of more work-whether for leaders, paid employees, or volunteers. Exhaustion leads to shorter attention spans, increased emotional volatility, and poor decision making. If movement leaders burn out, that will be replicated by others in our sphere of influence-coworkers, staff, volunteers, children, and so on.

Social transformation work begins with the self. Imagine advocacy work as a series of peaks and valleys. The peaks are where advocacy work happens, and the valleys are where we rest, celebrate, and reflect, gathering our strength to climb the mountain ahead. If we conduct our lives this way and model this workflow in our organizations, we can build resilience, make sure that we keep people engaged, and ensure that none of us falls victim to burnout.
The modern self-care movement can embody practices that avoid burnout rather than merely being a response to it. The movement must demand that individuals put their health and wellness first without feelings of guilt for doing so. If we all collectively share our plans for self-care, we declare boldly that our needs, our state of mind, our body, and our overall health matter. This gives others permission to invest in themselves and take the courageous step to acknowledge that they have needs, that their needs are important, and that those needs deserve to be met.
There are key reflective questions we can ask ourselves and those on our teams and in our communities at every turn and with every incremental step forward that can improve our actions and build momentum to climb the next peak. For example:

How does the quality of my leadership diminish due to lack of my own self-care?

Which habits negatively impact my self-care, and what new behaviors can I substitute for them?

Do I have a self-care plan in place to ensure I follow up on new behaviors, and have I shared this plan with others who will hold me accountable?

How will I track my progress along the way?

How can I best support others in their self-care endeavors?

Such questions will help us to integrate self-care with community care and social movements, paving the path forward to achieve balance among all three and to cease having to choose one over the other.

When we work on the self, we do not need to abandon the world. When we begin the process of care with ourselves, we begin the journey of working to heal our community and the world. It is my hope that we each show up, fractured or whole but always beautiful, with our unique talents and skills to create the world we envision. No action is too small, no voice too quiet, and no person too insignificant to make a change. May we realize that our investment in the inner work awakens awareness to something else, something radical and liberating: a possibility. We matter, our voices matter, our lives are precious, and we have many gifts to offer. When our inner work is deeply embodied in the collective life of those working for social transformation, this creates resilience within the group, so that when natural bumps or boulders in the journey arise we don't give up. Instead, we stay the course, adjust course, or shore up our reserves and capacity. We celebrate and introduce play, creativity, and lightness into our efforts. We remember the purpose, meaning, and inspiration behind what we're doing, and it supports us in moving forward.

***

My eldest uncle, a very pious man, would often share with me wisdom from the Old Testament and the Talmud (also known as the Oral Torah). One of the verses that he shared when I was barely thirteen has been a guidepost for my work: "Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly now, love mercy now, walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it." ⁶

Movements are not goals. There are no finish lines. Movements embody incremental gains that require consistent forward motion born out of actionable intentions. Creating sustainable movements requires widening our perspective of self-care-shifting it from a purely individual pursuit to one that embraces the entire community and uses the entire toolbox of best practices and resources. While self-care and communal care are movements in themselves, they also provide the primary infrastructure that supports every other movement, whether for equity, justice, peace, or freedom. In order to sustain forward movement-even if it's millimeter by painful millimeter at a time-the pillar of societal care must be championed.

NOTES

1. Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light: Essays (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1988),

2. See

3. Martin Luther King Jr., speech at the second convention of the Medical Committee for Human Rights, Chicago, March 25, 1966, quoted in John Dittmer, The Good Doctors: The Medical Committee for Human Rights and the Struggle for Social Justice in Health Care (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009).

4. Aisha Harris, "A History of Self-Care: From its radical roots to its yuppie-driven middle age to its election- inspired resurgence," Slate, April 5, 2017, slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2017/04/the_history_of

_self_care.html.

1. The Armah Institute of Emotional Justice, theaiej.com/about-aeij.

2. Originally attributed in the Pirkei Avot (Ethics of our Fathers) 2:16 to Rabbi Tarfon, and then repeated in the

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Power of Self-Care: A Bridge to Communal Care - Non Profit News | Nonprofit Quarterly

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We are in the middle of a national mental health crisis. A time like this can serve as a call to reclaim self-care and communal care as movements that require diving beneath the surface problems, which are just the symptoms of the deeper, more enduring traumas that we carry.

# data[].attributes.headline
Why Your Out-Breath is Connected to Your Well-Being - Mindful

# data[].attributes.subject
Why Your Out-Breath is Connected to Your Well-Being - Mindful

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Toward the end of a yoga class or during a guided meditation, it's likely you've heard some version of: "Let's take a few slow, deep breaths, allowing the body to relax as you gently exhale." These are simple instructions intended to slow down your heart rate. But what you may not realize is that these slow, deep breaths-and exhalations, in particular-are stimulating your vagus nerve, which signals to the body that it is in a state of calm. It can now rest and digest, tend and befriend.

In Latin, the word "vagus" means wandering, a fitting description for this meandering nerve that stretches from the brain stem down to the colon, connecting to the middle ear, vocal cords, heart, lungs, and intestines along the way. The longest and most complicated of the body's 12 cranial nerves-each connects the brain to other parts of the body-the vagus nerve plays many roles, affecting our emotional states, heart rate, inflammation levels, blood pressure, and digestion. It interacts with our autonomic nervous system (or ANS-a part of the nervous system that has three branches responsible for unconscious processes, such as digestion and breathing). In particular, it's an advocate for the parasympathetic nervous system-the branch of the ANS that stimulates the body to "rest and digest." The vagus nerve thus has a profound impact on our sense of safety and connection.

What's the Message?

"The vagus nerve is like the highway of information for the parasympathetic nervous system," says Dr. Brendan Kelley, professor and clinical vice-chair in the Department of Neurology at UT Southwestern Medical Center. The vagus nerve carries signals-neurotransmitters-between the emotional center of the brain and organs like the heart, lungs, and stomach. These signals instruct specific organs to respond and function accord- ing to three states: safe and social, fight and flight, or freeze and immobilize. As deep breaths slow your heart rate, for example, your vagus nerve recognizes the cues of safety and sends that information to parts of the body so they can turn off their defenses, such as those that arise from a sense of anxiety or threat.

"The brain is reading and regulating your body through this nerve," says Dr. Stephen Porges, a Distinguished University Scientist at Indiana University and creator of the polyvagal theory, an understanding of the nervous system and how the tone (that is, the activity) of the vagus nerve directly affects our well-being. "The body won't function optimally," he adds, "unless it picks up cues of safety."

Working with mind-body tools, especially the breath, helps to moderate the communication between the sympathetic (another branch of the ANS that stimulates the fight-or-flight response) and parasympathetic nervous systems. "The breath can be used as a gas pedal and as our brakes," says Arielle Schwartz, PhD, a clinical psychologist and certified yoga instructor. "If I'm feeling shut down and need more alertness, I can bring in some breath of fire; or if I'm feeling anxious and panicky and I want to tap the brakes, I'll emphasize long, slow exhales and deep belly breathing."

Safe and Social

In social interactions, we tend to focus on behavior-both ours and the person with whom we're interacting. But Porges' theory suggests that sociability is not only about voluntary behavior, but rather is rooted in neurobiology. The vagus nerve is involved in how we respond to people around us, notes Kelley, whether it's a loving, caring interaction, or one involving fear and anxiety. How the vagus nerve will respond-whether it activates or deactivates-comes down to what the particular situation calls for.

"When you get rid of the threat reaction, you become calm and more present. The body can then solve problems on a neurophysiological level."
Stephen Porges, Distinguished University Scientist, Indiana University

Porges offers the example of a mother's role to calm a child with a facial expression, a touch, a soothing voice-which activates the vagus nerve-and how the resulting state of calm allows the child's body to regulate, and if necessary, to heal. "When you get rid of the threat reaction, you become calm and more present," says Porges. "The body can then solve problems on a neurophysiological level, optimizing how the visceral organs function."
Sometimes, your vagus nerve needs to deactivate to allow you to access your threat (fight-or-flight) response. For example, hearing sounds such as a dog barking aggressively or a loud clap of thunder will cue the vagus nerve to deactivate, so you can react accordingly and protect yourself. "If we get anxious, we can't breathe correctly and we turn off the mechanism through which the vagus nerve will calm us down," says Porges.

This deactivating response can also arise m through nonthreatening and even enjoyable situations, Kelley explains. Picture players in a soccer game: When the body needs blood to run fast, it can't also direct resources to a task like digesting our last meal. According to Kelley, "The sympathetic nervous system really narrows our attention to focus on the matter at hand"-a side benefit of the fight-or-flight response.

A Signal for Compassion

In social settings, the vagus nerve encourages what Porges calls the "compassionate witness," a physiological state where a person is not throwing out cues of anger, threat, or hurt, but is there as a peaceful and supportive observer. "The co-regulation helps the nervous system of the person who's been hurt to feel safe enough without being defensive, to feel calm and validated," says Porges.

While further research is needed to illuminate how specific emotions relate to vagal tone, a 2015 paper published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that feeling compassion, "when encountering the suffering of others, leads to markedly greater vagal activity compared with neutral or other emotional states," according to the researchers. Four studies compared undergraduate participants' RSA (respiratory sinus arrhythmia, a common measure of cardiac vagal function) during different positive emotional states. Results showed the participants' RSA was greater while they were feeling compassionate than while they were experiencing either pride or inspiration.

Can You "Improve" Vagal Tone?

While the tone of the vagus nerve directly affects our well-being-specifically, our capacity to self-regulate and to connect with others-Kelley adds an important nuance: Although we can measure vagal tone, it's not a general indicator of how well a person manages stress. When we're relaxing, our vagal tone will naturally be higher; when we're active or under pressure, the nerve is not needed and effectively "shuts down." " Our ability to handle stress is tied up in our brain and emotional world. Vagal tone is just a reflection of that point in time," Kelley summarizes.

4 Ways to Calm Your Whole Body

1. Breathe deeply. Deep, slow breathing stimulates the vagus nerve and lowers the heart rate, and this can be amplified through the rhythmic rising and falling of the belly during abdominal breathing. Try making your exhalations longer than your inhalations.

2. Smile and be kind. The vagus nerve, Kelley says, is like a two-way street: "Emotions can affect vagal tone, but there is also communication coming back." Prosocial behaviors, such as being friendly, compassionate, and grateful, can strengthen vagal tone.

3. Gently massage your face and neck. "All the vagal pathways in the face relate to how we connect with others-our eyes, smile, voice," says Schwartz. Gently massage tender spots around the eyes, ears, jaw, and neck to stimulate the vagus nerve. If you try self-massage, take care-Kelly notes it may cause your blood pressure to drop, potentially making you pass out.

4. Laugh it out. A good laugh stimulates diaphragmatic breathing, activating the vagus nerve. You don't even have to wait for a good joke to get the benefits: A 2016 study found "simulated laughter" (going through the motion
of laughing, without a humorous cause for it) improved health outcomes among older adults.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Why Your Out-Breath is Connected to Your Well-Being - Mindful

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Toward the end of a yoga class or during a guided meditation, it's likely you've heard some version of: "Let's take a few slow, deep breaths, allowing the body to relax as you gently exhale." These are simple instructions intended to slow down your heart rate.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Future of Healing: Shifting From Trauma Informed Care to Healing Centered Engagement- Dr. Shawn Ginwright

# data[].attributes.subject
The Future of Healing: Shifting From Trauma Informed Care to Healing Centered Engagement- Dr. Shawn Ginwright

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Shawn Ginwright Ph.D.
From time to time, researchers, policy makers, philanthropy and practitioners all join together in a coordinated response to address the most pressing issues facing America's youth. I've been involved with this process for long enough to have participated in each of these roles. I recall during the early 1990s experts promoted the term "resiliency," which is the capacity to adapt, navigate and bounce back from adverse and challenging life experiences. Researchers and practitioners alike clamored over strategies to build more resilient youth.

In the early 2000's the term "youth development" gained currency and had a significant influence on youth development programs, and probably more importantly how we viewed young people. Youth development offered an important shift in focus from viewing youth as problems to be solved to community assets who simply required supports and opportunities for healthy development. Since that time, a range of approaches have influenced how we think about young people, and consequently our programmatic strategies. I have, for the most part, attempted to nudge and cajole each of these approaches to consider the unique ways in which race, identity and social marginalization influence the development of youth of color.

More recently, practitioners and policy stakeholders have recognized the impact of trauma on learning, and healthy development. In efforts to support young people who experience trauma, the term "trauma-informed care" has gained traction among schools, juvenile justice departments, mental health programs and youth development agencies around the country. Trauma informed care broadly refers to a set of principles that guide and direct how we view the impact of severe harm on young people's mental, physical, and emotional health. Trauma informed care encourages support and treatment to the whole person, rather than focusing on only treating individual symptoms or specific behaviors.

Trauma-informed care has become an important approach in schools and agencies that serve young people who have been exposed to trauma, and here's why. Some school leaders believe that the best way to address disruptive classroom behavior is through harsh discipline. These schools believe that discipline alone is sufficient to modify undesired classroom behavior, but research shows that school suspensions may further harm students who have been exposed to a traumatic event or experience (Bottiani et al., 2017). Rather than using discipline, a school that uses a trauma informed approach might offer therapy, or counseling to support the restoration of that student's well-being. The assumption is that the disruptive behavior is the symptom of a deeper harm, rather than willful defiance, or disrespect.

While trauma-informed care offers an important lens to support young people who have been harmed and emotionally injured, it also has its limitations. I first became aware of the limitations of the term "trauma-informed care" during a healing circle I was leading with a group of African American young men. All of them had experienced some form of trauma ranging from sexual abuse, violence, homelessness, abandonment or all of the above. During one of our sessions, I explained the impact of stress and trauma on brain development and how trauma can influence emotional health. As I was explaining, one of the young men in the group named Marcus abruptly stopped me and said, "I am more than what happened to me, I'm not just my trauma". I was puzzled at first, but it didn't take me long to really contemplate what he was saying.

The term "trauma informed care" didn't encompass the totality of his experience and focused only on his harm, injury and trauma. For Marcus, the term "trauma informed care" was akin to saying, you are the worst thing that ever happened to you. For me, I realized the term slipped into the murky water of deficit based, rather than asset driven strategies to support young people who have been harmed. Without careful consideration of the terms we use, we can create blind spots in our efforts to support young people.

While the term trauma informed care is important, it is incomplete. First, trauma informed care correctly highlights the specific needs for individual young people who have exposure to trauma. However, current formulations of trauma informed care presumes that the trauma is an individual experience, rather than a collective one. To illustrate this point, researchers have shown that children in high violence neighborhoods all display behavioral and psychological elements of trauma (Sinha & Rosenberg 2013). Similarly, populations that disproportionately suffer from disasters like Hurricane Katrina share a common experience that if viewed individually simply fails to capture how collective harm requires a different approach than an individual one.

Second, trauma-informed care requires that we treat trauma in people but provides very little insight into how we might address the root causes of trauma in neighborhoods, families, and schools. If trauma is collectively experienced, this means that we also have to consider the environmental context that caused the harm in the first place. By only treating the individual we only address part of the equation leaving the toxic systems, policies and practices neatly intact.

Third, the term trauma-informed care runs the risk of focusing on the treatment of pathology (trauma), rather than fostering the possibility (well-being). This is not an indictment on well-meaning therapists and social workers many of whom may have been trained in theories and techniques designed to simply reduce negative emotions and behavior (Seligman 2011). However, just like the absence of disease doesn't constitute health, nor the absence of violence constitute peace, the reduction pathology (anxiety, anger, fear, sadness, distrust, triggers) doesn't constitute well-being (hope, happiness, imagination, aspirations, trust). Everyone wants to be happy, not just have less misery. The emerging field of positive psychology offers insight into the limits of only "treating" symptoms and focuses on enhancing the conditions that contribute to well-being. Without more careful consideration, trauma informed approaches sometimes slip into rigid medical models of care that are steeped in treating the symptoms, rather than strengthening the roots of well-being.

What is needed is an approach that allows practitioners to approach trauma with a fresh lens that promotes a holistic view of healing from traumatic experiences and environments. One approach is called healing-centered, as opposed to trauma-informed. A healing centered approach is holistic involving culture, spirituality, civic action and collective healing. A healing-centered approach views trauma not simply as an individual isolated experience, but rather highlights the ways in which trauma and healing are experienced collectively. The term healing-centered engagement expands how we think about responses to trauma and offers more holistic approach to fostering well-being.

A shift from trauma informed care to healing centered engagement (HCE) is more than a semantic play with words, but rather a tectonic shift in how we view trauma, its causes and its intervention. HCE is strength based, advances a collective view of healing, and re-centers culture as a central feature in well-being. Researchers have pointed out the ways in which patients have redefined the terms used to describe their illnesses in ways that affirmed, humanized and dignified their condition. For example, in the early 1990s AIDS activists challenged the term "gay-related immune deficiency" because the term stigmatized gay men and failed to adequately capture the medical accuracy of the condition. In a similar way, the young men I worked with offered me a way to reframe trauma with language that humanized them, and holistically captured their life experiences.

A healing centered approach to addressing trauma requires a different question that moves beyond "what happened to you" to "what's right with you" and views those exposed to trauma as agents in the creation of their own well-being rather than victims of traumatic events. Healing centered engagement is akin to the South African term "Ubuntu" meaning that humanness is found through our interdependence, collective engagement and service to others. Additionally, healing centered engagement offers an asset driven approach aimed at the holistic restoration of young peoples' well-being. The healing centered approach comes from the idea that people are not harmed in a vacuum, and well-being comes from participating in transforming the root causes of the harm within institutions. Healing centered engagement also advances the move to "strengths-based' care and away from the deficit based mental health models that drives therapeutic interventions. There are four key elements of healing centered engagement that may at times overlap with current trauma informed practices but offers several key distinctions.

Communities, and individuals who experience trauma are agents in restoring their own well-being. This subtle shift suggests that healing from trauma is found in an awareness and actions that address the conditions that created the trauma in the first place. Researchers have found that well-being is a function of the control and power young people have in their schools and communities (Morsillo & Prilleltensky 2007; Prilleltensky & Prilleltensky 2006). These studies focus on concepts such as such as liberation, emancipation, oppression, and social justice among activist groups and suggests that building an awareness of justice and inequality, combined with social action such as protests, community organizing, and/or school walk-outs contribute to overall wellbeing, hopefulness, and optimism (Potts 2003; Prilleltensky 2003, 2008). This means that healing centered engagement views trauma and well-being as function of the environments where people live, work and play. When people advocate for policies and opportunities that address causes of trauma, such as lack of access to mental health, these activities contribute to a sense of purpose, power and control over life situations. All of these are ingredients necessary to restore well-being and healing.

The pathway to restoring well-being among young people who experience trauma can be found in culture and identity. Healing centered engagement uses culture as a way to ground young people in a solid sense of meaning, self-perception, and purpose. This process highlights the intersectional nature of identity and highlights the ways in which culture offers a shared experience, community and sense of belonging. Healing is experienced collectively, and is shaped by shared identity such as race, gender, or sexual orientation. Healing centered engagement is the result of building a healthy identity, and a sense of belonging. For youth of color, these forms of healing can be rooted in culture and serves as an anchor to connect young people to a shared racial and ethnic identity that is both historical grounded and contemporarily relevant. Healing centered engagement embraces a holistic view of well-being that includes spiritual domains of health. This goes beyond viewing healing only from the lens of mental health, and incorporates culturally grounded rituals, and activities to restore well-being (Martinez 2001). Some examples of healing centered engagement can be found in healing circles rooted in indigenous culture where young people share their stories about healing and learn about their connection to their ancestors and traditions, or drumming circles rooted in African cultural principles.

Healing centered engagement offers an important departure from solely viewing young people through the lens of harm and focuses on asset driven strategies that highlight possibilities for well-being. An asset driven strategy acknowledges that young people are much more than the worst thing that happened to them, and builds upon their experiences, knowledge, skills and curiosity as positive traits to be enhanced. While it is important to acknowledge trauma and its influence on young people's mental health, healing centered strategies move one step beyond by focusing on what we want to achieve, rather than merely treating emotional and behavioral symptoms of trauma. This is a salutogenic approach focusing on how to foster and sustain well-being. Based in positive psychology, healing centered engagement is based in collective strengths and possibility which offers a departure from conventional psychopathology which focuses on clinical treatment of illness.

Adult providers need healing too! Healing centered engagement requires that we consider how to support adult providers in sustaining their own healing and well-being. We cannot presume that adulthood is a final, "trauma-free" destination. Much of our training and practice is directed at young peoples' healing but rarely focuses on the healing that is required of adults to be an effective youth practitioner. Healing is an ongoing process that we all need, not just young people who experience trauma. The well-being of the adult youth worker is also a critical factor in supporting young peoples' well-being. While we are learning more about the causes and effects of secondary on adults, we know very little about the systems of support required to restore and sustain well-being for adults. Healing centered engagement has an explicit focus on restoring, and sustaining the adults who attempt to heal youth- a healing the healers approach. Policy stakeholders should consider how to build a systems that support adult youth worker's well-being. I have supported organizations in creating structures like sabbaticals for employees or creating incentives like continuing education units for deeper learning about well-being and healing.

Marcus's comments during our healing circle "I am more than what happened to me" led me to question our approach to trauma. What blind spots do we have in our approaches to supporting young people who experience trauma? How might the concepts which are enshrined in our language limit rather than create opportunities for healing? What approaches might offer "disruptive" techniques that saturate young people with opportunities for healing and well-being?

The fields of positive psychology and community psychology offers important insight into how policy makers, and youth development stakeholders can consider a range of healing centered options for young people. Shifting from trauma informed care or treatment to healing centered engagement requires youth development stakeholders to expand from a treatment-based model, which views trauma and harm as an isolated experience, to an engagement model which supports collective well-being. Here are a few notes to consider in building healing centered engagement.

Healing centered engagement begins by building empathy with young people who experience trauma. This process takes time, is an ongoing process and sometimes may feel like taking two steps forward, and three steps back. However, building empathy is critical to healing centered engagement. To create this empathy, I encourage adult staff to share their story first, and take an emotional risk by being more vulnerable, honest, and open to young people. This process creates an empathy exchange between the adult, and the young people which is the foundation for healing centered engagement (Payne 2013). This process also strengthens emotional literacy which allows youth to discuss the complexity of their feelings. Fostering empathy allows for young people to feel safe sharing their experiences and emotions. The process ultimately restores their sense of well-being because they have the power name and respond to their emotional states.

An important ingredient in healing centered engagement is the ability to acknowledge the harm and injury, but not be defined by it. Perhaps one of the greatest tools available to us is the ability to see beyond the condition, event or situation that caused the trauma in the first place. Research shows that the ability to dream and imagine is an important factor in fostering hopefulness, and optimism which both of which contributes to overall well-being (Snyder et al. 2003). Daily survival and ongoing crisis management in young people's lives can make it difficult for them to see beyond the present.

The greatest casualty of trauma is not only depression and emotional scares, but also the loss of the ability to dream and imagine another way of living. Howard Thurman pointed this out in his eloquent persistence that dreams matter. He commented, "As long as a man [woman] has a dream, he [she] cannot lose the significance of living" (p. 304). By creating activities and opportunities for young people to play, reimagine, design and envision their lives this process strengthens their future goal orientation (Snyder et al. 2003). These are practices of possibility that encourage young people to envision what they want to become, and who they want to be.

Healing and well-being are fundamentally political not clinical. This means that we have to consider the ways in which the policies and practice and political decisions harm young people. Healing in this context also means that young people develop an analysis of these practices and policies that facilitated the trauma in the first place. Without an analysis of these issues, young people often internalize, and blame themselves for lack of confidence. Critical reflection provides a lens by which to filter, examine, and consider analytical and spiritual responses to trauma. By spiritual, I mean the ability to draw upon the power of culture, rituals and faith in order to consistently act from a place of humility, and love. These are not cognitive processes, but rather ethical, moral and emotional aspects of healing centered engagement.

The other key component, is taking loving action, by collectively responding to political decisions and practices that can exacerbate trauma. By taking action, (e.g. school walkouts, organizing peace march, or promoting access to healthy foods) it builds a sense of power and control over their lives. Research has demonstrated that building this sense of power and control among traumatized groups is perhaps one of the most significant features in restoring holistic well-being.

I ran into Marcus at a street fair in Oakland not long ago. He was excited to see me and wanted to share with me that he was in a new relationship so he introduced me to his girlfriend. "This is my friend Michelle"! He introduced her with a sense of pride, and accomplishment. He also shared with me that he had enrolled in a program that was training him to become a medic. As we chatted for a while in the warm sun, dodging children, and fast walking parents, he leaned toward me and whispered, "yeah Dr. G, I'm not entirely healed, but I'm hopeful". I smiled, gave him a "brotha hug" and we departed ways.

I suppose, that if we had more time to chat he would have explained that healing is a process that we navigate for a lifetime. He might have shared with me that the future of his healing journey had just begun. Seeing him again, holding hands, sipping a soda with his new girlfriend was a powerful reminder, that he was so much more than the trauma he had experienced. As practitioners, researchers and policy stakeholders we need to listen and learn from young people who have insights that can advance how we think about trauma and healing. Shifting to healing centered engagement offered new questions, and strategies about how to support young people who experience trauma. Healing centered engagement is just a step toward a more holistic, and humanistic framework to support young people who have been harmed. Such an approach encourages us to think and act more boldly about how to restore young people and create places where they can truly flourish.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Future of Healing: Shifting From Trauma Informed Care to Healing Centered Engagement

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
From time to time, researchers, policy makers, philanthropy and practitioners all join together in a coordinated response to address the most pressing issues facing America's youth. I've been...

# data[].attributes.headline
Cultivating Organizations as Healing Spaces: A Typology for Responding to Suffering and Advancing Social Justice

# data[].attributes.subject
Cultivating Organizations as Healing Spaces: A Typology for Responding to Suffering and Advancing Social Justice

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Abstract

Historic inequities exacerbated by COVID-19 and spotlighted by social justice movements like Black Lives Matter have reinforced the necessity and urgency for societies and organizations to bring healing into focus. However, few integrated models exist within management and organization scholarship to guide practice. In response, our focus aims to unpack how organizations can become healing spaces. This paper offers a holistic definition of healing as the foundation for a new conceptual model of organizations as healing spaces. Drawing upon literature from clinical psychology, social psychology, and political science, we identify four perspectives that address healing in organizational contexts: (1) restorative justice, (2) posttraumatic growth, (3) relational cultural theory, and (4) dignity. These healing modalities represent prominent views of how healing can be achieved at the individual, dyadic, organizational, and societal levels. Synthesizing and building on these perspectives, we develop a typology that illustrates three ways organizations can function as healing spaces - Emergent, Endeavoring, and Exemplifying - representing a range of opportunities for how organizations can better respond to suffering. These spaces of healing are differentiated across seven dimensions, including source of harm, recipients of healing, facilitators of healing, focus of healing, length and strength of organizational attention, process of healing, and activators or enablers of healing. This research contributes to organizational healing research and to nascent social justice discussions in the management literature by exploring a range of opportunities for how organizations can better respond to suffering and substantively contribute to remedying harm from systematic bias against marginalized groups via healing.

Keywords: Organizational healing, Social justice, Harm, Suffering, Dignity, Healing

Healing is both an exercise and an understanding...

...To know healing is to know that all life is one.

- Excerpts from Margaret Torrie's The Intention

Taking stock of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, the imperative for recognizing and healing social injustice across every segment and through each layer of our global society is increasingly clear. A 2006 report by the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations frames social injustice as global and persistent, requiring collective responsibility along with comprehensive strategies and collaboration to redress. In support of the "universal aspiration for social justice" (p. 6), in 2008 the International Labour Organization (ILO) adopted its Declaration on Social Justice for a Fair Globalization for the purpose of accelerating the positive transformation of mutually beneficial economic and social development (ILO 2008). Despite the recognition of social justice as a necessary bedrock for realizing our best intentions and earnest commitments for a peaceful, flourishing, and sustainable society, enduring inequality and social strife continue to characterize the modern era.

In parallel, the for-profit enterprises in which we work continue to gain recognition and traction as increasingly influential actors and change agents in society (Drucker 1999). Recent analysis by researchers at the McKinsey Global Institute on twenty-first century companies highlights the critical questions today's firms face about "their responsibility for social well-being on a global as well as local scale" (Manyika and Tuin 2020). Such questions grow from accountability demands by stakeholders regarding organizations' responsibilities for social issues and their expectations of organizations for substantively addressing and remedying these (Porter and Kramer 2006). At the same time, a broadening public awareness of social injustice and resultant suffering - including systemic discrimination and institutionalized racism - highlights insufficiencies and gaps in dominant responses by organizations to societal inequality and inequity.

Importantly, the role organizations could - and we argue should - embrace for nurturing and stewarding social justice and healing beyond their own architectures and boundaries has remained largely unspecified. For example, while organizational justice focuses primarily on fairness of interactions and outcomes for individual actors (Colquitt et al. 2005) and workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts focus on social group composition and implications (Thomas and Ely 1996; Ely and Thomas 2020) in organizations, neither advances practices for how organizations can better or more proactively engage with social justice across levels and work toward healing individuals and collectives who have experienced injustice. Further, while the concept of corporate social justice (CSJ) reframes corporate social responsibility (CSR) to include stewardship of the interests of harmed or disadvantaged societal groups (Zheng 2020), it does not address healing directly. Overall, extant literature in the organizational field largely fails to account for systemic and holistic approaches in fostering effective organizational healing responses to social injustice. While the opportunity and urgency for organizations to harness resources and leverage influence in addressing social injustice is clear, the pathways for organizations to become conduits of healing in society has been less so.

In this research, we explore how organizations can become healing spaces, and, in particular, serve as stewards and agents of social justice. We develop a conceptually grounded framework to examine organizational healing practices. We define healing as a restorative, transformative process of repair or recovery resulting in positive change, finding meaning, and movement towards self-realization of wholeness and greater strength (Firth et al. 2015; Powley and Piderit 2008). We advance insights about the possibility and importance of cultivating organizations as healing spaces - places in which individuals, dyads, and groups are supported by elements that can be resourced to facilitate and nurture healing (DuBose et al. 2018; Sakallaris et al. 2015). The scope of this research includes for-profit enterprises, with anticipated application to a variety of organizational forms. In structuring this paper, we first provide an overview of social justice in organizing contexts, followed by a consideration of healing in relation to organizations. Next, we identify a set of healing modalities that draws on four perspectives - restorative justice, posttraumatic growth, relational cultural theory, and dignity - in supporting healing at the individual, dyadic, organizational, and societal levels. We synthesize learnings from each modality to highlight distinct capabilities and practices for organizations to consider and adopt in responding to and resolving issues of social justice. Finally, we propose a typology of organizations as healing spaces, elaborate how healing can be cultivated in and by organizations, and discuss implications and opportunities for future investigation and practice.

Justice & Organizing

The general concern of social justice is identifying and enacting what is fair, equitable, and right for members of society. While there is no widely agreed upon definition or interpretation of social justice (Kechen 2013), social justice is fundamentally about "justice among people" (United Nations 2006: 9), where justice refers to the quality of being fair and in conformity with what is morally upright or good (Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary 2021). Broadly, social justice can be understood as a concept that encompasses the premise of human equality and principle of fairness in the context of rights, opportunities, and treatment of people regardless of social category. Social justice is 'holistic' and 'systemic' (Miller 2017), involving adherence to the fair and equitable treatment of people and in relationship with sociopolitical institutions.

The seeds of Western social justice discourse have grown from ancient Greek considerations of justice, i.e., "to each their due," or, that people receive what they deserve, and, that how people are treated matters (Miller 2017). The modern-day language and conceptualization of social justice emerged out of the industrial revolution with philosophers' (e.g., Proudhon, 1809-1865) concerns over increasing economic disparity and ramifications for the human condition (c.f., Harbold 1969). Social justice considerations developed further and more formally following the Second World War (Tyler et al. 1997) as the social sciences of economics, psychology, and sociology grew and diverged both from each other and from the discipline and moral considerations of philosophy (United Nations 2006). Given its roots in income disparities, rights violations, and calls for reform associated with the rise of industrial organization (Ornstein 2017), mainstream management and organizational scholarship has directed substantial attention to understanding the consequences of experienced injustice by organizational members and the actions that organizations and their leaders can take to minimize the subjective injustices experienced by their members in the context of their work lives (e.g., Cropanzano and Ambrose 2015; Greenberg & Colquitt, 2005).

Robust streams of social justice literature exist in sociology, philosophy and political science, psychology, and education (c.f., respectively: Romero 2020; Barry 2005; Tyler et al. 1997; Mills and Ballantyne 2016), among other domains of modern scholarship. Notably, calls for social justice are typically informed and motivated by experiences and perceptions of its absence. Social injustice encompasses the structural or cultural perpetuation of inequity based on race, gender, sexual identity, age, physical ability, cognitive profile, or other instantiations that influence unfair treatment and the impoverishment of human rights and dignity. Contemporary social justice issues are complex, structurally and culturally embedded, and enduring (c.f., Hammack 2018). Social injustice ranges from common discriminatory treatment to human rights violations, and is entangled with and compounded by unequal access to economic, political, legal and educational resources including employment, healthcare, and housing among others. Addressing social injustice requires a comprehensive and holistic approach.

While the field of business and organizing - comprised of scholars, educators, practitioners, and extending to the broader ecosystem of stakeholders - has devoted decades of attention to understanding the subjective justice experiences of employees at work, less attention has been given to recognizing and remedying the deep, systemic inequities and injustices of modern society, including their pernicious roots in power, privilege, and prejudice. In their recent study of social justice attitudes and perceptions, Cartabuke et al. ( 2019: 606) assert: "There exists a need to enhance sensitivity toward social justice among firms, their managers, and employees and to reflect such sensitivity in policy and practice." Indeed, today's organizations are uniquely positioned and have a timely opportunity to advance the healing of social injustice across society.

Yet in the dominant literature streams of management and organizations, embracing opportunities for advancing a more socially just world, empowering social justice action and actors, and elevating the priority of social justice have lagged as explicit topics of research and discourse. In general, beyond a relatively narrow and largely philosophical band of consideration that has surfaced through the literature of business ethics (e.g., Murnion 1989; Samar 1999), as well as a concern for perceptions of justice in terms of employee-organization relations, i.e., organizational justice (e.g., Cropanzano and Rupp 2008, Greenberg & Colquitt 2013), a sharp and sustained focus on remedying issues of, damage from, or threats to social justice has been largely lacking in organizational scholarship to date. Importantly, considerations of social justice are not missing altogether in management scholarship; themes of fairness and equity are often implicit underlying concerns in this research. For example, social justice underlies research streams such as racial or gender representation and other considerations of diversity in work and organizations (e.g., Ashcraft 2013; Brush 1999; Nkomo et al. 2019), as well as the social responsibility of organizations (Matten and Moon 2008) and environmental sustainability (Shrivastava 1995).

Notably, central aspects of social justice are already being explored - though not consistently identified as such - in management research. For example, Greenbaum et al. ( 2020) emphasize the importance of employees' ability to voice - and by extension to enact - their moral concerns, and note associated implications for advancing social justice in organizations. Social entrepreneurship and social innovation scholars explore how individuals and organizations are remedying specific social justice challenges by offering products, services, and innovations in both traditional and novel manners (c.f., Bornstein 2007; Marquis 2020). The recently introduced concept of corporate social justice (CSJ) is positioned as a reframing of corporate social responsibility (CSR), with a focus on healthy and mutually beneficial relationships among corporations and disadvantaged or harmed stakeholders (Zheng 2020). We anticipate that emerging research connected with our collective recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic and associated disruptions will take more specific account of negative consequences experienced disproportionately by different social groups of employees. While these pockets of attention are encouraging, the growth opportunity for social justice research and application in organizational scholarship remains significant. Most considerations of social justice in the organizational literature focus on addressing problems that exist within the organization system as opposed to larger scale societal interactions, institutional reform, or systems transformation. In contrast, our research aims to advance a view of social justice as an actionable horizon that extends both within and beyond organizational boundaries in making an important and timely contribution to societal healing and transformation.

Healing and Organizations

Healing is a restorative, transformative process designed to return an organism back to health from an unbalanced, damaged or unervated condition while also strengthening the organism. In contrast to a definitive end state in which a condition is considered "cured", healing represents an ongoing journey with many possible routes (DuBose et al. 2018). Inspired by healing as a biological process, management scholars have begun to explore the process of organizational healing. According to Powley and Piderit ( 2008: 137), organizational healing involves immediate repair and subsequent strengthening; that is, "it involves movement away from a wounded state toward a condition of strength" in preparation for long-term organizational recovery. In the same vein, Sisodia and Gelb ( 2019) explored multiple organizations devoted to healing and concluded that organizational healing represents an organizational quest to alleviate suffering and elevate joy.

Initial work on organizational healing focused on organizations' capacity to recover from crisis or trauma imposed on an organization by external shocks. For example, Powley and Piderit ( 2008) explored the process of organizational healing after a shooting incident in a Midwestern university. Likewise, Powley ( 2013) studied the processes by which the Prudential Real Estate company was able to heal after the housing market crashed in 2008 through its commitment to repairing practices, routines, and structures and to strengthening organizational functioning through social relationships. Both cases of healing involved repairing and mending the collective social fabric of an organization after a crisis caused by an external unexpected jolt.

An additional stream of research has explored organizational healing in the face of trauma caused by internal sources within an organization. In contrast to contexts of external jolts that are often outside of organizational control, this scholarship considers trauma that unfolds within organizational boundaries and is often incurred by organizational leadership, culture and/or practices that enable harm, wrongdoing, incivility, or discrimination. For example, Clark ( 2012) studied bullying and incivility exhibited toward minority nurses and other health professionals in nursing schools, hospitals, and private practices to unpack how healing from such experiences can be brought to life in these organizational contexts. Porath and Pearson ( 2012) examined the emotional and behavioral response to incivility at work and called attention to the role of organizations in developing greater awareness about the harmful effects of fear and sadness caused by incivility in the workplace. De Maria ( 2010) studied how organizations attempt to recover from scandals after public exposure and identified three different types of responses (e.g., 'redemptive', 'tread water' and 'rogue') that organizations adopt.

This body of work uncovers several critical assumptions. First, in contrast to resilience, coping, or recovery that represent positive adjustment processes designed to maintain a previous equilibrium state (Luthar et al. 2000) or to return to normalcy (Bonanno 2004; Lilius 2012) in the face of adversity, healing represents the development of organizational strength in excess of what previously existed. Second, recent organizational research reveals healing as a quest (Sisodia and Gelb 2019) that reflects an ongoing organizational commitment to healing rather than an end state. This depiction of healing work is important as it turns our attention to the continual learning involved in healing and the social architecture that can awaken ongoing healing processes (Worline and Dutton 2017). Third, while most organizational healing research focuses on healing in response to harm experienced within the organizational boundaries, recent work on organizational healing has begun to explore the role of organizations in healing outside the boundaries of organizations. This approach positions businesses as a place of healing for employees and their families, a source of healing for customers, communities, and ecosystems, and a force of healing in society (Sisodia and Gelb 2019). This research redefines for whom organizations are responsible and how organizations might contribute across the broader spectrum of societal healing. Next, we turn to discuss healing modalities and illuminate practices at the heart of healing.

Healing Modalities

Crafting organizations as healing spaces requires organizations to develop distinct capabilities and practices. To identify practices that can facilitate healing in and by organizations we spotlight insights from clinical psychology, social psychology, and conflict resolution research that can help unpack opportunities and steps for shaping organizations as healing spaces. More specifically, we draw on four perspectives that address healing in organizational contexts: (1) restorative justice, (2) posttraumatic growth, (3) relational cultural theory, and (4) dignity - all of which represent prominent perspectives exploring how healing can be pursued at the individual, dyadic, organizational, and societal levels. Below we offer brief summaries of these perspectives and associated practices for healing. We use integrated insights gleaned from these approaches as a foundation for the typology we propose in the subsequent section of the paper.

Restorative Justice

Restorative justice emerged in the 1970s in response to critiques that the Western legal approach to crime fails both victims and perpetrators (e.g., Braithwaite 1999; Zehr 1990, 2002). Specifically, the restorative justice approach seeks not merely to punish wrongdoers, but also to provide opportunities for victims to describe their experiences and shape the punishment, and for offenders to take responsibility for their actions and their consequences on victims and the community (Zehr 2002). Thus, beyond addressing an offense and paired consequence, the restorative justice approach focuses on "healing and reintegration for all" parties to a justice violation (Goodstein & Aquino 2010: 625). This perspective tends to prioritize processual interactions in parallel with the goal of comprehensive healing outcomes.

The restorative justice approach requires active participation of victims, offenders, and the community in devising a healing response to the harm (Goodstein and Aquino 2010). In a restorative justice conference, victims and harm-doers, along with friends, family, and other community members, meet face-to-face and engage in supported dialogic communication (Borton and Paul 2015; Zehr 2009). In dialogic communication, parties discuss the present and past behavior and experiences, as well as their future goals, using a series of practices including listening, storytelling, perspective-taking, and emotion sharing (Black 2008; Umbreit et al. 2007; Zehr 2002).

Central to the effectiveness of this model is reintegrative shaming, in which victims and the community can express their disapproval of the offender's actions while communicating their respect for and forgiveness of the offender (Braithwaite 2002). Furthermore, offenders are expected to accept responsibility and apologize for their transgressions, thereby restoring their own dignity and allowing them to reconnect with their community (Tyler 2006).

Successful restorative justice processes can heal all parties: victims, offenders, and the community "through both material and symbolic restitution, rebuilding the self-respect of offenders, and integrating them back into the community" (Goodstein and Aquino 2010: 625; Braithwaite 2002; Wenzel et al. 2008). Restorative justice provides psychological benefits to victims and offenders in the form of greater empowerment (Armour and Umbreit 2006; Braithwaite 2002; Morris 2002) and psychological growth (Borton and Paul 2015). Victims also report less fear, desire for revenge, and posttraumatic stress (Sherman et al. 2015). Restorative justice also can repair the relationship between the offender and victim and the offender and community (Fehr and Gelfand 2012). Finally, restorative justice heals the community by reducing recidivism and ongoing cycles of harm (Sherman et al. 2015) and by reaffirming important social values (e.g., Block 2009; Wenzel et al. 2008).

Posttraumatic Growth

Posttraumatic growth is a psychological theory that illuminates a trauma-based account of growth from "shattered assumptions" (Tedeschi and Calhoun 2004). Posttraumatic growth refers to a transformative positive change that can follow an adverse event (Linley and Joseph 2004; Maitlis 2011). This perspective frames healing as an outcome (e.g., Calhoun & Tedeschi 2006; Janoff-Bulman 2006) or a process (e.g., Affleck and Tennen 1996; Nolen-Hoeksema and Davis 2004). Healing, according to this perspective, centers around meaning making or reframing processes involving change in (a) perceptions of self, (b) relationships with others, and (c) philosophy of life designed to derive strength from setbacks.

Most of the posttraumatic growth literature focuses on healing an individual. This line of research proposes that individuals can be traumatized by intense negative and unexpected events (Janoff-Bulman 1992; Linley and Joseph 2004; Tedeschi and Calhoun 2004) that can shatter one's assumptive world (Maitlis 2011) or shift an individual's meaning systems (Park 2010). According to the posttraumatic growth perspective, healing unfolds through meaning making processes designed to rebuild one's foundational assumptions or beliefs about the world (Maitlis 2011). A central part of process models of posttraumatic growth is the notion of accommodation. Tedeschi and Calhoun's ( 1995, 2004) functional-descriptive model suggests healing can occur when survivors accommodate their trauma. This involves survivors moving from trying to explain what has happened to them to establishing whether and how they can deal with it, and ultimately to making sense of the trauma while acknowledging its positive meaning and future possibilities. Likewise, Joseph and Linley's ( 2005) organismic valuing model proposes that healing comes as survivors revise their schemas to accommodate (e.g., "sometimes bad things happen to good people") rather than assimilate (e.g., "bad things happen to bad people") the trauma into their existing models of the world and self.

The literature on posttraumatic growth highlights two mechanisms that can enable healing of individuals: disclosure and social support. First, Tedeschi and Calhoun ( 1995, 2004) emphasize the importance of disclosing thoughts and feelings to others as a critical mechanism of posttraumatic growth and healing. The intentional sharing of one's own current or past traumatic experiences to either seek help or share one's personal history with trusted others have been found to positively relate to growth and recovery (Frey and Fulginiti 2017; Frey et al. 2020). Second, although growth and healing are achieved by individuals who reframe the way they think about themselves, their relationships with others, and the world, others also play a critical role in this process. According to this perspective, supportive interactions with others are essential for growth and healing (Tedeschi and Calhoun 2004). Social support can help individuals develop positive accommodations of their trauma and change the meaning survivors accord to their lives and relationships to acknowledge unique possibilities and strength (Linley and Joseph 2004). In contrast, social contexts that are not supportive can lead to negative accommodations and feelings of helplessness by survivors.

Posttraumatic growth also points to practices that can support organizational healing processes (Powley 2013; Powley and Piderit 2008). Healing, at the organizational level, involves repair and strengthening work designed to help organizations recover from a local crisis and expand organizational ability to withstand future crises (Kalfas 2001; Schilling 1968). This line of research proposes that healing processes involve three sequential phases: protective inflammation, relational proliferation, and remodeling (Powley 2013; Powley and Piderit 2008). Protective inflammation represents an activation phase in which resources are mobilized to the wound site to stabilize the trauma, mitigate potential harm, and prepare the wound site for future growth. This entails actions taken by organizational leaders and members who deploy social, organizational, and material resources to stabilize organizational performance and protect against potential threats. At this stage, organizational leaders and members who feel called to deal with the organizational crisis aim to generate an organizational-wide positive energy to support crisis response and to secure the collective well-being of organizational members. This attempt to restore group efficacy is achieved by substantive actions (e.g., invoking policies and procedures to prevent further loss) and symbolic actions (e.g., reinforcing the organization's vision and culture).

Whereas protective inflammation is designed to mobilize resources to tend to the local wound, the relational proliferation that follows is designed to propel growth and strengthening of the organizational tissue. This entails organizational members identifying, building, and strengthening key internal and external relationships that support the overall organizational recovery. Relational proliferation is achieved through positive relationships and high-quality connections (Dutton and Heaphy 2003) and social support (Fazio and Fazio 2005) in which organizational members come together to form bonds and connect emotionally (Mooney 2009), strengthen ties, and foster cohesion between organization members. As inflammation ebbs and the network of supportive relationships grows, organizations are ushered toward the last phase of healing, termed remodeling. Remodeling involves not only returning to the previous organizational state and function but also generating additional core strength that protects the organization against future potential harm (Mitchell 1996; Powley 2013; Powley and Piderit 2008). This phase entails organizational members strengthening family-like bonds and initiating ceremonies and rituals that create a sense of closure and renewal (Powley and Piderit 2008). As in physiological healing, optimal healing occurs through successive stages and may be compromised if the order of steps is changed or if phases are omitted. Thus, this perspective posits that organizational healing will be achieved only when all three phases are completed.

Researchers exploring the mechanisms underlying the organizational ability to heal from external crises propose four mechanisms enabling organizational healing, including empathy, healing interventions, collective effort, and leadership (Powley 2013). Empathy refers to individuals' ability to understand another's point of view and emotionally relate to others' experiences (Batson et al. 1996). Empathy seeds and nurtures positive relationships with others in the organization that plays a central role in relational proliferation. Healing interventions pertain to the deployment of internal resources and access to external support that can help protect against fear and intimidation, stimulate social processes, and enable growth and rebuilding (Powley 2013). Internal interventions often include actions that rebuild social connection after external disruption. External support may include networked stakeholders coming to the organization's aid, client engagement meetings, or newly recruited leadership marshalled to reinforce the organizational attempt to recover from the crisis at hand. Collective effort captures the extent to which organizational members strongly identify with the organization, its mission, and vision, which in turn translates to collective effort to resume and reinforce organizational processes that further strengthen the organization. Collective efforts are especially critical during relational proliferation and remodeling phases of organizational healing as such efforts help maintain order as organization members act together to reproduce necessary organizational structures and routines. Leadership also plays a critical role in enabling organizational healing. During the protective inflammation stage, leaders offer clarity about their intention and direction of the organization in crisis, prioritizing needs, deploying resources, and inspiring a positive vision. During the relational proliferation phase, leaders seed and promote a positive energy network of internal and external stakeholders in an effort to build trust and mobilize a wide range of individuals to join this cause. Finally, during remodeling leaders create opportunities to strengthen the organizational culture and enhance the sense of purpose and meaning of those involved.

Relational Cultural Theory

Relational cultural theory (RCT) originally emerged as a feminist theory that aligns with multicultural movements in psychology and embraces many aspects of social justice. RCT (Miller 1976; Jordan et al. 1991; Miller and Stiver 1997) unpacks the conditions that bring about healing and sheds light on microprocesses of social interactions embedded in the larger societal contexts of gender and power dynamics that are at the heart of healing processes. In contrast to Western models of adult development that envision growth as a process of becoming increasingly proficient at separating and individuating oneself from others as one moves from dependence to independence, RCT proposes that growth and healing happen when we are in connection with others (Miller 1976; Miller and Stiver 1997; Surrey 1985). RCT recasts the goal of relationships by suggesting that connection with others does not hold us back from growth or healing; rather, positive relationships usher individuals toward increased competence in enacting both members' self-in-relation and increased ability to operate effectively in a context of interdependence (Fletcher and Ragins 2007).

Importantly, RCT does not suggest that all relationships are positive. This perspective is often utilized in response to experiences of disconnections and disrupted relationships, and illuminates relational qualities at the heart of a healing connection (Miller and Stiver 1997). According to RCT, healing connections are characterized by mutuality, in which the boundary between one's self and one's partner is fluid and multidirectional (Fletcher and Ragins 2007). This process involves two individuals moving first toward mutual authenticity (bringing one's authentic self to the interaction), then to mutual empathy (whereby one can hold onto one's self but also emotionally relate to the experience of the other's reality), and finally to mutual empowerment (whereby each person is in some way influenced or affected by the other, so that something new is created) (Jordan 1997; Jordan et al. 1991). A second relational quality of healing connections stems from the power dynamic evident in such relationships. In contrast to hierarchical, top-down relationships in which one individual has power over the other, the power dynamic experienced in healing connections reflects power with others, enabling both parties to meaningfully shape the relationship and co-participate in the growth and healing processes (Kabadayi et al. 2019). According to RCT, a key condition for healing connection is that participants approach the interaction expecting to grow and be changed by it, and feel a responsibility and desire to contribute to the growth and healing of the other. More specifically, relational cultural scholars point to the importance of relational skills such as empathy, listening, and emotional competence as essential building blocks to enable healing in connection (Fletcher 1999).

Dignity

The first three dignity elements can be understood as setting the groundwork for co-creating a space in which reconciliation and healing can occur. Acceptance of identity ensures actors that they are viewed and will be treated as equals, and that who they are at their core is accepted and may be fully expressed. Inclusion invites and embraces a sense of belonging in the relationship. Safety is essential for putting actors at ease physically and psychologically so they can communicate freely and without fear. The next four elements are activated through dialog, listening, and behavior in the process of healing dignity violations. Acknowledgement entails full attention, validation, and responsiveness to actors' concerns and experiences. Recognition involves appreciation and gratitude for efforts and contributions in the reconciliation process. Fairness upholds standards of law or rules, justice, and equality, and protects against discrimination and injustice. Benefit of the doubt establishes the premise of trustworthiness, good motives, and integrity among actors. Understanding encourages sharing, explaining, openness to, and deep listening toward all points of view. The last two elements encourage agency and responsibility-taking by actors. Independence supports a sense of hope and possibility based on actors' experience of control over their own well-being. Accountability demands that actors hold themselves and each other responsible for incurring and rectifying injury.

For reconciliation within this dignity framework, healing occurs when all parties take a key action and simultaneously support three fundamental human needs. The first step is "public acknowledgment - no reconciliation and healing are possible without acknowledging the lived experiences and truth as experienced by both sides" (Hicks 2011: 188). Support for this process entails that all involved recognize the need for safety and nurturing by cultivating an environment in which parties can share their past experiences. To address the need for control, programs should strive to give back power to parties. Finally, with these two conditions leaders can encourage authentic and vulnerable sharing to foster reconciliation (Hicks 2011: 190).

This acknowledgement process and the ten essential elements of dignity highlight the role of empathy, also identified by the RCT and restorative justice. In addition, vulnerability and humanizing others and self are seen as critical components of the healing process. The pathway to healing from the lens of dignity is reconciliation to honor each other's inherent self-worth.

Integrated Insights

Each of these modalities of healing described above share important parallels. Table 1 compares and contrasts these perspectives that we use as a foundation for our theorizing.

Table 1

Dimensions

Restorative justice

Posttraumatic growth

Relational cultural theory

Reconciliation via Dignity

Definition of healing

Victim's harm and needs are acknowledged and met; harm doer takes responsibility and is reintegrated into the community; relationship repair

Reframing trauma as a possibility and source of strength

Interdependence in connection

Facing the truth of all parties and acknowledging the inherent worthiness of all involved

Target/breadth (Who): Recipients of healing

Dyadic (may include larger context, e.g., community)

Individuals or organizations

Dyadic, interaction level

Nations or organizations

Approach (How): Process of healing

Dialogic conversation including listening, storytelling, perspective-taking, and emotion sharing

Individual healing, change in:

* Perceptions of self

* Publicly acknowledge harm done

* Cultivate safe and nurturing environment in which parties can share their lived experiences

* Cultivate programs that give back power to parties involved

* Encourage authentic and vulnerable sharing of lived experiences and histories that imprinted parties' behaviors

* Relationships with others

* Philosophy of life via disclosure and social support.

Organizational healing, 3 phases:

* Protective inflammation

* Relational proliferation

* Remodeling

Empathic listening coupled with mindful responses that build on deep sense of connection

Outcomes

* Material and symbolic restitution

* Relationship repair rebuilding the self-respect of offenders

* Zest

* Reconciliation

* Healing

* Increased self-worth

* Empowered action

* Increased sense of worth

* New knowledge

* Desire for more connection

* Re-integration of offenders back into the community and reconnection of victims and harmdoers to the community

* Victims and harmdoers empowerment

* Victim and harmdoer psychological growth

* Healing of the community by promoting and reaffirming important values

* Growth of traumatized entity

Key references

Goodstein and Aquino 2010; Tyler 2006; Zehr 2002

Maitlis 2012; Powley 2012; Powley and Piderit 2008

Fletcher and Ragins 2007; Miller 1976; ; Miller and Stiver 1997

Hicks 2011;Hicks 2016; Hicks 2018

All the healing modalities we review acknowledge healing as a social and relational process that requires authentic and mutual involvement in collective efforts toward restoration and renewal. Broadly, these healing modalities involve restoration of well-being, which is applicable at micro-, macro-, and blended levels of analysis, and recognizes both mending and safe-keeping of self as well as restoration, growth, and strengthening of relationships. Healing processes include active participation by those who have experienced injury or injustice and by those who have caused harm or suffering - and often by both together. Vulnerability is central in healing, including the willingness to share experiences of pain and trauma, as well as the ability to listen to, accept, and understand accounts shared by others. Empathy, in terms of activating compassionate understanding and the ability to relate to oneself and others, is another central capability across practices of healing.

These modalities highlight the importance of surfacing, engaging, and validating multiple perspectives of injury, pain, or trauma in processes of healing. Acknowledgement of harm, along with recognition of how the injury or injustice has been created or reproduced (whether intentionally or unintentionally), are critical foundations for healing. In addition, these modalities suggest that dedicated roles can help to facilitate healing, including the involvement of leaders or facilitators who are tasked with and trained to steward healthy progress. Finally, healing may be understood as restorative for all (not just for victims), and as enabling the possibility for deeper connections and more generative relationships across contexts.

Organizations as Healing Spaces Typology

Our observation is that contemporary organizations - and increasingly for-profit enterprises - are being called upon to cultivate healing spaces. In this section of the paper we build and extend extant literature on healing reviewed above and argue that the cultivation of healing within and by organizations can be categorized into three qualitatively different responses. The typology we propose illuminates these three spaces of healing - emergent, endeavoring, and exemplifying. Each healing space may be characterized and differentiated across several dimensions, including: source of harm as prompt for healing, recipients and agents of healing, focus of healing, duration and intensity of healing, and processes and practices of healing in and of organizations. See Table 2 . These sets of healing responses are neither comprehensive nor exclusively discrete, but instead provide a broad framework for understanding generalized roles, reasons, and resources for organizational leaders and members to be better equipped to foster healing capacities and cultivate organizations as healing spaces.

Table 2

Dimensions

Emergent Healing Spaces

Endeavoring Healing Spaces

Exemplifying Healing Spaces

Prompt (Why): Source of harm

Shock

Scandal

Systemic Historic and Societal Issues

(external & internal)

E.g., BLM, #metoo

(internal)

E.g., sexual misconduct, financial misconduct, child labor

(external)

E.g., 9/11, tsunami, hate crimes, COVID-19

(internal/external)

Target/breadth (Who): Recipients of healing

Individuals

Groups

Organizational Systems

E.g., structures and processes; internal and external stakeholders

E.g., impacted "victims" and social identity groups

E.g., employees in acute need

Agents (Who): Facilitators of healing

Primarily Expert Consultants & Leaders

Expert

Expert Consultants & Leaders

+

Organizational Members

+

External Stakeholders

Consultants & Leaders

+

Organizational Members

Diagnosis (What): Focus of healing

Tending to local wound

Tending + Identifying how local wound occurred

Tending + Identifying + Reviewing system vulnerabilities and healing capacity

Duration & intensity (When): Length and strength of organizational attention

Temporary /

Short- or Medium-term /

Long-term /

ongoing

intermittent

immediate

Approach (How): Process of healing

Reactive

Investigative

Proactive Introspection &

Reconciliation

Responsiveness

Realization

Fundamental practices (How): Activators and enablers of healing

Empathy

Empathy

Empathy

Mutuality of vulnerability

Bearing witness to harm

Dignity recognition of those enduring injustice

Recognizing harm

Acknowledgement of organizational responsibility

Symbolic, substantive & comprehensive action

Organizational system inquiry & transformation

(examining, unlearning & redesigning)

Crusader leadership

(awakening other organizations to healing role)

Mutuality of power in connection

Public recognition of accountability

Symbolic, substantive & responsive action

High quality connections

Symbolic, substantive & reactive action

Emergent Healing Space - Healing Approach to Localized Harm Caused by External Jolt Outside of the Organization's Control

In emergent spaces of healing, organizations focus on recovering from external shocks, typically from a one-off event such as a natural disaster (earthquake, tsunami, or similar events) or human disaster (terrorism, war or other human-driven catastrophes), representing extreme jolts outside of an organization's control (e.g., Powley and Piderit 2008; Powley 2012). In such crisis situations, it is typically leaders and other experts, governmental or otherwise, who dictate the healing response with swift decision-making and policy-setting in reaction to the event. This approach often represents a reactive realization paired with responses targeted internally and focused on the immediate local "wound," such as relief efforts for employees directly impacted by an external crisis, including resources such as time off, supplies, and financial support. This organizational healing space may extend beyond the organization's structural boundary in terms of the provision of relevant services, donations, and expertise to alleviate suffering and help strengthen local communities.

For example, H-E-B, a privately held grocery retailer based in San Antonio, has a long history of dealing with natural disasters within its service region. When Hurricane Harvey presented a challenge of unprecedented magnitude, many H-E-B employees were displaced by the extreme weather incident and could not get to work. H-E-B deployed helicopters to fly truck drivers in from San Antonio, so they could move delivery trucks out of the yard to rescue displaced employees (Sisodia and Gelb 2019). Moreover, in its effort to support H-E-B employees and to serve local communities under the most duress, H-E-B activated its network and called for volunteers to assist understaffed stores. In turn, more than 2000 community partners from Austin, San Antonio, the Rio Grande Valley, and other locations answered the company's call for help (Sisodia and Gelb 2019).

In this emergent healing space, the need for quick action and unilateral decisions is dominant. Organizational attention tends to be immediate and temporary in response to external shocks causing harm to organizational members and their immediate communities. Healing occurs through empathy (Hicks 2011; Powley 2013) for experienced misfortune and through collective efforts (Powley 2013) to mobilize monetary and relational resources to address the local, emerging needs often championed by organizational leaders (Powley 2012). Importantly, some organizational responses in the emergent space may consist of symbolic action, such as internal or public statements expressing support, or the amplification of relevant organizational vision and culture (Powley and Piderit 2008). However, healing may not occur unless symbolic action is coupled with substantive action (Powley and Piderit 2008), which privileges policies, procedures, and the mobilization of resources to address local needs of those directly harmed.

Scholars examining how organizations recover from external unforeseen crises outside of their control (e.g., local fire; Dutton et al. 2006) emphasize the importance of relational proliferation. This notion captures the capacity of organizational members to cultivate high quality connections within the organization that help to rapidly expand support networks that can be resourced for responding to local needs (Powley and Piderit 2008; Dutton et al. 2006). Importantly, such healing efforts not only offer relief to the immediate needs of organizational members, but also sharpen organizational capacity to address future unforeseen external jolts impacting others within the organization (Dutton et al. 2006) and expand the organizational capability to recover from such strains in the future (Powley 2013; Powley and Piderit 2008). It is worth noting that some organizational members might question support actions due to the sentiment that these roles and functions are best served by the public and not private sector organizations, what some behavioral ethicists term "denial of responsibility" (Anand et al. 2004).

Endeavoring Healing Space - Healing Approach to Localized Harm Created by Organizations or Their Members

Endeavoring spaces of healing encompass an organizational commitment to working toward typically localized healing from harm caused by sources within the organization's boundaries and control. In contrast to the emerging space, where organizations notice and react to harm caused by external jolts, in an endeavoring healing space organizations demonstrate growing awareness of harm caused by organizational members and other internal stakeholders within the organization's control and responsibility (e.g., sexual harassment; discriminatory practices; unethical decision-making; problems precipitated by operations, products, or services). This space is characterized by organizational efforts to notice and respond to harm that exists and occurs within the organization, including suffering resulting from psychological, physical, or ethical violations perpetrated by organizational members.

Similar to the emerging space, in the endeavoring space organizations also respond to acute symptoms of harm and focus healing efforts on recovery from experienced suffering. Beyond the largely reactive response that characterizes healing in the emerging space, the process of healing in the endeavoring space typically includes a focus on investigation to identify how harm occurs as well as what course of action is needed to remedy associated suffering and address evident organizational causes. In this space, healing is typically initiated when a visible tipping point is reached, such as when a report is filed, a petition is registered formally, or an incident is publicized. Importantly, this space of healing is facilitated by a sense of physical and psychological safety (c.f., Edmondson 2018) that reinforces transparent and honest reporting as well as freedom from fear of retribution (Hicks 2011) that victims or whistleblowers frequently negotiate in illuminating situations of suffering.

In an endeavoring space of healing, recipients of healing are individual organizational members (i.e., "victims") and/or potentially those social identity groups most directly impacted by the violation (i.e., Asian employees in the case of anti-Asian aggression and hate speech). Healing is enabled when all parties involved (victims and transgressors, organizational leaders, and organizational members, including Human Resource professionals and Diversity, Equity & Inclusion [DEI] officers) take an active part in the process of remediating the situation so that power is shared in a way that enables mutuality (i.e., every party is welcomed and encouraged to participate in this process, albeit in different forms [c.f., Miller and Stiver 1997; Hicks 2011]). If the chasm between victims and transgressors is too great to bridge with internal resources, external experts and consultants, employees advocates or stewards, and other DEI specialists may be called upon to facilitate and cultivate a safe space in which empathic listening is practiced and dialogic communication is enabled (Tyler 2006).

A central activator in an endeavoring space of healing pertains to the organizational recognition of the harm and public acknowledgement of organization's accountability (Hicks 2011; Tyler 2006). This often entails public apology, coupled with symbolic as well as substantive action to repair damage and meaningfully address the causes of harm. For example, a 2020 campaign supported by over 1500 Cass Business School students and staff members called the attention of their institution, City, University of London, to the harm caused by commemorating Sir John Cass. Cass was a major figure in the early development of the slave trade and the Atlantic slave economy, and a historical symbol of racist and inhumane actions and the institutionalization of racism.1 In response, the Business School acknowledged the harm caused by designating this name for the business school and publicly committed to changing its name in an effort to reject an organizational identity associated with the slave trade.

In an effort to address student and staff concerns, the institution launched a comprehensive inquiry and consultation process with stakeholders, and invited the university community to suggest alternative names for the business school. Over 8000 participants - including staff, current and prospective business school students, and alumni - participated in this process. Approximately 150 new names were proposed for the business school; Thomas Bayes emerged as the leading choice. Bayes (1702-1761), a nonconformist theologian and mathematician, is best known for Bayes' theorem, which proposes that we get closer to the truth by constantly updating our beliefs in proportion to the weight of new evidence. City sources2 indicated that it is this idea - not only the person - that served as the motivation behind adopting the new name for the business school, Bayes Business School. As this example illustrates, the university demonstrated openness to bear witness to suffering experienced by stakeholders in association with historical institutional connections to slavery and racism, publicly acknowledged harm and complicity in perpetuating suffering through controversial naming conventions, proactively involved multiple stakeholders, and generated responsive symbolic action (e.g., renaming the business school, implemented September 20213) in an initial effort to propel future substantive action in cultivating further healing.

Another example of what could be characterized as an endeavoring space of healing in and by organizations involves the issue of child labor across global supply chains. Firms spanning fashion and apparel, cosmetics, manufacturing, consumer goods, and food and beverage industries have become more attuned to social issues related to the illegal employment of children, largely in response to public scrutiny and regulatory pressure. For example, in 2007, the apparel manufacturer and retailer Gap became embroiled in a scandal involving an Indian supplier's violation of child labor laws and Gap's stated operating standards. When these exploitative working conditions were exposed, the company responded by immediately acknowledging its supplier's wrongdoing and accepting responsibility in working to address and rectify the situation for each child involved in the incident and throughout its operations more broadly. Gap announced a package of measures to tighten its "commitment to eradicating the exploitation of children in the manufacture of its goods," including paying back wages, providing educational expenses, and offering employment at legal age to the children involved (c.f., Gentleman 2007).

In an effort to overcome and rectify harm to the child laborers exploited by the supplier, symbolic action included the Gap president's statement about the absolute unacceptability of child labor. This was followed by reports of substantive action, including: launching a full investigation; providing remuneration, education, and future job opportunities to the 14 children directly impacted; and, levying contract penalties in parallel with tightened operational oversight of the exploitative supplier. In addition, the company reportedly provided a significant grant to support work on improving working conditions in India, and initiated an international conference to focus on solutions for issues related to child labor. While an endeavoring space is not characterized as fundamentally holistic or systemic in its approach to or resources of healing, it does represent a space of important organizational effort and intention to meaningfully acknowledge and recognize suffering and injustice caused by or with the operating scope of the organization, to accept responsibility for overcoming such harm, and to address and remedy injury or injustice that is understood to lie within the direct and even indirect control of the organization. Importantly, in the endeavoring space a lack of substantive action toward taking responsibility and correcting mistakes made by an organization can stifle healing. In this space, perceptions that an organization's commitment to addressing harm is limited, lacks integrity, or is inauthentic (c.f., Maak 2008; Dare 2016; Steckler 2012, 2014) can derail healing.

Exemplifying Healing Space - Holistic Healing Approach Within and Comprehensively Beyond Organizational Boundaries

Exemplifying spaces of healing stand at the cutting-edge of the holistic, systemic healing potential of organizations. These spaces span private, public, and nongovernmental sectors, and are characterized by organizations actively working to address the broadest scope of healing of systemic harms endured by individuals and social groups both within and outside the boundaries of the organization. This healing space entails organization-wide attention to systemic historic and cultural issues, and the demonstration of deep engagement with resultant internal and external injustice and pain. The exemplifying space is characterized by organizational commitment to proactively address injustice as an integral part of the way organizations perceive their role in society. Whereas processes of healing are characterized in the emerging space as reactive to external shocks and in the endeavoring space as responsive to acute local wounds occurring within the organization's generalized scope of control, the exemplifying space reflects a proactive, comprehensive, and holistic approach toward healing by organizations.

This approach to holistic healing calls organizations to engage in introspection, including reviewing the systems and vulnerabilities that create and reproduce inequity, and challenging and reinventing organizational systems as paths toward healing. Organizations that function as exemplifying healing spaces activate healing by embracing the importance of vulnerability and adopting a beginner's mindset, akin to the notion of innocence and curiosity, in attempting to fully account for and understand multiple points of views among those impacted by societal injustices. Such organizations carve spaces for individuals to deeply bear witness to suffering by being fully present and to approach problems with humility, rather than prior assumptions, suspending any denial, rationalization, or opinion about another's experience of suffering. This kind of engagement with suffering affords the opportunity to approach a deeper familiarity with the lived experiences of suffering. This in turn seeds empathy toward those affected by societal injustices, and mobilizes organizational members to recognize harm endured by and act to restore the dignity of marginalized people.

While some of these elements are also demonstrated in emergent and endeavoring spaces, an important differentiator of an exemplifying space is that healing stems from the nature of actions undertaken by organizations. We propose that organizations embracing an exemplifying space of healing are characterized by their commitment to comprehensive inquiry to examine, unlearn, update, and redesign organizational practices, policies, and organizational roles that privilege healing as a primary organizational contribution. This enables organizational members to notice injustice within and outside the organization, acknowledge the organizational role and responsibility in healing what is broken in our society, take substantive actions to dismantle organizational structures, functions, and procedures that recreate, reinforce, and reproduce injustice, and invite diverse voices to contribute and co-create inclusive organizational systems that aim to cultivate and enhance justice and equity.

An example of an exemplifying space of healing is Greyston Bakery, a for-profit organization known as champion and advocate for Open Hiring. Greyston aims to lower unnecessary barriers of employment and to enable individuals who may be perceived by others as unemployable (e.g., previously incarcerated members of society) a chance at social mobility (Pirson and Livne-Tarandach 2020). Greyston's mission is human-centric - rather than hire individuals to bake brownies, the bakery aims to bake brownies to hire individuals. In doing so, Greyston cultivates an inclusive economy that innovates and expands rather than limits employment opportunities afforded to talented individuals who have been left on the sidelines (Pirson and Livne-Tarandach 2020). Greyston demonstrates a systemic approach that re-imagines the organization as a site of healing, cultivating organization systems rooted in mutual respect, dignity, and power shared with all involved. This entails the redesign of human resources practices (e.g., hiring without a traditional selection process), organizational roles (e.g., re-imagining the role of HR professionals and mentors, and creating new roles devoted to path-making for marginalized individuals), and policies (e.g., restructuring compassion and patience into organizational policies of employee' training, assessments, performance review, and promotion) to lower the barriers of employment, restore the dignity of marginalized individuals, and enable employee thriving within and outside the organizational boundaries. While such an approach may begin with an opportunity offered to an individual, it holds the potential to create far-reaching ripple effects. As Greyston's CEO and President Joseph Kenner remarks, such an opportunity also supports "a family that is embedded in the community and a broader society all of which are positively impacted by the opportunities enabled by Open Hiring" (Pirson and Livne-Tarandach 2020: 239).

Beyond their own commitment to promote justice within and outside the organizational boundaries, organizations as exemplifying spaces of healing are devoted to spreading a healing ministry. Such organizations often expand their circle of influence and demonstrate crusader-like leadership in awakening other organizations to consider their role in healing their local communities and our society. For example, Greyston is not only committed to serve as a healer of its local community, but is committed to educate and support other organizations (within and outside the US) to adopt Open Hiring as a path toward promoting social justice and expanding societal healing more broadly (Pirson and Livne-Tarandach 2020; Laasch et al. 2019).

Discussion

Our paper offers a holistic definition of healing as the foundation for a new conceptual model of organizations as healing spaces. We draw upon four perspectives which address healing at various levels of analysis: (1) restorative justice, (2) posttraumatic growth, (3) relational cultural theory, and (4) dignity to develop a typology that illustrates three ways organizations can function as healing spaces - Emergent, Endeavoring, and Exemplifying. Overall, our conceptualization of organizations as healing spaces makes several contributions to the fields of healing and social justice research and offers a generative foundation for future theoretical and empirical work on healing and practical implications for organizational leaders and human resource managers, as well as for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) contexts.

Theoretical Contributions to Healing Research

Second, our work seeks to expand the scope of research that tends to focus on the healing of individuals or suffering within organizations. In contrast to prior work on organizational healing that focuses on healing in response to harm experienced within organizational boundaries (Porath and Pearson 2012; Powley 2013; Powley and Piderit 2008), our paper seeks to expand attention to address organizational opportunity and responsibility for attending to harm experienced outside the boundaries of the organization. The typology we advance invites management scholars and practitioners to re-imagine for whom organizations are responsible. More specifically, we propose that while organizations characterized as emerging and endeavoring spaces of healing may focus on harm experienced by organizational members and stakeholder groups directly within the organization's scope of control, organizations that embody exemplifying spaces of healing actively engage in recognizing and remedying harm both within and outside the organization - even when such harm was not caused by the organization. As such, organizations as exemplifying spaces of healing comprehensively demonstrate their commitment to prioritizing the welfare and healing of all their stakeholders broadly defined, including employees, customers, communities, and society (Sisodia and Gelb 2019).

Third, expanding on prior research on organizational healing that illuminates primarily reactive practices to address injury and facilitate recovery (Powley 2013; Powley and Piderit 2008), we conceptualize healing as a proactive and ongoing process rather than a narrowly or temporally bounded set of practices or outcomes in response to events or situations. We propose that crafting organizations as optimal healing spaces calls for organizations to demonstrate an enduring commitment to healing, and that healing is an active, multidimensional process of engagement rather than a set of discrete outcomes. Our conceptualization of organizations as exemplifying spaces of healing sheds light on the elements and practices organizations can leverage and activate in building comprehensive and integrative capacities for recognizing, responding to, and remedying suffering, including systemic harms of societal injustice.

Fourth, our study synthesizes four leading perspectives on healing modalities. Based on our review of the literature we draw on what might be considered best practices and processes of healing from outside the management field (e.g., restorative justice, posttraumatic growth, relational cultural theory, dignity). In weaving insights from these four modalities of healing into our conceptual development of organizations as healing spaces, we extend prior research that frames healing as a reactive or responsive approach to local harm to include more proactive and holistic approaches of healing to broader experiences of suffering. While extant organizational research illuminates a relatively narrow and reactive set of responses to mobilize for healing in organizing contexts (Powley 2013; Powley and Piderit 2008), the typology we advance expands the toolkit of practices and resources available to organizations in cultivating more holistic, proactive, and authentic healing spaces. In particular, the exemplifying healing space highlights the transformational potential of designing and shaping organizations that steward dignity and foster healing by: recognizing and bearing witness to the suffering experienced by others, both within and beyond organizational boundaries; exercising awareness of the role organizations play in generating harm, including the reproduction or reinforcement of systemic injustice; and, acknowledging harm and embracing responsibility for remedying harm, regardless of cause or influence by the organization.

Theoretical Contributions to Social Justice Research

In addition to expanding the scope of healing in organizations our theorizing also extends prior social-psychological work on the "scope of justice" - or the boundary, which defines who is perceived to be deserving of fair and just treatment (e.g., Opotow 1990, 2001; Hafer and Olson 2003). The delineation of those who are perceived as meriting fair treatment and those who are not affects attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of individuals toward others; those designated as falling outside the boundary are perceived as being less deserving of fair treatment. Scope of justice also has implications for political attitudes. For example, students are more likely to endorse efforts to protect the environment when their scope of justice includes the natural world (Opotow 1994). In our healing spaces typology, organizations characterized as emergent and endeavoring spaces may view only organizational members or primary stakeholders as being deserving of fair treatment and healing. Organizations characterized as exemplifying spaces of healing, however, are likely to conceptualize the scope of justice more expansively and thus seek to heal suffering and injustice that has occurred well beyond their own borders and conventional scope of operations, influence, or responsibility.

Additionally, this work contributes to growing efforts to further integrate two prominent streams of research on social justice. The first has a long history in the management literature and examines when, why, and how justice is enacted and experienced and the consequences of perceived injustice in organizational contexts (e.g., Cropanzano and Ambrose 2015; Greenberg and Colquitt 2005). The second focuses on social justice as a movement and includes recent research on the Black Lives Matter movement (c.f., Jones-Eversley et al. 2017). While there has been important investigation in this latter stream in management (e.g., Hoang et al. 2021; Iyer and Achia 2020), there is increasing recognition in the field that more must be done (e.g., Akpapuna et al. 2020; Byrd 2018; Mir and Zanoni 2021). In conceptualizing organizations as potential spaces for healing in addressing suffering - including deeply entrenched systemic inequality and oppression, both within and outside the organization - we begin to address this call.

Limitations and Future Research

Our work to advance a typology of organizations as healing spaces raises a number of important questions and promising possibilities for future research. Our study illuminates three sets of spaces that characterize healing approaches and processes of healing by organizations. Each space represents an opportunity horizon of awareness, commitment, and resources to cultivate and support healing within and by organizations. Yet this typology does not yet map processes or mechanisms for organizations to move from one space to another. Future research might unpack how organizations interested in growing their commitment to healing might develop from emergent to endeavoring to exemplifying spaces. In addition, there may be additional dimensions, nuances, or sub-spaces of healing that would meaningfully advance an understanding of healing in organizational contexts.

Further, we do not assume that organizations automatically demonstrate the same level of commitment to healing when faced with various events or manifestations of suffering or injustice. We suspect that organizations may demonstrate different levels of awareness or commitment to healing depending on categories of social injustice (e.g., racism, gender inequality, anti-LGBTQIA+, institutionalized poverty, and other examples of unfair and exploitative treatment of identity groups or discriminatory phenomena). For example, some organizations may demonstrate an emerging space of healing when addressing racial injustice while demonstrating an endeavoring space when addressing gender related injustice. Finally, at the macro-level future conceptualizing might explore if and how this typology can inform healing efforts that acknowledge "all life is one" and address environmental justice that goes beyond centering human life.

The existence of different healing spaces of an organization in response to distinct categories of social injustice may elicit tension, backlash, questions of authenticity, or mistrust by organizational members, stakeholders, and the public. Future research might explore how stakeholders respond to misalignment of healing approaches toward different social categories. For example, if stakeholders perceive that organizations focus on healing that advances gender equality but are tone-deaf to racial issues, what are the implications? Moreover, future research might explore how organizations that are able to cultivate healing spaces for injustices relating to a particular social category can leverage such organizational capability to cultivate amplifying cycles (Feldman and Worline 2012) of greater awareness and commitment for other categories of injustice they have yet to acknowledge. Further, while the typology we develop offers insights about the motivations, roles, and mechanisms at the heart of healing by organizations, it provides limited consideration of explicit hurdles that may impede organizations from actualizing their commitment to healing. Future research might unpack the individual, team, organizational, and institutional influences that challenge organizational commitment to healing and explore ways to overcome such obstacles.

There are interesting potential linkages between the healing modalities we discuss and our typology of the healing organization on the one hand, and Indigenous healing principles and practices on the other that we believe may usefully be explored in future research. Indeed, scholars have drawn parallels between restorative justice and Indigenous healing practices (c.f., Hewitt 2016). Furthermore, Indigenous cultures worldwide have developed extensive traditions to heal themselves from the social injustice of generations of colonialism and the associated historical and intergenerational trauma they have experienced (Duran and Duran 1995; Gone 2007; Kirmayer et al. 2014). While there are widely varying traditional healing practices, many of these practices show clear parallels with the restorative justice, posttraumatic growth, relational cultural, and dignity modalities. For example, among First Nations people in Northern Ontario, sharing circles are an important route to healing, as these groups encourage empathy, shared testimony, and communal connection built on mutual power, and in which Elders and participants are viewed as equal (Marsh 2010; Marsh et al. 2016; Stevenson 1999). Similar connections and potential extensions between our typology and Indigenous healing practices likely exist in many other contexts and can enrich our understanding of the practices that allow organizations to heal within and beyond their boundaries. For example, Indigenous healing practices often build on a holistic integrative perspective of human and the environment (Baskin 2016), which we have yet to map on the western approaches we explore in this paper. Examining Indigenous healing practices may provide an opportunity for scholars to refine and extend our typology and, more generally, to contribute to the important and growing literature on Indigenous theory and practice in the field of management (e.g., Tung and Aycan 2008; Vora and Kainzbauer 2020).

Implications for Practice

In large-scale crises internal and external to an organization, human resource (HR) professionals are called upon to react and help support employees and offer resources that reduce their suffering so that they may address personal challenges and return to work. While standard policies like the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) and employee assistance programs (EAPs) focus on well-known long-term stressors affecting work-life balance, our review of healing modalities offers new frameworks for well-being. In particular, we think HR managers and leaders will benefit from a deeper understanding of posttraumatic growth research in cultivating emergent healing spaces dealing with external shocks. This literature underscores the essential role of high-quality connections with others for growth and healing-something that is a natural and daily part of the work environment. Furthermore, insights from the Emergent space of healing can assist HR professionals who aim to support employee healing in three ways. First, training can be expanded to include basic information about organizations as healing spaces. Second, new cultural practices can be developed that support normalizing disclosure about traumas-whether from an environmental crisis (i.e., tornados) or social crisis (i.e., hate crime, sexual violence, etc.). Third, social support can be offered through traditional programs, by encouraging employee affinity groups and the development of a culture of care in organizations.

The #metoo and Black Lives Matter movements, among others, have called to our collective attention the enormity of changes needed within many institutions to achieve fair, just, and equitable workplaces. These efforts are predicated on the large-scale transformation of policies, practices, and often behaviors. DEI leaders are often the stewards of this essential social justice work within institutions. The dominant strategies for DEI organizational change and development work have usually focused on (1) discrimination-and-fairness, (2) access-and-legitimacy in organization, and (3) connecting diversity to work perspectives (Thomas and Ely 1996; Ely and Thomas 2020). Our typology parses out and honors the complexity of DEI efforts that often need to operate across the three organizational spaces of healing simultaneously. Healing can be nurtured by organizations in reacting to local concerns from unrest due to racial bias incidents such as police brutality towards people of color (reactive - emerging), responding to hiring bias against women and caregivers (investigative - endeavoring), and systematically appraising how organizational systems, procedures, and policies disadvantage marginalized employees (introspection - exemplifying). Additionally, we suggest that restorative justice, posttraumatic growth, relational culture theory, and the reconciliation model of dignity provide new change strategies that promote healing by engaging with social justice concerns to identify and process inequity violations in more dialogic and non-legalistic models.

Managers responsible for the corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts of their firms can also benefit from the insights of this research. Since these leaders help support and align an organization's vision, mission, and values and play a key role in engaging with key stakeholders, we suggest that the typology can contribute to expanding and validating CSR efforts from a healing spaces perspective. Initiatives, such as philanthropic humanitarian relief (emergent healing for crisis), recognizing environmental violations and acting to remedy them (endeavoring), and proactively innovating educational resources and engaging in integrative, multi-sectoral programs to support women's empowerment in local and distal communities (exemplifying), can be better designed and more comprehensively implemented with an awareness of and applied guidance from the typology. In a recent reframing of CSR, Zheng ( 2020) introduces the concept of corporate social justice (CSJ) to include a focus on corporate stewardship of the interests of harmed or disadvantaged societal groups. The typology we advance further extends considerations of CSR by specifically spotlighting opportunities for healing social injustice and transcending more conventional approaches to or measurements of social responsibility by organizations. In instances where there is a fractious history between firms and communities, educating CSR practitioners about the different strategies for dialog and reconciliation, as informed by restorative justice, posttraumatic growth, relational culture theory, and the reconciliation model of dignity, would be greatly beneficial. Furthermore, we anticipate that training in empathy and building high-quality connections will significantly assist the multi-faceted activities required for CSR practitioners to manage internal and external stakeholder relationships. In particular, for CSR practitioners facilitating inter-institutional initiatives across sectors where historic harm could exist (e.g., multi-stakeholder consultations, cross-sector partnerships), we anticipate that competencies in the recognition of a need for reconciliation and the generation of dialog in advance of deeper collaboration would help steward more effective processes and mutually beneficial outcomes.

Conclusion

We live in a time when historic inequities exacerbated by COVID-19 have reinforced the necessity and urgency for societies and organizations to bring healing into focus. In this paper, we respond to this call and develop a typology that illustrates three ways organizations can function as healing spaces, exploring a range of opportunities for how organizations can better respond to suffering and substantively contribute to remedying harm from systematic bias against marginalized groups via healing. As the opening excerpts remind us, when we realize that all life is one - that all elements of our world are deeply interconnected rather than isolated and independent - we can begin to re-imagine the role of organizations as healing spaces in our communities and society. In parallel, as we engage processes of exercising and understanding healing, a deepening awareness of life as unified and integrated can nurture our individual and collective capacities for recognizing and remedying suffering. We view this research on organizations as healing spaces as a promising dawn horizon for awakening organizational scholars and practitioners to the healing potential of organizations as catalysts for societal change. With the plethora of grand challenges and increasing crises and disruptions facing humanity, we hope insights from this work may guide organizations as they are called upon more often to become healing spaces and stewards of social justice.

Acknowledgements

We thank David Wasieleski and participants of the Humanistic Management Thought Leadership Conference 2021 for their feedback on early versions of the work we develop in this manuscript. We appreciate insights shared by Paul Harper, which have been invaluable for conceptualizing organizations as healing spaces for social justice. We acknowledge the urgency for healing in our communities and global society for inspiring this research.

Declarations

Conflict of Interest

On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest.

Contributor Information

Reut Livne-Tarandach, Email: ude.nattahnam@10hcadnaratenvilr.

Erica Steckler, Email: ude.lmu@relkcetS_acirE.

Jennifer Leigh, Email: ude.zan@4hgielj.

Sara Wheeler-Smith, Email: ude.nattahnam@htims-releehw.aras.

References

Calhoun, L. G., & Tedeschi, R. G. 2006. The Foundations of Posttraumatic Growth: An Expanded Framework. In L. G. Calhoun & R. G. Tedeschi (Eds.), Handbook of posttraumatic growth: Research & practice (pp. 3-23). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.

Clark, C. M. 2012. "Healing from the Bitter Pill of Incivility". Minority Nurse 32-34.

De Maria, W. 2010. After the scandal - Recovery options for damaged organizations. Journal of Management & Organization 16 (1). 10.5172/jmo.16.1.66.

Drucker P. Management challenges for the 21[st century. New York: HarperCollins; 1999. Google Scholar]

Ely, R., and D.A. Thomas 2020. Getting serious about diversity: Enough already with the business case. Harvard Business Review, 98, no. 6 (November-December 2020).

Feldman MS, Worline MC. Resources, resourcing and ampliative cycles in organizations. In: Spreitzer GM, Cameron KS, editors. [The oxford handbook of positive organizational scholarship: 629-641. New York: Oxford University Press; 2012. Google Scholar]

Firth K, Smith K, Sakallaris BR, Bellanti DM, Crawford C, Avant KC. Healing, a concept analysis. Global Advances in Health and Medicine. 2015;4:44-50. doi: 10.7453/Gahmj.2015.056. [[PMC free article] [PubMed] [CrossRef] Google Scholar]

Frey LM, Fulginiti A, Sheehan L, Oexle N, Stage DL, Stohlmann-Rainey J. What's in a word? Clarifying terminology on suicide-related communication. Death Studies. 2020;44(12):808-818. doi: 10.1080/07481187.2019.1614111. [[PubMed] [CrossRef] Google Scholar]

Hicks, D. 2016 Dignity: Its Essential Role in Resolving Conflict. New Heaven: Yale University Press.

Hicks D. 2018. Leading with Dignity: How to create a culture that brings out the best in people. New Heaven: Yale University Press.

Joseph S, Linley PA. 2005 Positive Adjustment to Threatening Events: An Organismic Valuing Theory of Growth through Adversity. Review of General Psychology. 9(3):262-280. 10.1037/1089-2680.9.3.262.

"Justice" and "just". 2021. Merriam-Webster.com. https://www.merriam-webster.com (23 March 2021).

Kabadayi, S., Alkire, (née Nasr) L., Broad, G.M., Livne-Tarandach, R. Wasieleski, D., and A.M. Puente 2019. Humanistic Management of Social Innovation in service (SIS): An interdisciplinary framework. Humanistic Management Journal, 4: 159-185. 10.1007/s41463-019-00063-9.

Kechen, M. 2013. Social justice: Concepts, principles, tools and challenges. A publication of the United Nations economic and social Commission for West Asia; United Nations economic and social council. E/ESCWA/SDD/2013/Technical Paper.9; December 16, 2013.

Kirmayer LJ, Gone JP, Moses J. Rethinking historical trauma. Transcultural Psychiatry. 2014;51(3):299-319. doi: 10.1177/1363461514536358. [[PubMed] [CrossRef] Google Scholar]

Kruse, K. 2020, July 7. 3 ways managers can address social justice issues with their teams. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinkruse/2020/07/07/3-ways-managers-can-address-social-justice-issues-with-their-teams/?sh=2e07986335cc.

Laasch, O., Dierksmeier, C. Livne-Tarandach, R. Pirson, M., Fu, P., and Q. Qu 2019. Humanistic management performativity "in the wild': The role of performative bundles of practices. Presented at the Academy of Management Conference, Boston, USA.

Luthar SS, Cicchetti D, Becker B. The construct of resilience: A critical evaluation and guidelines for future work. Child Development. 2000;71:543-562. [[PMC free article] [PubMed] Google Scholar]

Maitlis, S. (2012). Posttraumatic growth. In K. S. Cameron & G. M. Spreitzer (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of positive organizational scholarship (pp. 909-923). Oxford University Press.

Manyika, J., and M. Tuin 2020. It's time to build 21st century companies: Learning to thrive in a radically different world. Milken Institute Review. Published May 4, 2020. Accessed 8 May 2021. https://www.milkenreview.org/articles/its-time-to-build-21st-century-companies.

Merriam Webster 2021, justice, Merriam Webster, Inc. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/justice

Sakallaris BR, MacAllister L, Voss M, Smith K, Jonas WB. Optimal healing environments. Global Advances in Health and Medicine. 2015;4:40-45. doi: 10.7453/gahmj.2015.043. [[PMC free article] [PubMed] [CrossRef] Google Scholar]

Steckler, E. 2014. The social construction of organizational authenticity by stakeholders. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Boston College, Chestnut Hill.

Surrey, J. 1985 "The self in relation (Working Paper No. 13)." Wellesley, MA: Wellesley Centers for Women, Wellesley College.

Thomas, D.A., and R.D. Ely 1996. Making differences matter: A new paradigm for managing diversity. Harvard Business Review, Sept.-Oct.: 79-90.

Zheng, L. 2020. We're entering the age of corporate social justice. Harvard Business Review (Digital Article). June 15, 2020.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Cultivating Organizations as Healing Spaces: A Typology for Responding to Suffering and Advancing Social Justice

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Historic inequities exacerbated by COVID-19 and spotlighted by social justice movements like Black Lives Matter have reinforced the necessity and urgency for societies and organizations to bring healing into focus. However, few integrated models exist within management and organization scholarship to guide practice. In response, our focus aims to unpack how organizations can become healing spaces.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Transformative Justice Mixtape by Freedom Lifted

# data[].attributes.subject
The Transformative Justice Mixtape by Freedom Lifted

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This is a grassroots project. Please refrain from sharing log in account information and passwords. Money raised from the Mixtape series goes to closed captioning, compensation for the presenters and donations to BIPOC-run organizations/formations who have a history of working on Transformative Justice in Chicago, IL.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
policing
police abolition
prison abolition
prison abolition trainings
pic
ending the pic
transformative justice
transformative justice training
prison industrial complex
restorative justice
harm reduction
harm reduction training

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Transformative Justice Mixtape: Steps to End the PIC

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This is a grassroots project. Please refrain from sharing log in account information and passwords. Money raised from the Mixtape series goes to closed captioning, compensation for the presenters and donations to BIPOC-run organizations/formations who have a history of working on Transformative Justice in Chicago, IL.

# data[].attributes.body
https://bookshop.org/books/finding-refuge-heart-work-for-healing-collective-grief/9781611809367

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Finding Refuge: Heart Work for Healing Collective Grief a book by Michelle Cassandra Johnson

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Learn how to process your own grief--as well as family, community, and global grief--with this fierce and openhearted guide to healing in an unjust world. In unsettling and uncertain times, the individual and collective heartbreak that lives in our bodies and communities can feel insurmountable. Man…

# data[].attributes.headline
Resilience for Liberation by Lumos Transforms

# data[].attributes.subject
Resilience for Liberation by Lumos Transforms

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A free session exploring the intersection of personal healing and collective change.

# data[].attributes.headline
How (and When) to Say No to the Boss- Harvard Business Review

# data[].attributes.subject
How (and When) to Say No to the Boss- Harvard Business Review

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It can be especially hard if you love your work.

# data[].attributes.headline
How to make the shift from indulging problems to creating possibilities - MindShift

# data[].attributes.subject
How to make the shift from indulging problems to creating possibilities - MindShift

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How to make the shift from indulging problems to creating possibilities - MindShift

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For those looking to create radical transformation in the education sphere and beyond, Dr. Shawn Ginwright’s new book “The Four Pivots” discusses how to shift from resisting to reimagining.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The New Paradigm: Healing Centered Engagement

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
This 10 week healing workshop is geared towards those who have been impacted by violence, caused harm, enabled harm, and those who find themselves in cycles of physical and emotional harm who want to explore their participation in such cycles. Our work as facilitators engages our first-hand experiences in being impacted by harm as people who have caused, enabled, and survived it.

Wondering if this is the right experience for you?

Consider these situations:

​

As part of this work we select individuals interested in leading this work as they receive the benefits of this work. People trust those they know with their intimate stories, pain, and desires for personal growth. We want to give existing local leaders additional tools to address individual and collective trauma and violence, and therefore build the capacity for more communities to create a culture of accountability and compassion. Our participant-researcher model has resulted in prior participants co-facilitating future sessions. We are interested in training individuals who have the most capacity to lead this work forward in their own communities. Questions for those interested listed in the application.

Modules
Please note that our work is alive and fluid, and changes with the needs of each cohort.

Deepening Tools for Generative Dialoging with Discomfort

Session Seven : Compassion, Acceptance, Accountability

Session Eight : Values, Intentions, Commitments

Participant Commendations

"It definitely has supported my healing journey in so many ways. I found the meaning of life again and you guys have given me the encouragement and bravery to live my life to the fullest. Thank you so much for making me feel reborn again."

For support for our 2022
labor, we thank:

Also, warm thanks to

Healing Together for breathing life into and offering material support to this important work.

Prior Cohorts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
This 10 week healing workshop is geared towards those who have been impacted by violence, caused harm, enabled harm, and those who find themselves in cycles of physical and emotional harm who want to explore their participation in such cycles.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
By Stop talking about Self-Care Yashna Maya Padamsee
In the last 3 years as I talk about the Healing Justice (HJ) work I am involved in I am met with dueling responses of either deep yearning and curiosity about sustainability or a look that says "how sweet" and "call me when you're ready to do some real work."

Each response often leads to the introduction conversations that get stuck on the idea that HJ is only about the practice of "self-care." Self-care is important and essential but lets not get stuck here.

I love the idea of exploring ways to care for ourselves and our sustainability such as- honoring what unions won for us by working an 8 hour day (instead of working 10-14 hour days all the time), or other common self-care options like taking a bubble bath, or eating comfort food.

If we let ourselves be caught up in the discussion of self-care we are missing the whole point of Healing Justice (HJ) work. Talking only about self-care when talking about HJ is like only talking about recycling and composting when speaking on Environmental Justice. It is a necessary and important individual daily practice- but to truly seek justice for the Environment, or to truly seek Healing for our communities, we need to interrupt and transform systems on a broader level.

We need to move the self-care conversation into community care. We need to move the conversation from individual to collective. From independent to interdependent.

Too often self-care in our organizational cultures gets translated to our individual responsibility to leave work early, go home- alone- and go take a bath, go to the gym, eat some food and go to sleep. So we do all of that "self-care" to return to organizational cultures where we reproduce the systems we are trying to break; where we are continually reminded of our own trauma or exposed and absorb secondary PTSD, and where we then feel guilty or punished for leaving work early the night before to take a bubble bath.

Self-care, as it is framed now, leaves us in danger of being isolated in our struggle and our healing. Isolation of yet another person, another injustice, is a notch in the belt of Oppression. A liberatory care practice is one in which we move beyond self-care into caring for each other.
Why are we seeking Care?
You shouldn't have to do this alone.

There is a growing rumble of yearning for healing in our movement work. Oppression and trauma do influence our well-being. On-going generational trauma and violence affect our communities, our bodies, our hearts, minds and spirits. Racism, sexism, classism, eats at our very beings. This leads us to seek care. We know this. Our bodies know this. Our friends can read it in our faces even if we have learned to ignore it.

We put our bodies on the line everyday- because we care so deeply about our work- hunger strikes, long marches, long days at the computer or long days organizing on a street corner or a public bus or a congregation. Skip a meal, keep working. Don't sleep, keep working. Our communities are still suffering, so I must keep going. We risk and test our bodies to go further and we stretch our hearts or close our hearts to keep going- whatever it takes- and ultimately what it takes is a toll on us. This leads us to seek care.

We want to deny it- but abelism still shapes our movement work- "go hard or go home". In the the Needs Assessment by Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, they state, "Changemakers are dying as a result of spiritual and physical deprivation from trauma, stress and unrest in our movements."
How do we move from Self-care to Community-Care?
We are burning out faster and at higher rates- unable to do the work we love. How can we win when our bodies individually and collectively can't keep up? We are risking not just burn-out, but organizer loss and movement fragmentation. We cannot afford this.

In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Dr. King says "I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." In that same spirit- can we be cognizant of the interrelatedness of our own bodies, of our own well-beings? I cannot sit and read a manifesto for liberation of mind without going deep and healing for liberation of body and spirit. I cannot sit and care for my body without being concerned with what happens to the bodies of my sisters. We are connected.

Can we understand how creating another world will require, or rather, demand our well-being? From small-town collectives and national organizations to strategy and pop-ed sessions to shared meals and parties- it is our responsibility not as individuals, but as communities to create structures in which self-care changes to community care. In which we are cared-for and able to care for others.

Disability Justice is mightily leading the way in showing us that we don't have to keep doing our work in the same way nor do we need to do it alone. For example, Sins Invalid ("a performance project that incubates and celebrates artists with disabilities") rescheduled an entire production due to a members health concerns and performed when it was safe for every-one's bodies. Or another shining example is Creating Collective Access - creating a "new model of being in our movements ...by resisting against the individualization of access" by organizing for collective care at social movement gatherings.

If your liberation is wrapped up with mine- for me that means that it matters how you feel and what you are feeling. Your well-being is our liberation, and I would hope that you would say the same.
Organizations for Liberation
We can take the lead from the field notes of many Healing Justice & Disability Justice organizers, collectives, events and organizations, work from visionary poets and examples from national organizing campaigns that center the principle of Care. There are resources out there and treasures that are many generations old. Find them, talk about them, practice them together, honor them.

"We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." Dr. King (Letter from a Birmingham Jail)

As our conversation develops from the limited idea of self-care to the expansive reality of community care we are able to honor the depth of Healing Justice work and the depths of ourselves. We need to switch our thinking- individually and organizationally- to including well-being in our work for justice. Because when we are able to do that- that means we are cognizant of Dr. King's "network of mutuality." Because when we do that we will truly be working towards a liberatory and visionary new world.

So go on and call me when you are ready to do some real work.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Communities of Care, Organizations for Liberation - Transform Harm

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
By Yashna Maya Padamsee Original article found here Stop talking about Self-Care In the last 3 years as I talk about the Healing Justice (HJ) work I am involved in I am met with dueling responses of either deep yearning and curiosity about sustainability or a look that says "how sweet" and "call me when you're [...]

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Your Instructor

Sage Hayes, SEP, LMT is the convener, catalyst and teacher for this course. Sage Hayes (she/he/they) is a somatic practitioner exploring frontiers of embodied liberation. Sage is an anti-racist, trans and queer somatics practitioner with Embodied Liberation and a lead teaching assistant with the Somatic Experiencing Trauma Institute. Sage opened their private practice in 2006 and has been on a wonderful emergent adventure ever since. Sage works one-on-one with clients, teaches classes and workshops online and around the world, and is currently writing a book.

Sage's work integrates biodynamic craniosacral therapy, systemic constellations, evolutionary biology, quantum physics, ecstatic dance, Somatic Experiencing and intuitive wisdom practices. As an educator, a community organizer, a healing arts practitioner, Sage is passionate about creative ways to create conditions for embodied liberation which interrupt and help us heal from the trauma of supremacy, binary thinking and marginalization, in both systems and in bodies. Sage lives on the ancestral lands of the Narragansetts and Wampanoags currently known as Rhode Island with her brilliant partner and travels around the world to support trauma healing.

Re-Align Your Practice Mentors

Re-align Your Practice will have group mentors with coaching and somatics background who are available to support your process. You will be assigned a pod of practitioners and a mentor. Each week you will be invited to meet for an hour in this pod as a way to support each other, build community and keep moving along towards your vision.

Lillie Wolffe, Re-Align Your Practice Mentor

Mariann Lackey, Re-Align Your Practice Mentor

Edi Tsang, R e-Align Your Practice Mentor

Nichole McGraw Jacobson, Re-Align Your Practice Mentor

Frequently Asked Questions

When does the course start and finish?

The course starts Monday May 11th, 2020 at 6pm EST kicking off with a live class. It finishes June 11th, 2020 with a celebratory zoom together!

How long do I have access to the course?

How does lifetime access sound? After enrolling, you have unlimited access to this course for as long as you like - across any and all devices you own.

We have a full commitment to making this class economically accessible to anyone who wants to take it. I'm offering a sliding scale because I believe that financial resources, including income, are not and should not be the only determining factor in whether or not someone can access services/care/etc. Especially in this moment when so many practitioners are facing income flux due to covid-19) Option #1: $350 or 3 monthly payments of $116 Option #2: $250 or 3 monthly payments of $83 Option #3: $150 or 3 monthly payments of $50 10% of all course fees will go into a fund which will be directly distributed to healing arts practitioners who need monetary support at this time.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Sage Hayes, SEP, LMT is the convener, catalyst and teacher for this course. Sage Hayes (she/he/they) is a somatic practitioner exploring frontiers of embodied liberation. Sage is an anti-racist, trans and queer somatics practitioner with Embodied Liberation and a lead teaching assistant with the Somatic Experiencing Trauma Institute.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Through Healing and Justice, We Achieve Liberation.

Coaching for Healing, Justice, and Liberation (CHJL) is a non-profit organization that provides professional coaching training programs that build the capacity of BIPOC social justice movement leaders.

We believe that through engaging in individual and collective healing and through the victories of social justice movements for those most-impacted by systems of oppression, we will achieve liberation for all people.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Through Healing and Justice, We Achieve Liberation. Coaching for Healing, Justice, and Liberation (CHJL) is a non-profit organization that provides professional coaching training programs that build the capacity of BIPOC social justice movement leaders. We believe that through engaging in individual and collective healing and through the victories of social justice movements for those most-impacted by systems of oppression, we will achieve liberation for all people.

# data[].attributes.headline
Anti-Oppression Resource and Training Alliance

# data[].attributes.subject
Anti-Oppression Resource and Training Alliance

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Transformative change work requires that we do the personal work to unlearn the horizontal violence and psychological harm that plague our movements for justice. From one-on-one coaching with individuals to identity based caucuses, we bring a healing-centered and resilience-focused approach in supporting reflection around resistance and change, igniting opportunities for bold growth and visioning.

# data[].attributes.body
Los Angeles, CA

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Afterschool Arts Program

We provide healing-centered art classes to youth ages 10-18 throughout Los Angeles County in partnership with the Department of Arts and Culture and the Department of Parks and Recreation. Our classes include filmmaking, theater, painting, and music classes for youth as part of a holistic effort to increase student leadership and prevent violence in our communities.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We provide healing-centered art classes to youth ages 10-18 throughout Los Angeles County in partnership with the Department of Arts and Culture and the Department of Parks and Recreation. Our classes include filmmaking, theater, painting, and music classes for youth as part of a holistic effort to increase student leadership and prevent violence in our communities.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Decolonizing Latinx Health and Reclaiming Traditional Healing

La Cura will take you on a journey that centers Latinx healing and wellbeing. We will explore what healing is, the possibilities for for it, and engage in conversation with thought leaders, historians, spiritual sages, trauma informed healers, traditional and western medicine practitioners and many more.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
La Cura will take you on a journey that centers Latinx healing and wellbeing. We will explore what healing is, the possibilities for for it, and engage in conversation with thought leaders, historians, spiritual sages, trauma informed healers, traditional and western medicine practitioners and many more.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Welcome to the Artful Leader podcast! In this introduction episode, you'll meet host Rachelle Archer and hear all of the great things you can expect from this podcast that explores the intersections of healing, arts, and education. Find Rachelle and her work here
Want to support the podcast? Support the podcast by donating the cost of a cup of coffee here

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
‎The Artful Leader: Introducing the Artful Leader Podcast on Apple Podcasts

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Welcome to the Artful Leader podcast! In this introduction episode, you'll meet host Rachelle Archer and hear all of the great things you can expect from this podcast that explores the intersections of healing, arts, and education. Find Rachelle and her work here Want to support the podcast? Suppor...

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Mental Health | Roots of South Los Angeles Wellness Center

# data[].attributes.body
Roots of south Los Angeles

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Mental Health | Roots of South Los Angeles Wellness Center

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Roots of South Los Angeles Wellness Center is a nonprofit orgnaization centering the healing of inner city communities by providing holistic, culturally appropriate mental health services to those in need.

# data[].attributes.body
Embodiment Institute

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We are looking for a Operations Manager

The Operations Manager is a leader and project manager in the areas of Operations, Safety & Digital Security, HR, and Finance with a talent for implementing sustainable and values-aligned practices that scale the impact of TEI's mission. This position will work closely with the Operations Director in developing new systems and improving existing ones, leveraging their strong technology and relational skills within an organization that is scaling and changing to meet the needs of this moment. The Operations Manager joins a dynamic, motivated team of creative and embodied practitioners collaborating virtually across the country. Read the full job description here.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Operations Manager is a leader and project manager in the areas of Operations, Safety & Digital Security, HR, and Finance with a talent for implementing sustainable and values-aligned practices that scale the impact of TEI's mission.

# data[].attributes.body
Generative Somatics

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"When I entered Somatics and Trauma in 2014 I was organizing in New York, winning campaigns, but not able to feel the impact of my work. I felt stuck and disconnected. Somatics gave me the ability to feel more, to connect to those around me, and to be a more impactful organizer in the movement. Since 2014 I've seen gs transform entire organizations, offering tools for organizers to deepen their ability to heal with both love and rigor." - Che Johnson-Long, Community Engagement Specialist, Reimagine ACDC

"Over the last five years my personal and professional life has been transformed through the courses, coaching, mentorship, and community of generative somatics. I credit so much of my learning and growth as an organizer to generative somatics. In this political moment, gs is needed more than ever." - Ileana Mendez-Penate, Communities United for Police Reform staff

"Being able to identify and communicate what I'm feeling opens up a world of possibilities. A lot of people look at me and the work I've done and think 'he's cool, he's got this.' They could assume that I don't need support, but that's not true. Now, I can say, 'I am really afraid and I need you to hold this, I can't keep holding everything and being at the center'. That's completely new for me to have the awareness to say-'this is what I'm feeling, this is what's happening'. It opens up a door to say-I can be competent, and also afraid. I can lead, and also need support." - Nate Mullen, Director of People in Education

"Somatics has opened to me a community and a methodology for integrating personal healing and transformation into political leadership. And as I've transformed, I've had more access to my own creativity and power. Today I'm designing more creative and impactful campaigns and I'm successfully cultivating new leaders who find this work liberating rather than demoralizing and draining." - Sendolo Diaminah, Carolina Federation Co-Director

"gs has allowed me to believe in the power of my self worth, renew my commitment to social justice work, and reclaim my dignity in profound and life altering ways. gs has taught me how to tap into the infinite power I have within myself, my histories, and my futures to better serve social and ecological justice movements across the world in ways that honor the inherent dignity and worth of land and people." - Sam Jung, gs teacher

"gs is the most powerful source of that healing I have ever come across. It is a rare space for personal inquiry and change that is actually grounded in the radical anti-colonial, anti-racist, feminist, queer politics that we love and need. It is the first place I ever felt like I did not have to set aside my politics, or swallow a harmful environment, in order to access group practice toward personal transformation." - Dean Spade, gs student

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"When I entered Somatics and Trauma in 2014 I was organizing in New York, winning campaigns, but not able to feel the impact of my work. I felt stuck and disconnected. Somatics gave me the ability to feel more, to connect to those around me, and to be a more impactful organizer in the movement.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Counseling Services Emilia Ortega Jara | Corazón Counseling Riverside CA

# data[].attributes.headline
Emilia Ortega Jara from Corazón Counseling 

# data[].attributes.subject
Emilia Ortega Jara from Corazón Counseling 

# data[].attributes.body
Riverside, CA

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Counseling Services Emilia Ortega Jara | Corazón Counseling Riverside CA

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Facilitating emotional wellness with counseling for the lifespan: pregnancy and postpartum through parenting, menopause, death & dying.

# data[].attributes.headline
Wendy Amara- Inspired Action Group Coaching

# data[].attributes.subject
Wendy Amara- Inspired Action Group Coaching

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Inspired Action Group Coaching — Wendy Amara

# data[].attributes.headline
Dr. Priscilla Ortiz of Tree of Life Botanicals 

# data[].attributes.subject
Dr. Priscilla Ortiz of Tree of Life Botanicals 

# data[].attributes.body
Upland, California

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Treatment plans consist of an Iridology Exam, Organic Herbal Supplements, Nutrition and Lifestyle Counseling. Therapies such as, Arvigo Mayan Abdominal Massage, Full Body Massage, Reflexology Therapy, Cupping Therapy, Vaginal Steams, Organic Infrared Body Wraps, Ear Candling and Magnetic Foot Detoxification.

# data[].attributes.body
Long Beach, CA

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
People of the Global Majority will reclaim their Sovereignty and Freedom by fully embodying their Identity, Voice & Power.

Cristina creates and facilitates workshops and discussions using an anti-oppressive, healing justice approach grounded in community and social justice.

Through these workshops she helps transform and challenge oppressive systems while uplifting and centering the voices and lived experiences of Black Indigenous and Women and Femmes of Color.

Cristina brings her own ancestral wisdom, training in macro social work and 15+ years of community organizing to this work.

Cristina is a mentor to Black Indigenous and Women & Femmes of Color. She helps leaders in their own identity journey, supporting them in cultivating their inner resilience & ancestral wisdom as they heal from conditioning and oppression.

Her vision is for all of us to reach emotional and spiritual freedom in our journeys towards individual and collective liberation.

Cristina speaks on issues at the intersection of wellness, culture and social justice.

Through her talks and discussions, she helps bring consciousness to issues of identity, race and equity drawing attention to how these impact our individual and collective social, political and spiritual wellbeing.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
People of the Global Majority will reclaim their Sovereignty and Freedom by fully embodying their Identity, Voice & Power. Cristina creates and facilitates workshops and discussions using an anti-oppressive, healing justice approach grounded in community and social justice.

# data[].attributes.body
California

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"The METAMORFOSIS of the butterfly is utilized as a metaphor to describe the ongoing transformation/transmutation that we experience throughout our lifetimes....The premise and foundation of my soul-work is to HEAL through LOVE.

When we choose to walk the path of love....our whole world changes."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
"The METAMORFOSIS of the butterfly is utilized as a metaphor to describe the ongoing transformation/transmutation that we experience throughout our lifetimes....The premise and foundation of my soul-work is to HEAL through LOVE. When we choose to walk the path of love....our whole world changes."

# data[].attributes.body
Across the U.S.

# data[].attributes.body
Long Beach, CA

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Indigemama: Ancestral Healing helps women attain optimal health through traditional and modern holistic healing modalities.

Reconnect with your womb, your ancestry and Mother Earth.

Deepen and strengthen your wellness practices with Indigemama: Ancestral Healing womb massage, herbalism, traditional foods, and educational courses. Be one of the hundreds of women to attend workshops with Panquetzani. Learn and convene with inspired women women of color and allies dedicated to feminine wellness and vitality. Treat yourself to a personalized consultation privately with Indigemama, in-person, on the phone, or via Skype. Enrolling in our distance courses enhances self-care and healing in a self-paced, self-directed way in the comfort and privacy of your home or office. Ask about our services for mothers-to-be, and check Indigemama's calendar for local and international gatherings.

Serving Long Beach, Los Angeles and Orange County.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Indigemama: Ancestral Healing helps women attain optimal health through traditional and modern holistic healing modalities. Reconnect with your womb, your ancestry and Mother Earth. Deepen and strengthen your wellness practices with Indigemama: Ancestral Healing womb massage, herbalism, traditional foods, and educational courses. Be one of the hundreds of women to attend workshops with Panquetzani.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Meet Jessica Guzman of Pura Holistic Wellness - Voyage LA Magazine | LA City Guide

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Meet Jessica Guzman of Pura Holistic Wellness - Voyage LA Magazine | LA City Guide

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Today we’d like to introduce you to Jessica Guzman. Thanks for sharing your story with us Jessica. So, let’s start at the beginning, and we can move on from there. My passion for nutrition, health, and wellness began shortly after my second pregnancy. At the time I was working for a pharmaceutical r…

# data[].attributes.headline
Alex “Purple” Liera of WOC Sister Collective 

# data[].attributes.subject
Alex “Purple” Liera of WOC Sister Collective 

# data[].attributes.body
Los Angeles, CA

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The WOC Sister collective's Vision is to create community, connection and collaboration with and through sisterhood. It is a platform for BIWOC and womxn identified to share their gifts, find their voice, and step into their power.

# data[].attributes.body
Denver, Colorado

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Eutimia Cruz Montoya is a whole-istic healthcare practitioner from the Denver Five Points/Mestizo-Curtis Park neighborhood. She is a licensed acupuncturist, herbalist, birth attendant, cantadora, danzante, Real Foods Activist and Food Systems Educator. She is the descendent of New Mexican and Mexican curanderos, and learned the healing ways in the home. Eutimia was raised amidst the ceremony ways of pan-indigenous america, giving her an inborn connection to and understanding of Body and Source. She has a degree in the Anthropological Sciences from Stanford University, a Master of Science degree in Oriental Medicine, and has been studying and practicing Classical Chinese Medicine since 2004. In 2013, she came home to her Curanderismo roots under the guidance of Maestra Laura Alonzo de Franklin and Kalpulli Teocalli Ollin of Albuquerque, NM. She has been deepening her Spiritual path as an apprentice with Nataline r. Cruz at strawberry moon energetics and ancestral healing for the last 3 years. As an educator and practitioner of the healing arts and sciences, Eutimia is passionate about reigniting the fire of agency in Personal Well-Being through teaching observance and recognition of how we, in every action and intention, create the internal and external environmental influences on whole body, mind, emotion and spirit health. She is honored and excited to offer her expertise to all people, that we may continue to heal ourselves and the world! Ometeotl.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Eutimia Cruz Montoya is a whole-istic healthcare practitioner from the Denver Five Points/Mestizo-Curtis Park neighborhood. She is a licensed acupuncturist, herbalist, birth attendant, cantadora, danzante, Real Foods Activist and Food Systems Educator. She is the descendent of New Mexican and Mexican curanderos, and learned the healing ways in the home.

# data[].attributes.body
Los Angeles, CA

# data[].attributes.body
Temecula, CA

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Schedule your appointment online Mujer Magic

# data[].attributes.headline
Sonia Fregoso of Angel City Holistic Therapy 

# data[].attributes.subject
Sonia Fregoso of Angel City Holistic Therapy 

# data[].attributes.body
Los Angeles, CA

# data[].attributes.body
Los Angeles, CA

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Rosa Shetty, LCSW is a licensed mental health therapist from Los Angeles, California. Rosa is also the host of Inner Healing Paths Podcast and develops workshops on healing from trauma and generational wounds. Rosa has over 15 years of clinical experience helping adults heal from childhood trauma, generational and ancestral trauma. Rosa emphasizes the integration of the mind, body, spirit and ancestral legacies. Rosa intertwines inner child healing, ancestral reconnection, and spirituality with the latest research-based therapy approaches. This East-Meets-West approach is a powerful and transformative medicine for embodied healing and recovery from trauma.

For daily inspiration on all things healing follow Rosa on Instagram @rosashettylcsw.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Rosa Shetty, LCSW is a licensed mental health therapist from Los Angeles, California. Rosa is also the host of Inner Healing Paths Podcast and develops workshops on healing from trauma and generational wounds. Rosa has over 15 years of clinical experience helping adults heal from childhood trauma, generational and ancestral trauma.

# data[].attributes.body
16- week curriculum for youth

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
All trained participants will be certified in the Xinachtli Rites of Passage curriculum. This 3 day training will support facilitators in their life-skills work with girls and gender expansive youth. The Xinachtli training prepares facilitators to provide a supportive process for youth to develop a positive identity, life skills and support system; based on indigenous principals of the individual's interconnectedness to the family, the community and the nation.

# data[].attributes.body
Indigenous Youth Program | Riverside, CA

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
KALLI TECPATL is a Danza Azteka family based in Riverside, CA that is led by Ce-Mazatl & Ce-Coatl.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Indigenous Circle of Wellness - Individual, Couple, Family Counseling

# data[].attributes.body
Los Angeles, CA

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Indigenous Circle of Wellness - Individual, Couple, Family Counseling

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Monique Castro is a citizen of the Diné (Navajo) Nation and Xicana, born, raised, and currently lives on Tongva lands (Los Angeles, CA). She is a mother, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (Lic# 104427), private practice owner, certified professional coach, consultant, facilitator, and advocate with over 16 years of professional experience in health, wellness, community organizing, and education.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Now Available: Free Download Print from booksellers In Spanish Interactive Web Version Download PDF Mix & Match Pre-Order Interactive Web-Based Interactive (in English with Maori Banners).

# data[].attributes.headline
VOICES of HOPE Mindfulness Coloring Book

# data[].attributes.subject
VOICES of HOPE Mindfulness Coloring Book

# data[].attributes.body
Created by Alliance for Hope International

# data[].attributes.body
INCITE! WOMEN OF COLOR AGAINST VIOLENCE

# data[].attributes.body
Riverside, CA

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
it’s more than just a hair, it’s your Crown, KEEP IT RIGHT!!!

# data[].attributes.headline
Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation (Emergent Strategy Series)

# data[].attributes.subject
Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation (Emergent Strategy Series)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In our complex world, facilitation and mediation skills are as important for individuals as they are for organizations. How do we practice them in ways that align with nature, with pleasure, with our best imagining of our future? How do we attend to generating the ease necessary to help us move through the inevitable struggles of life? How do we practice the art of holding others without losing ourselves? Black feminists have answers to those questions that can serve anyone working to create changes in our world, changes great and small; individually, interpersonally, and within our organizations.

Holding Change is about attending to coordination, to conflict, to being humans in right relationship with each other, not as a constant ongoing state, but rather as a magnificent, mysterious, ever-evolving dynamic in which we must involve ourselves, shape ourselves and each other. The majority of the book is sourced from brown's twenty-plus years of facilitation and mediation work with movement groups.

Includes contributions by Autumn Brown, Sage Crump, Malkia Devich-Cyril, Ejeris Dixon, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Prentis Hemphill, Micky ScottBey Jones, N'Tanya Lee, and Makani Themba

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation (Emergent Strategy Series)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation (Emergent Strategy Series) [Brown, adrienne maree] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy Facilitation and Mediation (Emergent Strategy Series)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Voices from the Ancestors

Xicanx and Latinx Spiritual Expressions and Healing Practices

Voices from the Ancestors brings together the reflective writings and spiritual practices of Xicanx, Latinx, and Afro-Latinx womxn and male allies in the United States who seek to heal from the historical traumas of colonization by returning to ancestral traditions and knowledge.

This wisdom is based on the authors' oral traditions, research, intuitions, and lived experiences-wisdom inspired by, and created from, personal trajectories on the path to spiritual conocimiento, or inner spiritual inquiry. This conocimiento has reemerged over the last fifty years as efforts to decolonize lives, minds, spirits, and bodies have advanced. Yet this knowledge goes back many generations to the time when the ancestors understood their interconnectedness with each other, with nature, and with the sacred cosmic forces-a time when the human body was a microcosm of the universe.

Reclaiming and reconstructing spirituality based on non-Western epistemologies is central to the process of decolonization, particularly in these fraught times. The wisdom offered here appears in a variety of forms-in reflective essays, poetry, prayers, specific guidelines for healing practices, communal rituals, and visual art, all meant to address life transitions and how to live holistically and with a spiritual consciousness for the challenges of the twenty-first century.

"This is an innovative and powerful collection that crosses the border between academic and artistic styles. Each contribution works to decolonize the mind and the soul. It is necessary reading for all who are interested in the anti-imperial project."-Luis D. León, author of The Political Spirituality of Cesar Chavez: Crossing Religious Borders

"One of the many strengths of this book is the intergenerational dialogue that takes place; this is fertile ground for great discussions inside and outside the classroom. A must-read!"-María Del Socorro Castañeda-Liles, author of Our Lady of Everyday Life: La Virgen de Guadalupe and the Catholic Imagination of Mexican Women in America

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Voices from the Ancestors brings together the reflective writings and spiritual practices of Xicanx, Latinx, and Afro-Latinx womxn and male allies in the United States who seek to heal from the historical traumas of colonization by returning to ancestral traditions and knowledge.

# data[].attributes.headline
All Bodies Deserve: Creating the Future of Us FREE Coloring Book

# data[].attributes.subject
All Bodies Deserve: Creating the Future of Us FREE Coloring Book

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
In partnership with the Women's Foundation of California, The Center for Cultural Power presents a coloring book titled All Bodies Deserve: Creating the Future of Us. Inviting all of us to imagine a colorful, welcoming future where all bodies deserve love, care and recognition, All Bodies Deserve: Creating the Future of Us includes twenty new illustrated coloring pages from eight diverse artists. Each of their drawings centers joy and diverse communities and is inspired by the ideas of abundance - that we should all have what we need to thrive; that people can be different and still equally valued; that we need to care for ourselves, our communities, and the world; and that we can raise curious, happy, healthy identities and families. Download your copy and start coloring!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
All Bodies Deserve: Creating the Future of Us

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In partnership with the Women's Foundation of California, The Center for Cultural Power presents a coloring book titled All Bodies Deserve: Creating the Future of Us. Inviting all of us to imagine a colorful, welcoming future where all bodies deserve love, care and recognition, All Bodies Deserve: Creating the Future of Us includes twenty new illustrated coloring pages from eight diverse artists.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Patrisia Gonzales addresses "Red Medicine" as a system of healing that includes birthing practices, dreaming, and purification rites to re-establish personal and social equilibrium. The book explores Indigenous medicine across North America, with a special emphasis on how Indigenous knowledge has endured and persisted among peoples with a legacy to Mexico. Gonzales combines her lived experience in Red Medicine as an herbalist and traditional birth attendant with in-depth research into oral traditions, storytelling, and the meanings of symbols to uncover how Indigenous knowledge endures over time. And she shows how this knowledge is now being reclaimed by Chicanos, Mexican Americans and Mexican Indigenous peoples.Red Medicine suggests that Indigenous healing systems can usefully point contemporary people back to ancestral teachings and help them reconnect to the dynamics of the natural world.

For Gonzales, a central guiding force in Red Medicine is the principal of regeneration as it is manifested in Spiderwoman. Dating to Pre-Columbian times, the Mesoamerican Weaver/Spiderwoman-the guardian of birth, medicine, and purification rites such as the Nahua sweat bath-exemplifies the interconnected process of rebalancing that transpires throughout life in mental, spiritual and physical manifestations. Gonzales also explains how dreaming is a form of diagnosing in traditional Indigenous medicine and how Indigenous concepts of the body provide insight into healing various kinds of trauma.

Gonzales links pre-Columbian thought to contemporary healing practices by examining ancient symbols and their relation to current curative knowledges among Indigenous peoples.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Red Medicine: Traditional Indigenous Rites of Birthing and Healing (First Peoples: New Directions in Indigenous Studies)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Red Medicine: Traditional Indigenous Rites of Birthing and Healing (First Peoples: New Directions in Indigenous Studies) [Gonzales, Patrisia] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Red Medicine: Traditional Indigenous Rites of Birthing and Healing (First Peoples: New Directions in Indigenous Studies)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Save

Our society is experiencing profound levels of stress and anxiety, a public health crisis that's triggering unresolved traumas in many people, resulting in widespread uneasiness, poor public health, social dysfunction, and alienation, as well as high levels of violence, suicide, and substance abuse. Through traditional stories and personal reflections, Jerry Tello, raised in South Central Los Angeles, co-founder of the Healing Generations Institute, a celebrated leader in the field of the transformational healing of traumatized men and boys of color, shares his approach to generating the "medicine" necessary to shield ourselves from this toxic energy, and offers us pathways to discover, uncover and recover our sacredness and return to health and wellbeing.

To learn more about Jerry Tello and the Healing Generations Institute, visit https://www.nationalcompadresnetwork.org/institutes/healing-generations/

This keynote talk was delivered at the 2019 Bioneers Conference. View more videos, articles, and more from the 2019 Conference at https://bioneers.org/2019talks

Introduction by Héctor Sánchez-Flores, Executive Director, National Compadres Network.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Recovering Your Sacredness | Jerry Tello

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Save Our society is experiencing profound levels of stress and anxiety, a public health crisis that's triggering unresolved traumas in many people, resulting in widespread uneasiness, poor public health, social dysfunction, and alienation, as well as high levels of violence, suicide, and substance abuse.