As an activist and youth organizer who deeply values the power of healing and transformation, I have come to see that too often, within our movement, “healing” and “social change” occupy two separate spaces that have little intentional relationship with one another. Some people work to help others heal from their trauma and transform themselves. Other people dedicate themselves to grassroots organizing and changing the social and economic policies that shape our lives. While each of these spaces is imperative to any serious effort to create social change and transform our society, sometimes it seems that only a few people work in both.

It’s not hard to understand why that might be the case. It is easy for someone focused on healing and inner transformation to argue that we can’t heal society’s ills until we first heal ourselves. And, on the other hand, it is easy for someone focused on organizing and systems change to argue that the world has huge and urgent challenges that won’t wait for us to heal ourselves. The problem arises when we don’t heal the emotional and psychological harm that has been caused by systemic inequality. This leads us to burn ourselves out and often replicate the very dynamics we are trying to stop, hurting ourselves and hurting each other. Fortunately, a third perspective is beginning to emerge – one that integrates healing and transformation with organizing and systems change.

One of the people that taught me deep and lasting lessons about the need for us to work at the intersections of healing and social justice — and about the need for Healing-Centered Youth Organizing — is a young woman named Rayna. When I met Rayna she was 16-years old and had already suffered more loss than some experience in their entire lives. When Rayna was just 18-months old, her mother fell victim to gun violence, shot while pregnant with Rayna’s younger brother. Her mother was put on life-support so that the baby could be brought to term, but she never recovered from her injuries. Then, when Rayna was about 12-years old, her father’s girlfriend was murdered, and her uncle was killed on the street where she still lives today. As a teenager, Rayna lost countless friends and peers to violence. On her 16^th birthday, she opened her front door and saw her childhood friend lying on the ground surrounded by a large group of people. A police officer had shot and killed him.

It was shortly after this that I first met Rayna. A friend encouraged her to join Silence The Violence (which would grow into Urban Peace Movement). Rayna tells us now that she was reluctant to come because, based on her experiences up to that point, she had trouble believing that peace was even possible. When her friend invited her, she thought our program would be “one of those places where you go and adults tell you that you are a bad person.” But thankfully—for her and for us—that is not what happened. Instead, she saw peers and adults working together, respecting each other, trying to find a path out of the vicious cycle of violence. Over time, she came to participate regularly. She attended community events and trainings. She went on retreats with us. And, within a matter of months she became one of our most committed young people. In Silence The Violence/Urban Peace Movement she found a new community of support, and in our trainings she learned skills and tools that [she says] “helped me calm down.” Outside of our meetings, she sought grief counseling. All of these things made a big difference in Rayna’s life. She began to open herself up to the possibility of happiness, daring to be vulnerable in the way that only a hopeful person can.

Based on this foundation of healing, Rayna entered into her first organizing campaign with our organization—a coalitional effort to secure a “community jobs agreement” for a large redevelopment project in Oakland expected to create thousands of new jobs. After attending her first City Council meeting, Rayna came back to our other youth and said something like, “Did you guys know that there’s a room over there where a group of people decide about things that affect our lives, like what the police can or can’t do and what type of jobs are going to come to this city?”

During the campaign, Rayna discovered she had a knack for public speaking and the ability to quickly understand complex public policy arguments. She got up at that first City Council meeting and gave a two-minute testimony so powerful that the Council President actually interrupted the next speaker to call Rayna back up to the podium. He then paused the meeting to thank her personally for her remarks.

Rayna emerged as one of the lead spokespeople for the Campaign for Quality Jobs. Our coalition, Revive Oakland, ended up winning a landmark jobs policy providing for a community-based job center, living wages, protections for formerly incarcerated workers, and local hire, among other things.

Through the campaign, Rayna learned that her voice could help shift Oakland’s trajectory. And if her voice was powerful enough to change the course of local history, it could also transform her own life. Rayna landed a job shortly thereafter and she literally walks taller now than before. It was community organizing that gave her back to herself, helping her rediscover that which she had lost touch with in all of her trauma. She found her voice and her own power through organizing, and that is a critical part of the healing process.

Today, Rayna is a powerful, dynamic, self-assured young woman. Like most young adults, she is still finding her way. But she has a sense of confidence and conviction that sets her apart. Working with Rayna has been a pleasure and a privilege, and I wish that I could take credit for the person she has become and is becoming, but she did it herself. All we did was create the space for her leadership to emerge. In return, she has reminded me time and time again of why I fell in love with the power of organizing in the first place. And she has reinforced an important lesson: organizing and healing are not separate or competing things. They are intricately bound together, and together they will help us achieve the freedom we know is possible.

One of the most well known passages from the Bible reads, “The first shall be last, and the last shall be first.” Most often, this passage is interpreted to mean that those who have had the least access to opportunity and those who have been cast out to the margins of our society will eventually be the ones that lead. This is a very powerful interpretation that runs consistent with social justice theory. However, I have come to see that this passage may hold another simultaneous meaning.

In the conventional, materialist view of the world, we put things first and people last. We believed that if we had enough of whatever it was that we thought we needed (money, fame, status, etc.) then it would make us out to be better people. That turned out not to be the case. Another view is emerging which says that we should start first by paying attention to who we are “being” and let who we are being guide our actions and our decisions. This will, in turn, help us to have a better society and a better world – one that benefits all of us. In this way we will put what was once first last and what was last first.

Social change organizations must start to take our role as “generators” of hope and optimism much more seriously. We must claim our victories, no matter how small, whether victories over violence and despair, personal victories, or political and economic victories. These seemingly small wins will help us build the momentum and capacity required to create a movement strong enough to restore balance to our society. Wins generate hope. And, hope carries with it a certain kind of momentum that adds a ‘boost’ to our capacity to bring forth new possibilities and new realities into this world.

I don’t think of my own “practice,” my own healing, as something entirely separate from the social justice work that I am involved in. As much as possible I work to integrate them. And, over time, I have come to see that my social justice work has become part of my practice. I believe that the work of social change, the work of reimagining our world, is sacred.

For a fuller exploration of healing-centered youth organizing, read Nicole’s report available on the Urban Peace Movement website: Healing-Centered Youth Organizing: A Framework for Youth Leadership in the 21st Century.

The connections between systemic oppression, health, and healing became clear to me in the summer of 1999 when I was helping to organize a Type 2 diabetes support group at Las Fuentes Health Clinic in Guadalupe, Arizona, a free health clinic that served multiple generations of Guadalupe’s mostly Yaqui and Mexican immigrant community.

I was door knocking every day to recruit participants for our support group and often the community members would invite me into their homes to learn more about our program. Our conversations usually strayed from the difficulties of living with Type 2 diabetes and led to discussions about race, class, gender, food security, and environmental health/racism.

I learned from the Guadalupe community that health and healing were influenced by factors much larger than an individual’s ability to process sugar.  I learned that the community had its own strategies for living with Type 2 diabetes and that the last thing they wanted was a 19 year old college student lecturing them about how to take care of themselves.

I made sure that our support group centered on participants sharing their strategies and stories with one another, without didactic interference from the organizers and “expert” medical folks.

As I ended my time with Las Fuentes and the Guadalupe community I felt a burning desire to practice public health with an awareness of systemic oppression and the intersections of poverty, race, class, gender, environment, and culture. I left Arizona and set my sights on going to graduate school for a Masters in Public Health.

Those plans changed in 2003 when I met Doc, a Barefoot Doctor/acupuncturist and the person who trained me as a street medic in Chicago. Feeling alienated, frustrated and burned out by the Chicago activist world, I went to acupuncture school to see how I might become a public health practitioner using the tools of Traditional East Asian Medicine. I wanted to help keep my loved ones involved and well in social justice and movement work.

Like many others, I had come to the realization that social justice spaces and movement work can be deeply gratifying, invigorating, nourishing, and healing – but also sources of great conflict, violence, isolation, unexamined privilege, and internalized oppression.

By 2010 I was a brand new acupuncturist offering sliding scale services to activists, organizers, and folks who are normally priced out of getting acupuncture at the market rate.

That was also the year that I had the honor and privilege of helping to coordinate the Healing Justice Practice Space at the US Social Forum with a team of truly brilliant and visionary folks from all over the country. Through this experience I found Healing Justice that brings together all the ways healing can be done on individual, group, and systemic levels.

According to Cara Page, Healing Justice is “a framework that seeks to lift up resiliency and wellness practices as a transformative response to generational violence and trauma in our communities.”

Healing Justice gave me a way to identify my felt-but-unnamed desires for healing myself and facilitating healing in others. Healing Justice helped me to further challenge myself and examine my own internalized capitalism and oppression. Now, as a practitioner of Traditional East Asian Medicine and Healing Justice, I see my role as supporting the creation of whole, integrated, inter-generational, abolitionist, actively anti-racist, feminist, queer, and truly liberated movements.

Today I work at Sage Community Health Collective which my fellow co-founder Stacy Erenberg describes as:

… a sliding scale acupuncture and bodywork clinic that works outside the medical industrial complex by providing harm reductionist, affordable, non-judgmental and trauma-informed services at an affordable rate. We are a worker owned collective so we make all our decisions based on consensus and have a non- hierarchal structure.  We are deeply rooted in meeting people where they are at, self-determination of communities and transformative justice. We are trying to create another way outside the system. It’s not perfect but we are always open to suggestions for growth and building with community.

For me, our non-hierarchical worker collective model challenges us to practice all of this every single day. We are regularly discussing ways to consciously navigate within capitalism as anti-capitalists. Our sliding scale forces us to transform conversations about money, which are often rooted in shame. As harm reductionists, we strive to have conversations about money that meet people where they are.

Our work is part of creating our next economy based on mutual aid, mutual accountability, and communities of resistance and care that do not dispose of anyone, do not leave anyone out, and do not fight one another for limited resources: communities that honor the personal as deeply political.

Our work is part of movement building that honors complexity and intentionally creates spaces to heal and bridge where we can and creatively renovate new solutions for the deep challenges we face in our world.

Our work is part of movement building that draws upon a multiplicity of healing and accountability strategies and tactics that creatively responds to our short-term needs and unravels dynamics that are generations old.

In our work we are constantly learning, growing, transforming, and widening the circle of Healing Justice through our organizing with the Chicago Healing Justice Network and beyond.

And every day I give thanks to the Guadalupe community that so wisely guided me toward this path.

—

Feature photo: Juliana Pino