Healing Justice Principles: Some of What We Believe

Some things we believe in:

• the healing power of pleasure
• creating majority people of color and Native spaces for healing
• Centering the genius and leadership of disabled and chronically ill communities, for what we know about surviving and resisting the medical industrial complex and living with fierce beauty in our sick and disabled bodies. We say no to the medical industrial complex’s model of “cure or be useless,” instead working from a place of belief in the wholeness of disability, interdependence and disabled people as inherently good as we are. We understand that there can be no healing justice without disability justice
• eating together as a form of organizing and healing
• food justice and cooking as healing
• queer and trans and Two Spirit presence and brilliance
• Drawing our lineage as healers from our ancestors, the 201o US Social Forum’s Healing Justice Practice Space, indigenous and people of color feminism, disability justice and Health At Every Size.
• decolonization as a central goal and principle of our work
• building and maintaining relationship to the land as part of our healing practices
• centering indigenous sovreignity
• challenging fatphobia, using a Health at Every Size framework and creating healing spaces for all bodies to define what healthy means for them.
• feminsm of color and indigenous feminist leadership
• listening to and honouring our ancestors
• resisting the “cure” model and understanding that for many people, the goal of healing is not a “perfect” able body.
• centering patient autonomy and consent; understanding that folks we work on healing with are in charge of their own treatment decisions.
• sustainability as a political practice we get from disability justice. not burning out. doing what our  bodies can actually do.
• We acknowledge that many people don’t identify as healers, and want to complicate the idea of professionalization and “who gets to be a healer.”
• cheese
• sex positivity
• The process is the product. Treating each other well and making room for space, mistakes, things to take longer than we thought.
• We begin by listening

Some other badass lists of HJ Principles:

2012 Allied Media Conference Healing Justice Practice Space Principles

PRINCIPLES AND GUIDELINES

• We begin by listening.
• We are people of color, indigenous people, disabled people, and survivors of trauma, many genders, ages and classes of people, and we are committed to leading the work of building healing justice at the AMC.
• We do this work to lift up and politicize the role of health and healing in our movements as a critical part of the new world we are building.
• We honor individual and community agency, intuition, and innate wisdom, and therefore honor people’s rights to make decisions about their own bodies.
• We understand that health and wellness should be determined by the individual or community receiving care, and for many of us this includes the reality of disability, illness, and harm reduction. We accept and encourage individuals and communities defining health, healing, and wellness for themselves, and not based on normative models of healing.
• We center the genius and leadership of disabled and chronically ill communities, for what we know about surviving and resisting the medical industrial complex and living with fierce beauty in our sick and disabled bodies. We say no to the medical industrial complex’s model of “cure or be useless,” instead working from a place of belief in the wholeness of disability, interdependence and disabled people as inherently good as we are.
• We live in countries that deny health care access to people based on economic and identity status, and we must build alternative structures for giving and receiving care that are grounded in community and ancestral traditions and in the values of consent and equality. The Healing Justice Practice Space is a part of that work.
• We believe that medicine is media, and we work with the understanding that how we heal ourselves is directly related to how we see and interpret ourselves and the possibility for transformation.
• We are aware that the body does not live forever, and that we honor death as a part of the cycle of life

Healing & Health Justice Collective Organizing Principles
US Social Forum Detroit 2010

We are committed to People of Color & Indigenous leadership, in partnership with our allies, on building healing justice* work at the USSF.

We will lift up the leadership and conditions of Detroit to define the healing justice practice space and other programming for healing justice inside of a national context.

We enter this work through an anti-oppression framework that seeks to transform and politicize the role of healing inside of our movements and communities.

We are learning and creating this political framework about a legacy of healing and liberation that is meeting a particular moment in history inside of our movements that seeks to: regenerate traditions that have been lost; to mindfully hold contradictions in our practices; and to be conscious of the conditions we are living and working inside of as healers and organizers in our communities and movements.

We are building national relationships and dialogues to cultivate knowledge and to build reflection and exchange of our healing, transformative and resiliency practices in our regions and movements.

We believe in transparency on all levels so that we can have a foundation of trust, openness and honesty in our vision and action together.

We believe in open source knowledge; which means that all information and knowledge is to be shared and transferred to create deeper collaboration and cross-movement building strategy.

As we continue to create spaces for healing and sustainability throughout the US Social Forum and beyond; we will keep ourselves in mind as well as conscious of our own capacity and well being.

We believe in movement building and organizing within an anti-racist and anti-hierarchical framework that builds collective decision making, strategies, vision and action and does not seek to support only one model or one approach over others.

We believe that there is no such thing as joining this process too late; as we move forward, anyone who comes in when they come in are welcomed; and we will always remember that we are interconnected with many communities, struggles and legacies who have joined healing and resiliency practices with liberation in their work for centuries.

June 2010