“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.”
– Cara Page
Dismantling systems of oppression are integral to healing justice practices. To truly heal from the effects of systemic inequality, we challenge racial capitalism and lift up those healers and healing practices that center social justice & racial equity. Healing justice practices provide access to those most impacted by health disparities and necessarily prioritize leadership from these communities. As was more visible during the COVID-19 pandemic, Black, Indigenous, and people of color, disabled, and working poor communities bear the brunt of health disparities while also having limited access to holistic health and wellness options due to barriers like location and cost.
Healing justice includes economic justice. Ultimately, the confluence of challenges of running a business in NYC, while aiming to pay living and equitable wages amidst a global pandemic led to our closure.
In our closure, we leave this Healing Justice Map to continue to lift up and center the principals of Healing Justice we aimed to embody as a business, and we share the principles below with hope to seed this vision of Healing Justice into the future.
We define healing justice as a business model as businesses, organizations and service providers that:
1. Are led by those most impacted by health disparities, specifically BIPOC & local community members.
What justice means, from liberation practice, is healing the root cause. What equity means in liberation practice is ownership of the soil one lives on, and compensation that allows Black and brown folks to become and own their role as the fabric of a community.
For 13 years, Third Root Community Health Center was located in what has been the most racially and ethnically diverse neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY with 13 languages spoken. Black and Caribbean communities made up more than 75% of the population within our zip code (11226) and our practitioners were largely Black and brown.
We recognize that health disparities are a reflection of systemic inequality, rooted in Racial Capitalism, and that is reflected ultimately in poor health outcomes and shorter life spans for Black and brown and BIPOC trans community members. For this reason it is critical that those most impacted by health disparities in any community are at the forefront of leading health and healing efforts.
We center Healing Justice led by those most impacted by health disparities as central – those that live at the intersection of racism, classism, transphobia and ableism, are best able to articulate, envision, and lead practices that can truly heal a community.
** Healers and healing spaces led by white people (by people of European descent) are listed here if they have participated in racial equity training such as PISAB – “Undoing Racism”, and have an ongoing commitment to being in the practice of social justice and racial equity. Additionally, to strongly align with Healing Justice practices, they build an achievable timeline to train and promote BIPOC and long-standing local communities into leadership and decision making roles in their practice, if such collaboration is not already in place.
“Optical allyship is allyship that only serves at the surface level to platform the ‘ally’, it makes a statement but doesn’t go beneath the surface and is not aimed at breaking away from the systems of power that oppress.”
– Latham Thomas
2. Offer sliding scale, free, or scholarship options for services.
This creates access for folks who are priced out of / feel unwelcome within more mainstream wellness spaces that cater to gentrifying clientele. For example, at Third Root, we offered the Collective Care Fund (CCF) by application to provide free and low-fee service to Black, indigenous, people of color and trans folks. We also offered a “no one turned away for lack of funds” option for many of our drop in yoga & meditation classes, as well as all of our workshops, as well as Community Care Days which were free outdoor healing spaces. For many years prior to the pandemic, we maintained a robust sliding scale for all of our programming.
“Life is very short. What we have to do
must be done in the now,”
-Audre Lorde The Transformation of Silence
into Language and Action.
3. Pay a living and equitable wage.
“The economic system still depends on a profound racial hierarchy. It still depends on the degradation of Black labor and still depends on and develops tools to segregate and disenfranchise Black people and other working people.”
– Jennifer L. Morgan, NYU Department of Social and
Cultural Analysis Chair
The labor of black & brown, people of color, indigenous, immigrant, disabled, trans, formerly incarcerated, elder, and women workers is undervalued, underpaid & overlooked. At Third Root, we were at least 50% BlPOC in our ownership, staff & teacher roles, with a majority of women & queer folks. It was always a struggle to balance our anticapitalist values with our need to become solvent, and payroll was alway our highest overhead cost. Our commitment to remain accessible to our students and patients came into conflict with our ability to pay ourselves equitably. And yet we knew first hand that if we are not uplifting and sustaining healing justice providers, we can not expect this work to survive. Healing justice includes economic justice. Ultimately, this confluence of challenges amidst a global pandemic led to our closure. We simply weren’t able to pay ourselves enough to fulfill this fundamental principle of healing justice.
Additionally, in talking about equitable payment, we center acknowledgement of cultural appropriation and profiting from teachings that are not from our cultures of origin – we know that monetizing ancient healing traditions is problematic when its cultural roots are severed and divorced from its usage and application, particularly when profited off of within white supremacist capitalism. At Third Root, we aimed to honor and name the lineages of our practices especially when these were not of our own origins – and be fairly compensated for the labor of love that is sharing them in a dignified way. In the season before the pandemic hit, we instituted a reparations fund in which we reserved a portion of all profits to be paid back to healing justice organizations led by and for intergenerational healers within yogic, East Asian medicinal, indigenous traditions. In the same way many ancient teachings guide us toward balance and harmony, we aimed to strike a skillful balance between charging and earning fairly.
4. Center social justice and racial equity.
Our individual healing work is never outside of our collective healing work, and collective healing must include our collective liberation – from generations of white supremacy, settler-colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, ableism, homo/transphobia. Communities of color, immigrant, queer, trans and disabled communities continue to bear the disproportionate health impacts, and so these communities are centered in our vision and actions. For example, at Third Root, we provided trauma-informed & affinity group based programming, (such as Brown Sugar: Yoga for Folks of Color, Yoga for Abundant Bodies, Queer & Trans Yoga, and a QTIBIPOC meditiation). We provided herbal education courses that actively addressed settler-colonialism and cultural appropriation in the procurement of native plant medicine. We maintained an anti-racist, anti-oppression code of conduct for staff and community, and ran regular racial justice & equity meetings within our staff, teacher & volunteer community.
“Dismantling systems of oppression is integral to building a world in which we all feel free and can fully live in our purpose individually and collectively. We are our ancestors’ continued presence. We believe in our community’s right
and ability to heal”
– Latinx Therapists Action Network