Support Collective Healing, Resilience, and Thriving

Self-healing communities is a concept developed by ACE Interface and refers to a...

 practice of inclusion, compassion, and appreciation for the core gifts of every person while recognizing that offering those gifts can be more difficult for people most affected by toxic stress and other adversities (1). Laura Porter

Self-healing communities can use capacity-building processes to:

  • improve connections, hope and efficacy

  • examine patterns of thinking and acting

  • nurture culture change that promotes healing and strengthens community resilience (2).


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Enough! Together We Can End Family Violence

Example: Mujeres, Salud y Liderazgo (MSL) Peer Leaders, many of whom are domestic violence survivors, initiated a family violence prevention project called ¡Ya Basta!. The project provides training about family violence to develop support in the Latinx community for ending family violence, to provide advocacy, public education and training for Educadores de Familia, and expand and enhance support groups, facilitated by trained Latina Peer Leaders and experienced mental health clinicians.

Click here to learn more about The Latina Center. 


Shawn Ginwright reminds us: 

  • just as trauma is a collective experience, healing is also experienced collectively

  • just as health and well-being are defined as more than the absence of disease, justice is more than the absence of oppression. 

He encourages a move from a focus on individual experiences > to a collective awareness > to collective action that fosters collective healing (3). 

Collective healing involves a restoration of well-being through….

  • culture

  • spirituality  

  • civic action

….offering opportunities for meaning, belonging, sense of purpose, and development of self-identity (4). 

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. 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 (5).

Another way to nurture self-healing communities is by incorporating restorative practices.

By addressing the impact of violence, restorative practices help to heal harm, meet human needs, promote equity, and strengthen community bonds (6).

Restorative practices: 

  • Work to > heal and strengthen relationships and connections within the community.

  • Require > culture change in how a community thinks about harm and reparation, replacing ineffective and harmful policies and practices.

  • Shift and strengthen > social norms, patterns, beliefs and create new processes and structures (7).

An example of healing-centered engagement and restorative practices is 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 (8).

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RYSE was born out of young people of color (YPOC) organizing to shift the conditions of violence, distress, and dehumanization in which they suffer, survive, succeed, dream, and die. Every day YPOC struggle, succeed, and exceed metrics of compliance. RYSE is working to reimagine, uplift and hold metrics of liberation - where resilience is the baseline, not the benchmark. Where solidarity and resistance replace or enhance self-efficacy and civic engagement (9). Kanwarpal Dhaliwal

 

Sources:

  1. Porter L, Martin K, and Anda R (June 29, 2016) Publisher: The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation https://www.rwjf.org/en/library/research/2016/06/self-healing-communities.html

  2. Porter L, Martin K, and Anda R (June 29, 2016) Publisher: The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation https://www.rwjf.org/en/library/research/2016/06/self-healing-communities.html

  3. Shawn Ginwright (2015) Hope and Healing in Urban Education (p. 54). Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.

  4. Ibid

  5. Ibid

  6. The Contra Costa County Call to Action p 7 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kxjRVg4X3J8xRUz_O-fopomKEGQJA5fE/view?ts=5e41e033

  7. Community Health & Restorative Practices, International Institute for Restorative Practices. https://www.iirp.edu/resources/community-health-restorative-practices

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

  9. Kanwarpal Dhaliwal. ACEs 2018 Conference and Pediatrics Symposium: Action to Access