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Nexus releases new report on “Healing Justice”

Nexus, along with the four other partners of the Leaders of Color Collaborative (Coalition of Asian American Leaders, Hope Community, Native American Community Development Institute and Voices for Racial Justice) have been in conversation for a few years about training leaders for community and systems change. As we shared our stories and ideas for a new narrative around why leadership development looks different for communities of color and indigenous communities (POCI), we came to a collective agreement that we were often sending leaders into toxic spaces and began to discuss the work of healing ourselves and healing our communities. We began to meet with elders and a few local healers. This conversation turned into the need for some kind of action when we realized that, while we had been talking about this for years, many of us were struggling with how to set this up. We knew that we wanted to hear from those who are already doing healing work. We were fortunate to hire someone with a background in healing justice work, Susan Raffo, and asked her to interview POCI healers in our community about what it means to build healing work as part of our organizational infrastructure. This report is the result of those conversations. They represent a conversation with 23 healers representing multiple communities, generations and approaches to healing. We asked them what we need to do to support collective healing. We asked them about infrastructure. We asked them about culture. And we asked them to give us concrete steps for change. Read the report