About Us
Our Approach
In 2014, The Healing Project emerged from a simple yet urgent truth: healing is political, and our stories deserve space. Relaunched in 2023, it remains a sanctuary where racialized women reclaim voice, power, and community.
As a grassroots healing justice initiative and a growing research collective, our work is deeply rooted in Black and decolonial feminist perspectives. We ground our approach in the core principles of Healing Justice and Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR)—embracing the ethos of “No research on us without us” (Fine & Torre, 2021).
Why We Exist
Historically, Blackwomen’s voices have been silenced, erased, or distorted in dominant narratives about their identities, experiences, and well-being. Blackwomen have been misrepresented as inhumanly strong, unfeeling, and endlessly resilient—expected to endure harm without acknowledgment or repair. These dangerous myths sustain systemic injustice.
We reject and redress these erasures through the power of storytelling, witnessing, testimonio, and public memory work (re/membering). By amplifying our stories, we affirm our truths and carve pathways toward collective healing and liberation.
Who We Serve
While The Healing Project hyper-focuses on Blackwomen’s experiences, our work extends to all communities under siege—those historically marginalized, oppressed, and dispossessed. We believe that healing justice must be collective and that liberation is interconnected. In centering the voices and needs of Blackwomen, we strengthen broader movements for justice, repair, and radical transformation.
What We Believe
Healing justice is not individual—it is collective action. Liberation for Blackwomen requires that we “fight the world,” together (CRC, 1977). It demands that we break disciplinary boundaries, disrupt stock stories, and create spaces where authentic narratives can thrive. Through The Healing Project, we cultivate Radical, Authentic, Rigorous, and Environmentally Brave (R.A.R.E.) Spaces, where truth-telling and transformation are possible.
Our Goals
- Disrupt & Resist – Challenge and riot against dominant narratives of resilience and strength that uphold systemic harm.
- Create Brave Spaces – Partner with Blackwomen-led communities and organizations to cultivate spaces for justice, joy, healing, and liberation.
- Develop Healing Justice Frameworks – Adapt healing justice approaches to address the lived realities of Blackwomen across multiple systems of oppression.
- Organize & Resist – Uplift Blackwomen’s politics of refusal and collective care to fight mental health oppression, sexual and colonial violence, and epistemic injustice.
- Intervene Through Art – Use arts-based methodologies, creativity, and imagination to address social issues, reclaim joy, and drive research that serves and uplifts marginalized communities.
This is our commitment. This is R.A.R.E. Space.
JUSTICE/JOY/HEALING PRAXIS
re/membering.
Justice, joy, and healing are not separate pursuits—they are interdependent. They must exist in tandem, woven together as a necessary praxis for the deep work of liberation.
For many of us, as Blackwomen, our minds, bodies, and spirits have been conditioned to endure. We have been taught to hold our breath, to furrow our brows, to tighten our shoulders, to curl our toes, to shrink inward, and to remain on guard—always. We have been socialized to survive rather than to be.
Thus, our healing requires the work of re/membering—the process of reclaiming what has been fractured, erased, or dismembered by oppressive systems. It is the practice of re/learning how to breathe while swimming, how to move through the currents without drowning—a metaphor deeply rooted in Black feminist theory and epistemology.
For many Blackwomen, healing and resistance are codependent, inseparable forces that sustain us. At The Healing Project, our praxis is collective; it is the act of healing together through the arts, through storytelling, through presence—what Audre Lorde conceptualized as the radical act of being.
Through public memory work, testimony, and creative expression, we cultivate spaces where Blackwomen can bear witness to one another’s truths, where survival transforms into liberation, where we reclaim the fullness of our existence.
research collective
We are an intergenerational, interdisciplinary research collective—a community of differently situated scholars, storytellers, and visionaries united by a shared commitment to social justice and collective healing.
Rooted in Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) and Black feminist epistemologies, our collective challenges the boundaries of traditional research. We reject extractive methodologies that exploit marginalized communities and instead cultivate knowledge with, not on, those most impacted by oppression.
Our work extends across disciplines and lived experiences, bringing together:
- Scholars and students reimagining the role of research in liberation.
- Activists and organizers using knowledge as a tool for resistance and justice.
- Artists and storytellers harnessing creativity as a means of disruption, truth-telling, and healing.
- Blackwomen across communities whose wisdom and lived experiences shape our collective inquiry.
Through The Healing Project, we are not just studying resilience—we are intervening in the systems that make resilience necessary. We are not just documenting stories—we are reshaping narratives to honor the fullness of Blackwomen’s lives. Our research is action, our action is healing, and our healing is resistance.
This is knowledge work for justice. This is research in service of liberation.
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SOCIAL JUSTICE + COLLECTIVE HEALING VIA THE ARTS
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