Third Root Press
Third Root Has Healing Presence
at 2010 US Social Forum
By Jacoby Ballard, New York, NY
July, 2010
Telesh Lopez and myself, Jacoby Ballard of Third Root Community Health Center attended the 2010 US Social Forum in Detroit in June.
We were grateful to have worked with a national team of healers, healthcare practitioners, and organizers in the USSF Healing Practice Space for the 6 months leading up to the Forum. We also deeply appreciated that healing had been given space and importance at the Social Forum- healing spaces are not often created at political conferences and gatherings, and we saw this as a great opportunity to not only reach other practitioners, but create a conversation with the larger movement about the role of healing in our movements.
Third Root was part of national calls and planning initially, and then due to our capacity this spring, we had to step back until the actual Forum. In Detroit, Third Root took a lead in helping shape and create the space at the Social Forum. Practitioners were from all over the country, sharing values of equal access to healthcare, a broad spectrum view of what is considered healthcare, and seeing the connections between the systems of oppression that we face and our experience of illness or disease.
The USSF is a space created from the World Social Forum model, acknowledging that if a better world is possible, a different US is necessary. First held in Atlanta, Georgia in 2007, and recently in Detroit, Michigan, this is a gathering of progressive organizers, activists, artists, funders, and musicians interested in social justice work-covering issues from racism, immigration policies and detentions, the War on Terror, the War on Drugs, sexism in our organizations and movements, conversations with elder organizers, the body as political, and much more. The scope is broad, and the intersections are many: environmental justice organizers who are being targeted by the FBI for their activism in the Northwest shared workshops with former political prisoners and family of prisoners from the 60s and 70s. National Domestic Workers Alliance held a conference at this years USSF, having been launched at the USSF in Atlanta. Organizers from Generation 5, a project whose goal is to end child abuse in 5 generations, held workshops on the way that trauma is held in the body.
Third Root was created as a space to bring social justice to healthcare and health and wellbeing to social justice work, and so working at the Health and Healing Justice Space at the USSF is a natural outgrowth of our position in progressive work. Third Root attended the USSF because we support the work of social justice organizers, and see healing as a central component of the change that we are trying to make in the world. In New York, we have begun to work with organizations to offer relaxing and rejuvenating retreats, and in more long-term ways to bsupport and create wellness in the very structures of organizations doing crucial and difficult work.
We also went to see and experience the way that healing and healthcare is being approached by our movements. What we found was a reality check-it's not being prioritized at all, and organizers are burning out and this impacts others and their work. Like all forms of oppression, we saw this sidelining of healing as institutional, interpersonal, and internalized. We saw this dynamic in the relationship of the Healing Practice Space to the USSF organizers: the separation of medical and holistic practices by the Social Forum organizers; putting holistic practices in another, separate building with little published about its existence; and by the scheduling of the entire forum, with little time for rest, but 5 12-hour days, and in seeing very few workshops on health projects and healing from oppressions. We saw this dynamic as interpersonal: how health practitioners were related to by the Social Forum staff, and the desperation that we were approached with by attendees of the Forum. We saw this as internalized, that organizers do not consider themselves worthy of rest, healing, and nurture-that there is always someone worse off than them, so they experience guilt and shame in taking care of themselves.
Telesh and I experienced all of this with the Healing Space practitioners, from all parts of the US. We are grateful to have comrades and colleagues now across the country, practitioners that experienced all this together and who are working to position healing as critical in their local movements. The Social Forum proves to be a space where folks can come together and strategize but it is also devastating in many ways, and also showed us that not only is there ROOM for our work in the movement, but our work is VITAL to the movement. If we don't intentionally create space to take care of ourselves and one another, and heal from all that we've each been through and face every day in this world, than our work is hollow.
We were called by the National Planning Committee in times of crisis, but not valued for our work as maintenance and preventative care. We were approached by attendees who were upset, overwhelmed, and anxious, or whose self care practices were deprioritized or absent to begin with. Clearly all of these people needed our services, and we were happy to provide them. Adrienne Marie Brown, USSF Coordinator, said, "The healers literally saved my life in the middle of the forum, and I am not the only one. It was one of the spaces/processes I heard continuous amazing reviews about from everyone who interacted with y'all. I am excited to see this part of the movement grow, it gives me the utmost hope."
In Detroit, it was clear that our movements need to become healthier, and prioritize health and healing in a way that may change the very shape and scope of our organizations. Many people talk about the exhaustion of their organizing work, though they may love it, and many, many people burn out. Currently we see a shift of many former organizers attending nursing school, herbal medicine school, social work school, public health school, acupuncture school, and yoga teacher trainings. This shift that many individuals are making is emblematic of the ways that our organizations need to shift to make better human beings out of all of us, in the most holistic sense. We envision organizations that nourish and cherish their organizers in such a way that people become healthier and empowered through organizing.
