Shifting toward the healing framework of Health Justice means building an inclusive network of staff, practitioners, volunteers, and clients who represent the diverse identities of the communities we serve in order to provide equitable and accessible care. This healing is informed by and contributes to many movements that envision long-term liberation, including disability, economic, food, gender, Indigenous, immigration, racial, and reproductive justice movements.

Health Justice remembers and honors the ancestral healing traditions that inform modern healthcare. Ancestral healing traditions from Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) have been completely absorbed into White Western Medicine without any recognition, despite these knowledge systems forming the foundation of what we consider “medicine” today. Modern appropriations of ancestral healing have also separated spirituality from medicine, losing the holistic aspect of healing that stems from these worldviews. Health Justice embraces holistic healing models that remember the interconnections between the mind, body, spirit, and Earth. More importantly, Health Justice honors the ancestral knowledge that these models come from, especially if that ancestry is different from our own.

Health Justice is a framework for healing from the many injustices of our existing healthcare systems and practices. In the United States, we are healing from centuries of settler colonialism and racial capitalism that led to the massive displacement of Native and Black communities, institutionalized violence against people of color, and irreversible environmental damage, among other harms. This legacy of violence created healthcare systems and practices in which both people and care are commodified. Social inequalities shaped by systemic oppression determine who is worthy of care and who is not, who can provide care and who cannot, and even who is healthy and who is not.

Medical institutions and practitioners consistently discriminate against people based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and sexual orientation, disability, immigration status, education level, and class. Yet people who hold one or more of these “marginalized” identities face medical violence even before attempting to access care. Systemic oppression has real—and often severe—negative health outcomes. Extreme stress and environmental racism, for example, can cause pervasive chronic health problems, leading to a higher prevalence of illnesses such as cancer, diabetes, and degenerative bone and tissue diseases in marginalized communities.

For many people, mainstream healthcare is both inaccessible and inadequate. At the core of Health Justice is bodily autonomy, giving people the skills and the choices to heal themselves in the ways that feel best to them. Sade Musa, a community educator and healer, explains:

“Whether we’re talking about emancipation from slavery or incarceration or medical apartheid, we’re talking about bodily autonomy. When we give people the skills to heal themselves as much as possible and connect that to how our ancestors would heal themselves as an act of resistance or self-determination, they gain the confidence to push back against the running narrative.”

Health Justice is a community of care. So many people are doing the deep work of collective healing, remembering, and reclaiming. As an organization healing from our own internal legacies of white supremacy culture and privilege, we are particularly inspired by both BIPOC-led healing as well as white healers who are practicing liberatory healthcare. We are actively working on building out the list of organizations below that we want to lift up on this page, and that have given their enthusiastic consent to be listed here.

Authorship Acknowledgement: This page was crafted in partnership by Margot Jeanne Cohen and former Co-Director Nathalie Rodríguez.