This workshop is inspired by a Master’s-level social work course, Community Building, where the group focuses on self-care and healing justice as critical for social workers in training. Healing justice is a framework and set of practices that attends to oppression, trauma, and stress by decolonizing institutions and culture while creating opportunities for personal and inter-personal healing. It is concerned with the whole self, including the body, mind, heart, spirit, nature, and community. Through study of Adrienne Maree Brown's Emergent Strategy, a new voice in transformative justice, the workshop will begin with meditation followed by check-ins about real struggles in our social justice work and lives. In this context, we will read some of Brown’s work aloud and everyone is supported in writing a poem using one of her lines as a prompt. Through a collective and embodied process, we will use our individual poems to create a collective poetry collage.
