Conceptual Framework: Institute for Healing Justice

´´The Power of Healing Together´´

Violence against women is one of the most challenging systems of oppression we face. Therefore, we can't change it on our own. We must change these systems together.

Healing together means putting in place processes that promote healing for collective and personal liberation processes for women's organizations s in the medium and long -term and, to rapidly respond and support their security in the face of violence and violent attacks on defenders and leaders on the front line.

Although patriarchy as a model of domination of women is millennial and precedes the colonialist and expansion of the capitalist model imposed in Our Americas, the violence and exclusion of colonialism have greatly marked our collective experience. The exploitation and looting of natural resources and violent domination and murder of the bodies of the native peoples prevail in the veins of our territories and accommodate the new needs of the dominant sectors that exercise economic and political powers. In this sense, we recognize that the bodies of women were the first territory of conquest and its justification through racism, racist and discriminatory ideologies and practices of native and Afro-descendant peoples that remain to this day and that continue to be the Achilles heel of rural and poor women in urban centers, migrants and those with physical or mental disabilities, both in the North and in the Global South.

These processes of conquest or subordination are also combined in decision-making processes at home, in social institutions, communities, and organizations. To transform the millennial consequences of these models of oppression on women, girls, and young women, a revolutionary and liberationist response is required that considers multiple and simultaneous forms of collective healing.

Program Objectives

Institute for Healing Justice is a vehicle for the programmatic articulation to transform the traumas resulting from the violence generated by models of oppression, domination, and exclusion imposed on women, girls, boys, and young people through social structures and institutions and in society in general.

Our goal is to Heal Together by putting ancestral knowledge at the center that promotes (1) mind-body autonomy and self-care; (2) equity and access to comprehensive health;  (3) promotion of sexual and reproductive rights;  (4) defense of cultural and linguistic diversity and rights.

The Healing Justice Institute develops its programs, projects, and activities with the support of other Latinas en Poder programs: (1) Transnational Summit (dialogue and research); (2) the Edna Viruel-Fuentes Transnational Feminist School (training and capacity building); (3) Center for Political, Legal Empowerment and Advocacy, CEPLIT, and (4) PICIS Foundation (programs to promote financial autonomy).

Feminist Participatory Action Research and Feminist Popular Education are our methodological research for popular collective participation, which guide our dialogue process with territorial and ancestral community organizations. These are intrinsically nourished by the knowledge, experiences, and practices to create healing processes and collective responses to continue growing and strengthening.