Since 2020, Healing Solidarity has been building a multi-racial collective of consultants that support organisations to build the “missing” skillsets which have been laid bare in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic and #BlackLivesMatter uprisings around the world.
We help organisations build anti-racist practice and culture and work to usher in the political courage, cultural humility, and an ethic of care in the nonprofit and philanthropy sector.
We aim to support people and organisations on a learning journey to avoid replication of the harm that has been done in and by our sector. Our consultancy work also helps to resource the online conference, space and events that we run.
All our work has an intersectional, feminist anti-racist lens and supports practitioners and organisations to:
- challenge injustice in our practice and re-imagining our sector,
- resist the working practices that overwhelm and exhaust us, and
- reflect and sustain ourselves as people.
As professionals, we recognise that it is the leadership and individual actions within complex systems needed to shift hierarchical structures and dominant culture ways of working.
We are particularly keen to work with organisations to be part of rethinking, reimagining, and reshaping the future of our sector - reflecting the team of consultants’ own lived experiences around the world.
We are keen to promote healing from the past and to generate a new narrative and practices about what it means us to develop a practice of global solidarity that heals injustice.
Our anti-racism offer is a bit different…
Healing Solidarity is a collective of consultants working together to be part of rethinking, reimagining, and reshaping the future of the international aid sector. We are working to figure out how to create solidarity that heals, rather than perpetuates injustice.
There are many excellent consultants out there offering:
- Unconscious bias training
- Micro-aggressions training
- Diversity and Inclusion training
- Intersectionality training
We don’t. We recognise the value of such training, but our offer is different.
We offer something deep, raw and transformational.
We will not ‘train’ your people to be aware of their white supremacy and the way it plays out in their communications with colleagues and communities they are serving. Rather, we will hold space for deep exploration, sharing, relationship and trust-building. These issues are relational and can’t happen tidily in individual heads- they need to happen in conversation, in community.
Our processes won’t fit into half a day. You will need to allocate a real chunk of time, spread out over many months, even years. Deeply established systems of oppression and inequality don’t change quickly.
Don’t expect to sit back and receive information from snazzy slides. Racialised trauma sits in our physical bodies, so our approach is to deliberately invite people to reconnect with their bodies, their emotions, their own personal stories. This is much deeper than most people would normally go in their workplaces and it is a crucial part of the healing that is necessary for us to find a way forward together.
Our processes aren’t tidy. Opening to messiness, imperfection and uncertainty are some of the ways we try to model working outside of the white supremacy culture mould.
We don’t come with all of the magic answers for how you can decolonise your organisation. We come with questions, the ability to facilitate ‘brave’ spaces of unlearning and dialogue, and the belief that you and your people have the answers.
Efficiency is not our priority in this work: creating grounded spaces for care and healing is. We can’t and won’t promise you that once our consultancy work is completed your organisation will be ‘done’ in your anti-racism work. You will probably just be starting.
Our processes aren’t predictable. We can’t tell you what will come up in this process or how people will respond. We can commit to meeting whatever comes with compassion and care.
Our processes aren’t comfortable. Some of the conversations necessary to fully acknowledge the current presence and workings of white supremacy in the attitudes and behaviour of people and in organisational systems may feel deeply confronting, upsetting and hard. We work to build ‘brave’ spaces where these conversations can happen and people can build the muscles necessary to keep having them.
This is a pretty different offer from normal! If these ways of working resonate with the kind of organisational cultures you want to build, we welcome potential clients to contact us if you are ready to:
- Allocate adequate resources before, during and after these processes to build a serious strategy for embedding anti-racist practises within your organisation;
- Hear the rage, disappointment and hurt of your BIPOC staff and stakeholders, and do the emotional work as leaders to find ways to respond to it from a place of humility and accountability, not defensiveness;
- Take the time and do the work to centre the views and needs of your BIPOC staff and stakeholders in this anti-racism work;
- Work careful with us to work out how to integrate consent at every stage of this process;
- Allocate the resources to carry out the internal processes necessary to prepare your people to be ready to participate in this deep anti-racist process;
- Schedule any activities related to this work in a way that centres staff needs for rest and sleep.
To enquiry about working with us please contact tanya@healingsolidarity.org.