UPDATED: Funding Healing Justice and Holistic Security
*Many have asked about the kinds of healing justice and holistic security requests we’ve gotten from grantee partners. In 2021 we updated the original 2020 post with a new set of slides that visualize the kinds of requests we’ve received.
When we speak with frontline leaders, one of the things we hear most often is that they need resources to care for their people - the humans doing the incredibly important work to move us towards climate, racial, and gender justice. These leaders are constantly challenged to keep their staff, volunteers, and communities safe and supported in the face of a global pandemic and escalating sexist, anti-black, and anti-immigrant rhetoric and violence. Support for individual leaders and self-care practices are not sufficient to meet the challenges they face. Tools and practices for collective care that tend to the impacts of trauma and harm while also transforming the systems that cause them are also needed. Funders can help resourcing these tools and practices.
The resources below visualize this work, the grantmaking, and the supports our grantees have requested.
Infographic: What is Healing Justice?
Early Learning
The Hive Fund hired esteemed healing justice practitioner Cara Page to help facilitate learning with our staff and some of our advisors. We participated in the Funders for Justice Healing Justice Institute and consulted with other funders exploring healing justice. We learned about the Southern roots of the healing justice framework that emerged in the early 2000s as organizers and cultural practitioners were trying to care for their communities in the face of relentless sexist, white supremacist and anti-immigrant attacks alongside tremendous loss due to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. More than fifteen years after the healing justice framework was created, organizations working for climate and racial justice are still under-resourced to deal with systemic conditions of trauma, violence and abuse.
“Healing justice...identifies how we can holistically respond to and intervene on generational trauma and violence, and to bring collective practices that can impact and transform the consequences of oppression on our bodies, hearts and minds.”
The Hive Fund defines healing justice and holistic security as the support needed to help Black women, Indigenous women, other women of color and their communities heal, transform, and be protected from the harmful effects of intergenerational and ongoing trauma, violence, pollution, and weathering from white supremacy and sexism—as well as immediate threats to physical, digital, and psychosocial safety.
A healing justice and holistic security frame requires us to hold and tend to both present harm and historic traumas simultaneously. It is rooted in the belief that both people and systems can be transformed. Healing justice honors the tools and practices that have always helped us heal, kept us safe, and allowed us to survive. These tools and practices have often been a part of frontline and movement work, but organizations haven’t always had funding to support it. A healing justice and holistic security frame also creates space for learning and the development of new tools and modalities that meet current needs.
The Hive Fund Approach to Healing Justice
We are funding three sets of practices:
Healing practices help us transform the impact of harmful systems.
Security practices help prevent and minimize harm from existing systems.
Power-building practices help us change the systems causing harm.
These practices take place at many levels. At the Hive Fund, we are resourcing interventions at the individual, organizational, and field-wide levels.
At the individual level, funding may support practices like meditation, mindfulness and somatic practices, child care and elder care, or safe houses and secure technologies. While practices may be employed at the individual level, they are also connected to an understanding that healing and security are critical parts of our collective liberatory practice.
At the organizational level, funding may support transformative justice and conflict resolution mediators, cyber and physical security for organizations, coaching and skills building for shared leadership models and other resources to develop healthy organizational culture. Funding at this level allows organizations to create systems and develop ways of being in relationship with each other that do not replicate harm, but build our collective power to combat oppressive systems.
At the field level, funding may support mapping and funding networks of healing and security practitioners and trainers that grantee partners have access to.
Funding Healing Justice and Holistic Security requires transformation and trust
Supporting healing justice and holistic security practices does not require funders to create and impose something new. It is a call to honor and resource the practices and tools communities already rely on - and organizations may already be using - to care for themselves and survive.
This requires a transformation of our understanding of what is fundable. While making general operating support grants is in the Hive Fund’s DNA, we are learning that grantee partners are so accustomed to imposed limits on things that are deemed ”overhead'' that they are often surprised that they can (and should) spend grant funds on healing and security practices. Because philanthropy has historically over-scrutinized budgets of organizations led by people of color, particularly Black, Indigenous and Latinx women, many of these practices have been operating “underground” and without resources.
Resourcing this work requires trust and deeper listening. Funding healing justice and holistic security work requires us to fund a practice and a process that may never have a tangible report out that is shared back with us. Sharing safety plans and healing practices may make our partners and their communities vulnerable, and that is not something we should require for them to be able to get the resources they need to do this vital work.
In late 2020, the Hive Fund made initial healing justice and holistic security gifts to existing grantees last month. These gifts didn’t require an application and won’t require a report. While these gifts are just a start as we prepare to roll out a more robust healing justice and holistic security offering, we heard back from grantees that these small gifts were immediately put to good use.
Continued Evolution of the Healing Justice Grants Program
We hired Ananse Consulting to work one-on-one with grantee partners to help them identify tools and practices they are currently using and those that they would utilize if they had more resources. The Ananse team helped us take healing justice and holistic security from theory to practice through a first round of supplemental grants in 2021, totaling $690,000 in support to existing Hive Fund grantee partners and $500,000 to support healing justice and holistic security practices in the field. While we have much to learn about how to best support this work, we are committed to moving resources to support healing and security practices in addition to core general support funding. We look forward to sharing our learning journey with you here going forward.
Healing Justice and Holistic Security Anonymized Requests
