Healing Is Essential for Change

“Social change is deeply connected to our own healing, reflection, and well-being.”
— Dr. Shawn Ginwright

Healing is often seen as a personal journey, but in our work with organizations and communities, we’ve found that it is not only individual but also collective and essential to systemic change.

We can’t transform what we don’t acknowledge. Too often, efforts for change focus solely on individuals—employees, leaders, and clients—without addressing the systems, structures, and histories that caused harm in the first place. True well-being comes not only from personal care but also from transforming the root causes of harm embedded in our institutions and cultures.

Audre Lorde wrote, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence; it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Healing becomes a powerful force for collective transformation—not just a means of survival but of thriving.

Healing-centered engagement moves us from coping to cultivating, regaining imagination, building critical consciousness, and interrupting cycles of trauma and disconnection. It shifts us from blaming individuals to optimizing systems for communities.

Radical healing recognizes that personal liberation is tied to collective well-being, critical consciousness empowers us to reflect and act within our sociopolitical environments, cultural authenticity and ancestral wisdom are sources of strength and pride—not liabilities—and radical hope is a belief in our collective ability to create change.

This work is not just about adjusting to disconnected systems—it’s about transforming them. Healing is an ongoing practice that restores agency, builds connection, and fosters community care. Developing healing-centered practices are key to fostering more humanizing and transformative spaces that lead to our individual and collective wholeness and well-being.  

Healing becomes a strategy for sustainable change when we embed healing into our movements. We create space for transformation—not only within ourselves but also in the systems that shape our lives.