How to architect healing justice? Reflections from an organizational design experiment with Restore Oakland

• In Event: Activist-Scholarship as Method: Re-Thinking Knowledge Production, Community-based Sociality, and Liberatory Futurities

Abstract

This presentation reflects on an ongoing scholar-practitioner collaboration with Restore Oakland Inc (ROI), a Black, Indigenous, and people of color-centered organization in the Bay Area that advocates for restorative and economic justice. Our participatory action research project built the organization's "structuring capacity," or its ability to architect its power and its people towards greater impact on health and justice issues in the Bay Area.

Restore Oakland offers programming that supports individual level health by supporting the healing of community members' trauma, particularly resulting from racism and state violence. For instance, Restore hosts community circles for relationship-building, conflict resolution and care work for community members in need, and public grief rituals for loved ones lost to violence. In addition, through its work on the "Care First, Jails Last" campaign, ROI also fights for community level health. In particular, the organization advocates to divert funds away from an expansion of mental health treatment inside the local jail and towards upstream mental health and housing support services to prevent incarceration.

Through our research collaboration, the organization developed a new organizational intervention to bridge between its individual and community level work: a basebuilding program that would develop a committed constituency of everyday people. These would become Restore Oakland members who could participate in both individual level and community level health projects, thus linking both sides of ROI's work.

Our project studies how this bridge has been built through ROI's unique healing justice methodology. While some political strategies use agitational emotions like anger to mobilize people towards action, Restore Oakland recognizes that these approaches can sometimes exacerbate the pain of Black, Indigenous, and people of color communities stressed by the grief and rage of racial and health injustice. We found that ROI's healing justice methodology aims to use individual level health practices (like technologies of circle-keeping) as an anti-inflammatory politic that can heal trauma in order to move people towards more resilient and effective action in the public sphere. This healing justice methodology has enabled the organization to organize both for health outcomes as the ends (f.e. improved funding for mental health services), and through health practices (like circle-keeping) as the means.

Our participatory action research supported Restore's basebuilding intervention through an organizational design process to architect a new membership base and democratic governance structure, and an iterative quasi-experiment to implement these new designs within the organization. Throughout the process, we assessed the impacts of the intervention through innovative "healing justice" metrics we designed, which capture shifts in health and power at individual, organizational, and wider community levels as a result of ROI's organizing.

In this presentation, we reflect on the challenges and opportunities of collaboration between social movement organizations and professional researchers: the risks and rewards of trying to measure intangibles like power and healing, reflections on how we ourselves manage the powers conferred by credentialing and funding, and how social movement and power-oriented research with organizational leaders differs from participatory action research with more vaguely boundaried communities.

Author

• Melanie Brazzell, Harvard University