Detroit Heals Detroit exists to foster healing justice for Detroit youth, enabling youth to transform their pain into power. With a goal to combat trauma, Detroit Heals uses healing-centered engagement to work to dismantle oppressive systems for marginalized Detroit youth.
Detroit Heals Detroit was created by Detroit youth for Detroit youth between the ages of 12-21 working together to heal from trauma. They lead community healing and teach strategies so that youth can advocate for themselves and others, deepen their own and others' knowledge, and illuminate the lives they live and the worlds they are a part of.
Detroit Heals Detroit's 4 Pillars of Impact:
- Healing Justice: A framework that identifies how youth can holistically respond to and intervene in generational trauma and violence and bring collective practices that can impact and transform the consequences of oppression on our bodies, hearts, and minds.
- Community Transformation: Engaging in a deep level of collaboration to seed transformational thinking and action. Using community transformation that focuses on the intersectionality of culture, race, gender, and class creates a space where healing is experienced collectively.
- Youth-Led Organizing: A burgeoning movement that empowers young people while simultaneously enabling them to make substantive contributions to their communities. Using organizing strategies to alter power relations and to identify, advocate for and instigate change on critical issues that are having an impact on our communities and broader society
- Liberation & Access: Educate, engage, and empower Detroit youth to liberation for racial, social, and economic justice. Our distinct goal is to build access for our peers: access to healing, access to literacy, access to liberation, and access to new possibilities.
Detroit heals provides consulting services to foundations, community organizations, educational institutions, and non-government organizations. They offer full-day and multi-day tailored training with a healing justice approach, and they partner with schools and organizations to pilot youth-led healing justice curricula, a 10-week social-emotional learning (SEL) curriculum that centers joy, healing, social justice, and liberation. Detroit Heals certification process teaches practitioners how to use healing justice practices in their work in schools, after-school programs, community organizations, and places where support is offered to youth of color. The certification combines online learning with hands-on engagement.
"We noticed that there is a wide gap between intention and practice in SEL in classrooms. The strongest signals of the future of SEL particularly SEL meant for communities of color, are co-created, led, and designed by communities of color themselves — those who have a deep understanding of their community's current and historic context, beauty, and complexity. When this is layered with strong youth-adult partnership models, we see a radical shift from how SEL is traditionally practiced. It is an intentional movement away from adults "checking in" with students of adults creating programs/protocols for students and moves toward SEL that is co-designed by community members and co-led with young people.
Source: Detroit Heals Detroit