Rehearsing Freedoms emerges as part of a two-year body of work rooted in community-based healing, structural interventions, spaces for collective capacity building, joy and restoration, while practising the collective skills needed to realise liberatory health, and just, sustainable futures. It combines Healing Justice Ldn’s longstanding practices approaches and strategic interventions into a cohesive programme, space for practice, narrative, and journey to build with. It does this while creating opportunities for sustained and consistent collaboration, co-production, and coalition building across many fields, sectors, communities, struggles, solidarities and movements.

Rehearsing Freedoms references visionary abolitionist Ruth Gilmore Wilson’s ideas that state that we need to ‘rehearse the social order coming into being’ in order to collectively envision and practice futures free from oppression. In this time of compounding and cumulative trauma, loss and violence, we are confronted with the culmination of many failing systems and structures. It supports our findings on a community, movement and grassroots level support the need for skill and capacity building in relational and social ways to create, repair and build alternative  life-affirming ecosystems, infrastructures or economies amongst marginalised peoples.

Rehearsing Freedoms sit with our work on building access to holistic and equitable healthcare provisions that tend to our physical and mental health needs, and support us to live well and dignifying lives, creates a unifying strategy across many groups, sectors and communities (including those that appear in conflict with one another). We anchor this work in our ongoing watershed Deaths By Welfare Campaign which locates our work and gives us an identifiable mobilising effort to resist and build with.

Our Deaths By Welfare Project interrogates deaths linked to and/or caused by the welfare system, welfare reform and the violence of State austerity. The project locates health and care as a unifying strategy, connecting different struggles, marginalised groups and the new constituencies that have emerged during the Covid 19-pandemic. Integral to this work is honouring and learning from myriad forms of disabled people’s resistance in order to re-envision justice and re-imagine ecosystems of care. The scope of this project spans across broad intersections of our preexisting work, connecting State violence with disability, spatial, racial and economic justice.