How do we do effective, sustainable social change…without burning out, internalizing systemic toxicity, and replicating urgency culture?

Practicing Liberation: Transformative Strategies for Collective Healing and Systems Change features essays from editors Hala Khouri and Tessa Hicks Peterson as well as the contributors Kazu Haga, Jacoby Ballard, Leslie Booker, Taj James, Therese Julia Uy, Kerri Kelly, Sará King, Nkem Ndefo, Keely Nguyen, Dalia Paris-Saper, Valorie Thomas, Claudia Vanessa Reyes, and Davion “Zi” Ziere.  Practicing Liberation can be used on its own or alongside The Practicing Liberation Workbook which offers tangible tools and practices for individuals, organizations and communities to do together that orient toward embodied leadership, interconnected collectives, and a bold vision for transformation—the vital tools we need for collective wellbeing, healing, and long-term social change.

Practicing Liberation: Transformative Strategies for Collective Healing and Systems Change reorients collective justice work toward a model that transforms the effects of injustice, harm, and oppressive systems into resilience, joy, and community care. Through frameworks like trauma-informed methodology, transformative movement organizing, engaged Buddhism, and healing justice, editors Hala Khouri and Tessa Hicks Peterson show readers how to:

  • Embody healing, wellness, and beloved community

  • Guard against replicating systems of harm

  • Disrupt racist, classist, anti-queer, and anti-trans behavior and systems

  • Celebrate creativity and radical imagination in movement work

  • Center healing from intergenerational trauma, white supremacy culture, and extractive capitalism

  • Honor that self-care is a necessity—not a luxury—that strengthens our collectives

Book Chapters

Frameworks

  • Know Justice, Know Peace: Insights from a Transformation and Justice Community Collective by Tessa Hicks Peterson, Keely Nguyen, Claudia Vanessa Reyes, Dalia Paris-Saper, and Therese Julia Uy

  • The Traumas of Injustice: Understanding Trauma and Fostering Healing in Movement Work by Hala Khouri

  • Micro to Macro: Embodied Trauma- and Resilience-Informed Systems Change by Nkem Ndefo

Practices

  • From Detox to Recovery: How to Heal in a Toxic World by Kerri Kelly

  • Accountability, Forgiveness, and Moving Toward One Another by Jacoby Ballard

  • Tending to a Broken and Bruised World: Centering Compassion, Lovingkindness, Joy, and Equanimity by Leslie Booker

Liberatory Futures

  • breath fugitivity wild horses: Black Feminist Strategies for Healing in a Predatory Empire by Valorie Thomas

  • Healing by Practicing Loving-Awareness-in-Action by Sará King and Davion Ziere

  • Building Transformative Movements: For Deep Democracy and Beloved Community by Taj James and Beloved Communities Network