Community Care Spaces for Detroiters

Healing by Choice! (HbC!) is a circle of BIPOC women and gender non-conforming health and healing practitioners based in Detroit, MI. As a collective, we gather together a multitude of sacred lineages and healing modalities to co-create healing spaces for communities we live in and are connected to. We believe that each person is an expert of their own experience, body and needs, and that healing is an interrelated process that addresses the roots of trauma and injustice for individual and collective transformation. We seek to find the harmony between the joys and griefs of this life, together, and imagine new conceptions of healing through communal care systems.

How We Do It

Through a holistic healing justice approach, we center our work in Detroit, MI and support  friends nationally with developing tools for navigating emotional, spiritual, and physical traumas created by the conditions of systemic oppression. Our practitioners offer diverse healing skill sets (reiki, massage, tarot, yoga, tai chi, restorative justice, herbalism, etc.) that we share to promote self-sustaining care practices for groups. We integrate these skills into no-cost community offerings for grassroot groups through gift economics to increase access to wellness spaces for marginalized groups.

As the world rapidly changes with a heightened need for healing in response to normalized instances of harm and violence, HbC! is deepening in how we can show up for ourselves and our communities. 

With your support, we will be able to offer 2-4 in-person community healing spaces across Detroit and online healing workshops between August - December 2022. These spaces will be offered in partnership with local grassroots groups that are wanting to center healing in their communities. In addition, we are really excited to bring in Yexenia Vanegas to create community partnerships and organizational offerings that focus on youth, art, and healing.  In order to do this work well, we need your support to have the spaciousness to onboard Yexenia, invite community voices into the visioning process, and build partnerships to sustain new programming.

Once funds are received, we’ll be able to do the following: 

• August 2022: 
  • Lead yoga and meditation offerings in partnership with Berg-Lahser Community Association’s Youth Initiative
• September 2022: 
  • Provide no-cost Healing Space at Southwest Fest in SW Detroit
  • On-board our practitioner, Yexenia Vanegas, to our core staff to expand our outreach to Detroit youth communities through art & healing modalities
• October 2022
  • Host healing space with a Detroit-based partner
  • Create a set of programming for arts, healing and youth programming. 
  • Start community outreach and community input for the arts, healing, and youth programming. 

• November 2022
  • Offer healing workshop for local and national communities
• December 2022
  • offer healing workshop for local and national communities

Healing by Choice! is rooted in the belief that any individual has the ability to heal themselves, regardless of where they are on such a journey. We understand the power dynamics and struggles that come with being marginalized peoples of different ancestries in a predominantly Black, and therefore disenfranchised, city. We also recognize the urgency in reimagining a world that honors our differences and sustains our lives instead of breaking them. The spaces we’re shaping through this project supports our world-building efforts to imbed alternative care systems into the social fabric of our movement spaces. Through this work, we reveal the truth that we can live beyond systems of harm and into ones that hold all of us and our needs.