The 21st Annual Liberation-Based Healing Conference gathers scholars, practitioners, healers, educators, activists, students, artists, and community members committed to transforming the colonial foundations embedded within mental health, health care, education, and the systems that claim to serve our communities.
This year’s theme, “Courage; Resistance; Celebration,” calls us into a deeper reckoning with coloniality—not as an abstract theory, but as a living structure that shapes how knowledge is produced, whose suffering is legitimized, whose healing is recognized, and how care is delivered. Coloniality is reproduced not only through policy and institutional power, but also through the everyday practices, professional hierarchies, diagnostic frameworks, curricula, research methods, and service models that continue to fragment families, communities, bodies, cultures, lands, and spirit.
LBHC 2026 moves beyond symbolic inclusion and beyond the language of diversity alone. This gathering is grounded in the work of decolonizing the structures and institutions of mental health, health care, and education – interrogating not only what is taught, researched, and practiced, but also how knowledge is transmitted, who is authorized to teach, whose lived experience is centered, and what structures must be dismantled or reimagined for liberation to become material and relational.
While decolonial and liberatory scholarship has offered powerful theoretical tools for naming, analyzing, and deconstructing oppression, LBHC 2026 asks what happens next. How do we move from critique to practice? From analysis to embodiment? From institutional reform to structural transformation? From professional expertise to community-rooted wisdom? From healing as individual adjustment to healing as collective liberation?
This conference centers lived experiences of transformation—on the ground, in classrooms, clinics, families, communities, movements, and cultural spaces. It honors the courage required to confront colonial harm; the resistance necessary to refuse systems that pathologize, extract, silence, and divide; and the celebration of ancestral knowledge, cultural resilience, creativity, relational healing, and collective survival as liberatory praxis.
Founded by the Institute for Family Services, the Liberation-Based Healing Conference is not simply an academic event. It is a space of study, struggle, memory, imagination, practice and connection. It brings together those who are building liberatory ways of knowing, healing, teaching, organizing, and being in relationship.
What to Expect
Powerful and visionary speakers rooted in decolonial and liberation-based praxis
Critical dialogues on coloniality in mental health, health care, education, and knowledge production
Panels and workshops that move from theory to embodied and community-based practice
Cultural, artistic, and spiritual expressions of resistance and collective healing
Intergenerational spaces for reflection, strategy, accountability, and transformation
Celebrations of courage, resistance, and the living traditions that sustain liberatory healing.
LBHC 2026 invites us to ask not only what must be decolonized, but what must be remembered, restored, practiced, protected and celebrated as we build the conditions for collective healing and freedom.
Proudly Sponsored By:
Institute for Family Services (IFS) Tri County Care Management Organization (CMO) (Hunterdon, Somerset, and Warren Counties, NJ) Monmouth University School of Social Work
15 NY & NJ CEUs will be offered
Date and Time Fri, Nov 6, 2026 – Sat, Nov 7, 2026 9:00 AM-5:00 PM EDT
