Conferences

THE ANNUAL LIBERATION-BASED HEALING CONFERENCE

Since 2005 the Institute for Family Services has been bringing together health  practitioners, and therapists, community activists and organizers, educators, faith and community leaders, students and more for dialogue and inquiry focused on a system of relational healing that embraces critical consciousness, empowerment, and accountability.

Here is a short description of our vision:

Decolonizing Strategies call for changing the paradigm, the lens, the language, and the journey and necessitates debunking the myth of healing through diagnostic codes, individual structures and the rigid bi-furcation of individuals, their families, their context and their healing spaces.

It encompasses the multiplicity of personal and social, institutional locations that frame identities within historical, economic and political life. People within our own and global localities are unwittingly located within a range of broad and nuanced descriptors that may or may not include nationality, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, ability, or religious preference.

They might also trace other identity markers that are both simultaneously visible and concealed. These personal and political intersections are largely unacknowledged by current Western models of psychological practice.

This paradigm of Liberation-based healing locates these complexities within a societal matrix that shapes relationships: power, privilege, and oppression building on the foundations of Critical Consciousness, Empowerment and Accountability within culture circles accompanied by tools for identifying and decolonizing lived experiences.

To take a look at some of our most recent conferences click below: