Healing justice is an ancestral technology—one part imagination, one part pragmatism, one part memory, and one part future, with dashes of belief in our inherent dignity. It is how we have learned to be, how we have learned to hold ourselves at the edge of the world. (And on the other side of that edge—again and again and again.) When the machinery of oppression tries to consume us, healing justice redirects us to shared survival, resistance, joy, and soulfulness, as well as to the other sultry stuff of wellbeing.

We ask, “How do we resource one another?” and Together at the Edge of the World: On Healing Justice answers by offering wisdom from healers, organizers, and poets. It includes generational whispers from Saida Agostini, word alchemy from Elizabeth Saint-Victor, a powerful transmission from Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, and interludes from your curator, Richael Faithful. Adorned with Kassamira Carter-Howard’s assemblage, this time capsule leaves behind what we know, what we are asking, and what we create, in service to our collective wellbeing.

In the midst of social dysfunction in which women and girls - especially from Black and Indigenous communities, those who do not fit into predetermined gender boxes, or are deemed weaker among men - face violence, exclusion, isolation, and bigotry, we know we can envision and create a different reality. A liberatory reality where kindness, inclusion, belonging, and above all else, love, are the order of the day. Turning to Wakanda where we see gender currently playing out in a number of ways, we wanted to know, what don’t we see? If Wakanda is Zion, Paradise, Negroland, Afrotopia etc. for all Afro-descendant people, how do we WANT to see gender beyond the snapshots offered to us in the comics, cartoons and movies?

Wakanda Dream Lab x Resonance Network came together and invited fan fiction, art, and poetry that was vision-led, future-facing, revolutionary, and social justice oriented from all those across the gender spectrum who believe in and are committed to gender justice and liberation, and the power of speculative fiction.

Youth LEADS (Leverage, Energize, and Define Solutions) is a Biden Foundation Initiative to combat gender-based violence among youth by providing young leaders with the platforms, network, and organizational support they need to create change. Youth LEADS looks to young people to drive the solutions that will change the culture and end violence in their communities.

In the Fall of 2018– at the height of #MeToo and March For Our Loves movements– the Youth LEADS team facilitated a series of 15 listening sessions with over 200+ Black, Indigenous, young people of color across the United States to learn more about their unique experiences with gender-based violence and their solutions for creating change.

In 2019, the Youth Leads Team published the
”Youth LEADS Report: Cultivating Young Leaders in the Fight to End Gender-Based Violence,” which highlights 11 themes central to their experiences, and offers 7 concrete policy recommendations for youth-serving organizations and groups working to end gender-based violence.