Healing social justice program launched in Sonoma

The new Sonoma Valley for Healing Justice program is a student-led initiative supported by the Hanna Institute. Local high school students will work together “to improve the mental health of all youth in Sonoma through collective healing in the community,” according to program materials.

Healing Justice is both a term and a movement “that aims to address widespread generational trauma from systemic violence and oppression by reviving ancestral healing practices and building new, more inclusive ones.”

With the $50,000 in funds from the Catalyst Fund, the Hanna team overseeing the program has been able to create the program, manage it, and offer all student participants an $800 stipend to take part.

The program runs for eight weeks from June 23 to August 11. Students will get together weekly for three hours a week (3:30 to 6:30 p.m.). All spots were filled prior to the official program announcement last week.

“Teens in Sonoma have struggled to deal with the ramifications of the COVID–19 pandemic – the isolation, fear, and the disruption of classroom learning – along with structural inequities, the recent fires, and ongoing disenfranchisement of marginalized communities, resulting in physical and emotional tolls that self and community care aims to address and remediate,” said Hanna Institute Research Director Daniela Domínguez.

Domínguez added that Sonoma Valley has witnessed and experienced wildfires, the pandemic, matters of racial injustice, anti-blackness and anti-immigrant sentiment; and the question now is how these events have impacted the community here.

"We are trying to create a collective care space where we can come and have conversations around what it means to be a Healing Justice responder and how is it that we can – with love, kindness, compassion, intentionality and urgency – respond to issues that are impacting our classmates or colleagues," said Domínguez.

To learn more about the Healing Justice Program, visit hannainstitute.org