Ecological Health in Neighbourhoods

Ecological Health in Neighbourhoods is a peer-to-peer learning journey for people interested in addressing systemic inequities to communally create neighbourhoods that are life-sustaining, providing people and Nature with health, dignity, and justice.

Hosted in partnership between Centric Lab, CIVIC SQUARE and Centre For Alternative Technology, the purpose of this collective journey is to create the space and time for communities advocating for justice in their neighbourhoods to imagine, learn, and grow their own ecosystems, frameworks, and practices for healing through non-western epistemologies, data knowledges, and Kinship.

We are humbly picking up the baton from those who came before and have shown us that neighbourhoods can be places of dreams, revolutions, and hubs of justice. In 1969, The Black Panthers established free medical clinics in neighbourhoods to provide racialised Black Peoples with the healthcare they deserved. This was a communal effort between communities and health practitioners, and is just one example that drives us in what is possible when we organise, learn and dream together, acknowledging that social justice is intrinsically entwined with health justice.

Running from July 2023 to March 2024, through this journey over 9 months 35 participants from across the UK will learn together through dynamic exchanges with a range of peers from across the UK. The common goal will be to share knowledge, ideas and energy openly and generously in order to take action in neighbourhoods, with a focus on live and regular organising in place.

Neighbourhood Organising

Our neighbourhoods require access to varied knowledges, tools, resources and platforms to gain autonomy over how they will address planetary dysregulation at a neighbourhood level. We are taught that crisis is inevitable, but it is not. Crisis results from how a society responds to phenomena. We know that governments will continue to be unresponsive to planetary dysregulation, putting racialised and marginalised peoples at risk for the worst parts of the crisis. Therefore, co-learning how crisis is formed and rooting ourselves in Kinship will give us the agency to move forward.

The movements, stories and organising for new plural economic possibility, the establishing of new Land policies, the demonstration of the symbiosis of mutual aid and systemic transformation, the opportunity to be in Kinship with each other and all other living Kin, which allows us to co-learn and seed multiple liberating imaginations - these, and many more instruments for our futures need to be nurtured, demonstrated, and crafted in the everyday simultaneously, and are critical in all of the many layers this transition demands of us.

If poor health outcomes and injustice are seeded in neighbourhoods that are racialised and marginalised by governing systems, then liberation, healing, and justice can be ignited and shaped in neighbourhoods that are rooted in democracy, autonomy, and self-governance. Understanding non-western epistemologies and reframing the concept of health as intrinsically connected to the ecologies we live within are key functions of what we see being ways of practicing expansive, rigorous justice movements, led by lived experience. Science can give justice movements energy, and data knowledges provide us with the tools to act and organise around what we can’t intuit.

This co-learning and neighbourhood-based journey is inspired by historic precedence of neighbourhoods as sites of revolutionary organising and points of liberation, guided by the movements that have come before, and for the movements that are yet to come. We are opening applications for people that are interested in addressing the systems impacting on the ecological health of our neighbourhoods so we can create places that are life-sustaining, to provide people and Nature with health, dignity, and justice.

More on this project can be found here": https://civicsquare.notion.site/Ecological-Health-in-Neighbourhoods-Peer-To-Peer-Learning-Journey-cac5d1942ff14ebc86a3f5771b7fc977