The Northeast HAC gathering is for radical healthcare workers, mutual aid workers, medics, herbalists, and all those working to build health autonomy. Join us this October in Vermont as we fight back against a dehumanizing healthcare system, build resilient networks, learn from each other, and nurture the quiet insistent belief that together, we can build models of communal care in the midst of turmoil.
Do you have an idea for a workshop, panel, or other activity? We have outlined our vision and several tracks below, and would love to hear from you! The deadline to submit a proposal is August 1, and we hope to get back to you by September 1 about whether your proposal has been accepted.
We seek to explore the contradictions we hold daily in our hospitals, clinics, patient relationships, ambulances. We aim to connect those within institutions and those providing healing work in our collectives and on the streets. We pledge to follow these contradictions to their roots, breaking down the power dynamic of “provider” and “patient”. We struggle against limitations external to the healing of our communities. We heal ourselves to become prisms, multiplying the healing in the complex communities we hail from. We remember and seek guidance from the sacred knowledge our ancestors whisper.
Below, we describe each of the four tracks and we invite you to submit your proposals about them. What will we do when we are together: simulation, workshop, theatre, song, revolution?
Building an Abolitionist Praxis
People who describe themselves as anarchist/ autonomist/ abolitionist or generally anti-capitalist and who find themselves moving into institutionally based healthcare, becoming nurses, therapists, doctors, social workers or other licensed/ certified professionals: How do we maintain an abolitionist worldview while working within these inherently statist institutions? For those who work as traditional healers, mutual aid workers, street medics, how can we create a space for our own sustainability and avoid the burn out that feels inevitable? How can HCWs in institutions as well as traditional healers/ mutual aid workers be in collaborative communication, building an abolitionist praxis that incorporates all types of healing while supporting our communities and ourselves? What does an abolitionist/anticapitalist practice within institutional medicine/modern medicine? How can we create communities of support at work and stay connected to movements? How do traditional healers create self-sustainability while increasing access to their healing practices? What would an integrative health look like, where HCWs and traditional healers and mutual aid workers are in collaboration and on equal levels of respect? How can this collaboration support movement practices? How do we expand our worlds and diversity within our healing: who is being left out of our praxis?
Creating Northeast Regional Health Autonomy Infrastructure
The national HAC was an amazing opportunity to meet people from all over the country. While we want to build a national/international solidarity, regional structure can be a cornerstone of that movement. What are the networks that already exist that tie us together? What had existed that we didn’t know about? What are the networks that need to exist? How can we increase our collective understanding of the region, our place within it, and create the robust network we need in the times to come? What is unique about the NE region that can be a benefit to other regions? What does regional mapping for the NE look like? How do we build NE solidarity and harm reduction networks? What does cross regional solidarity and collaboration look like? How do we increase our capacity for regional insurgent and trauma care? How can we address the contradictions between urban and rural areas where the lines of politics and community can be blurry? What needs to be developed in the NE around reproductive and trans-care justice? How can we support other regions in that capacity?
Caring for Caregivers: Our Collective Mental Health
What is sacred to us as healers and HCWs? How do we create the structures to address the grief, the isolation, the overwhelming nature of late stage capitalism? How can we create networks that hold each other so that we can maintain the tension between deep beauty and deep suffering of this world? How can we care for each other in crisis? What collective care structures can we build outside of the inadequate ones provided for us? How do we avoid interpersonal conflicts disrupting yet again another collective project? How do we listen to the world again?
Open Sky: What are you talking about with the besties?
Do share! What ideas and desires persist, even if not fully fleshed out? What are our blind spots? What deep work are you doing that we are not thinking about? What is missing from our other tracks? This an invitation for any proposals that don’t fit neatly into other tracks. We are intentionally leaving space for connection, role-play, hands-on work, and silliness that isn’t easily categorised.