Building New Models of Collective Care: The California Healing Justice Fund

On March 19, 2026, The California Healing Justice Fund gathered with a few of our grantees and our funder network to share our process of evolution and grantmaking in our second year. As a pooled fund who relies on our Movement Advisors to guide our work, we embrace a continuous process of sense-making in response to a continuously shifting political landscape.

We are currently fundraising for our Year 3 grantmaking cycle! If you would like to support this work, please reach out to our Coordinator, Amy Silva at cahealingjustice@gmail.com. View the recording of our session below, and continue reading to hear some of the highlights of the program.

“Disability and Healing Justice futurism is how we survive.”

Mordecai Cohen Ettinger
Health Justice Commons

Land, Grief & Collective Care

In our first year of grantmaking, our goal was to redistribute resources to organizations that do not typically have access to institutional funding. We invited two of our grantees from our first round of grantmaking to join us for a conversation about their work, and how the relationship to the land is a central part of their approach. Our Movement Advisor, Grisanti Avendaño, led the conversation that explored how the land provides nourishment to those doing collective liberation work.

Susana Victoria Parras, Co-Founder of Heal Together’s Anti-Carceral Care Collective, shared how their Collective’s Garden Club has created a space for their community to grow. “Like plants, we also grow,” she pointed out. For centuries, we have grown in a system that makes our physical and emotional bodies anxious, vigilant, inflamed, and terrorized. The Garden Club provides a space to grow in a different way, alongside the plants and veggies that provide nourishment to the community. Susana continued, “The space has grown into a community space where children and inner children can play, breathe, and learn to be in relationship with the life around us. The garden has become medicine, which is the relationships.” She shared that the Anti-Carceral Care Collective has been able to grow in ways they’ve been dreaming of, and they plan to expand the space to be able to hold more community members for their grief circles.

“We learn as we go, because none of this is prescribed.”

~Susana Victoria Parras
Heal Together’s Anti-Carceral Care Collective

We also heard from Maria Ramos, Midwife & Founder of Campesina Womb Justice, on her lifelong relationship to the land and how it led to her work supporting the campesinas, or farmworkers, in Watsonville, CA. She described her childhood in Jalisco where they dug holes to get groundwater, washed their clothes in the river, and lived in partnership with the land. When she immigrated north to the United States, her parents began working as campesinas, and she watched as they worked with the land in a different context– through a violent, extractive system.

Campesinas have to show up through all of it: the poverty, abuse, and the harm they are exposed to from ecocide. There is no access to formal health care or insurance to pay for medicines. And so, Maria’s work started by attending to this gap in care. She began working with the herbal medicines passed down through generations. During the pandemic, she and other organizers began distributing womb kits with medicine, money, and masks. Eventually they began hosting healing circles. Now, Campesina Womb Justice supports their community in many ways, including a doula program that trains people to support birthwork with ancestral wisdom and care that serves as an antidote to the extractive capitalism we are forced to endure.

“We deserve healing, we deserve joy, we deserve the best foods, peace and joy. It’s an honor to use my life experiences to help us remember how sacred we are.”

~Maria Ramos
Campesina Womb Justice

As humans, we are a part of the land, and the land is a part of us. Healing Justice seeks to help us remember this connection as part of our journey to collective liberation. To read more about our first year of grantmaking, check out our blog, “Reflections from Our Pilot Year”. You can connect with Heal Together’s Anti-Carceral Care Collective on Instagram @heal2gether, and Campesina Womb Justice @campesinawombjustice.

An Evolution Toward Inclusion

In 2025, access to healthcare in the United States was being completely decimated. The threat of losing healthcare was an added burden on all our communities, but was a particular type of terrorism on people living with disabilities. As the advisors began planning for our second year of grantmaking, it was clear that we were in a moment of needing new models of care that do not replicate harm.

Movement Advisor Mia Mingus, founder of SOIL: A Transformative Justice Project, shared that advisor discussions centered on the prominent need for blueprints of new futures. They wanted to support networks of practitioners who are supporting the communities most at risk for losing access to healthcare, and centering Disability Justice as a critical piece of the movement. These models of care uplift the shift from independence to the interdependence that collectivizes this work and creates a wider and stronger safety net for our communities. These networks are building momentum from a place of relational work that is central to all liberatory work.

“Disability Justice is a pillar of Healing Justice, there is no Healing Justice without Disability Justice and disabled people. We need to have a deep and clear analysis around ableism and able supremacy.”

~Mia Mingus
SOIL: A Transformative Justice Project

Mia invited Mordecai Cohen Ettinger, Founding Director of Health Justice Commons (HJC) to share about their organization’s approach to network building while centering a Disability Justice lens. They identify several approaches that had been uplifted earlier in the program as part of the 10 Disability Justice Principles, highlighting the way that Disability Justice is embedded in many Healing Justice modalities. For instance, Maria and Susana uplifted the need to rebuild communities of care that have been dismantled by settler colonialism, and Mia shared the importance of interdependence and collective access. They expanded on the critical need to disrupt ableism, which includes ecocide, genocide and eugenics. All of these forces are amplified under the Medical-Industrial Complex (MIC), which is designed to undermine our capacity to live. “To remedy these attacks, we have to redesign our society as a whole towards understanding and caring for our needs in the way that holds life sacred and sustainable,” they add, “we have to turn away from extraction, exploitation, control and punishment.”

Heath Justice Commons leads political education programming that centers the wisdom of lived experience in order to help us heal from internalized oppression and ableism. Through this education work, they are able to engage in movement and network building. The Radical Telehealth Collective unites disabled community and healthcare workers and healers to center Disability and Healing Justice practices and values to bring the care to our communities that we deserve, while also building the world we deserve through infrastructure that can serve as a necessary alternative to the MIC. All of HJC’s work, especially political education spaces, are models for collective access that include translation services (ASL, Spanish, and other languages as necessary), meeting access needs for people who are low vision or blind, or have sensory needs.

“When we hold political education spaces that center pedagogy, we’re centering people to come back to the truth within them.”

~Mordecai Cohen Ettinger
Health Justice Commons

Relationships and community are the antidote to fascism, but so often these spaces are not accessible for disabled people. There is a need for not only organizers, but also funders, to understand Disability Justice more, to understand Healing Justice more. If we talk about interdependence, that means all of us. Health Justice Commons is one of our grantees from our second year of grantmaking. You can learn more about their work at https://www.healthjusticecommons.org/.

Futurecasting

The California Healing Justice Fund advisors and funders are oriented towards building a future where we can all heal from state violence. In our third year of grantmaking, we are exploring ways to support both organizations and their people, the individuals who are tending to the care of those at the center of the work. The non-profit and funder relationship so often is focused on the organization, but organizations cannot exist without the people doing the work. In order for any work to be sustainable and continue forward, we have to center our humanity.

“We are looking towards collectively building a practice for philanthropy that is grounded in the real world experiences of the folks we are funding.”

~Malaika Parker
Black Organizing Project

We heard from grantee partners during the program who are building a future rooted in holistic care and connection. This work is not possible without trusting them to know their community. When we build foundations for giving that are based on trust, we are creating space for the creativity and longevity that are critical for building new futures. As we shift into our third year of grantmaking, we hope the California Healing Justice Fund can act as a framework for how to move forward in a way that does not separate the work into different cogs in the machine. The more we fall into that habit, the more we are feeding into capitalism and dehumanizing the people doing this work.

“We were blown away by this process. We were preparing for reports, meetings, and that kind of nonprofit bureaucracy. But instead, you said, ‘you get to decide what you’re going to do with the money, because we trust that.’ We said, what? It was disorienting, but very aligned with our hearts and our spirits.”

-Susana Victoria Parras
Heal Together’s Anti-Carceral Care Collective

Leveraging the Power of Institutional Funding

The funders who form the California Healing Justice Fund came together out of a shared goal of growing resources for Healing and Transformative Justice work that was in service of growing long-term community power. They saw not only the redistribution of funds, but the redistribution of power as an essential aspect of the way the work should be done. As the work began to unfold, it became a growing opportunity to share our process and our learnings, and to help our fellow funders understand the critical role Healing Justice plays in the sustainability of community stabilization and power building efforts.

“Many movement leaders are constantly asked to make the case for Healing Justice by potential funders. It’s important for us, as funders, to learn from and alongside movement leaders in a way that’s non-extractive and emerges from shared practice.”

~ Iris Garcia
Kataly Foundation

The nature of a pooled funding approach is to represent a variety of funder interests and goals. Melanie Havelin, Executive Director of the John M. Lloyd Foundation, shared her foundation’s journey from supporting trauma- informed work, to eventually including add-on Healing Justice grants. What they found is that these add-on grants also deepened the relationships with their grantees in unexpected ways. They were able to convey that they were not just interested in grant metrics, benchmarks, or outcomes, but also in the health, resiliency, and relationships within their communities.

The John M. Lloyd Foundation’s approach is unique, as is each of our funder’s interests in this work. For example, Gina Peralta from the Heising-Simons Foundation shared her approach to the work from a perspective of supporting movement building. Rachele Tardi from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, comes to Healing Justice as a funder focused on building a culture of health. You can read their full testimonies in the slide deck above.

Healing Justice lives at the intersection of many different approaches to community empowerment and well-being and is expressed through a variety of transformative modalities. We would love to collaborate with funders who value Healing Justice through contributions to our pooled fund or directly supporting our amazing grantees. Please get in touch! We can be reached at cahealingjustice@gmail.com

Thank you, to everyone who makes this work possible!

The California Healing Justice Fund Grantees

Campesina Womb Justice
Central Valley Healing Collective
Chicano Youth Center
Heal Together’s Anti-Carceral Care Collective
Health Justice Commons
All Youth Are Sacred
California Healers Network
Healing Clinic Collaborative
Young Revolutionary Front
RYSE Center
Freedom Community Clinic
Black Organizing Project
Justice Teams Network
SOIL: A Transformative Justice Project
YO! Cali
Birthworkers of Color Collective
ExpresArte Cultural Wellness Collective
Manara West
People’s Programs & Wellness Bureau
Ocho Semillas
Anti Police-Terror Project
Tierra Milperas