Arise for Social Justice (Springfield)

With Finding Our Way Home support, Arise will integrate healing justice practices directly into its organizing model through a Rest and Restoration Series that centers spiritual sustainability for staff and members. Funds will support quarterly healing gatherings and a day-long retreat led by local Black and Brown healers and mental health professionals, incorporating somatic practices, meditation, reiki, breathwork, art-as-healing, and Afro-diasporic spiritual traditions, while revitalizing community-rooted rituals such as ancestor acknowledgements, storytelling, music, and drumming that affirm culture as resistance and collective renewal.

Grant funding will compensate healing practitioners, provide trauma-informed mental health support, cover retreat space and materials, offer stipends to community participants, and support coordination and accessibility through partnerships with Growing A New Heart and The Wisdom Keepers. Arise’s hypothesis is that centering healing and spirit will deepen sustainability, clarity, and courage within the organization and its campaigns—strengthening retention, collaboration, and intentional pacing—while modeling healing as an act of resistance and a core component of liberation, and committing to movements that nurture wholeness, resilience, and long-term collective power rather than replicating extractive systems.