During the summer of 2024, psychologists, doctors, medical students, and other healthcare professionals from racialised experiences gathered to co-create methods for weaving justice into their practices. This is their Declaration and proposition for a world that rooted in healing rather than harm. As you read, you become part of the Declaration.

This programme drew upon abolitionist principles. We recognise that systems of capitalism, colonialism and other forms of oppression are designed to destroy health and exploit life. They cannot be compatible with health justice. Abolition asks us to dismantle and disrupt those systems, and to simultaneously imagine, build and collectively seed systems of care, regeneration and healing.

We are experiencing complex and multiple poor health outcomes due to the deliberate and innumerable crises created by extractive economic systems. These crises create more crises as well as amplify current ones.

To ensure the programme can facilitate co-learning, we chose participants that worked in a range of spaces. This included Researchers, Sexual Health Advisors, Educators, Doctors, Health Campaigners, Psychologists, Students. Their work collectively spans the intersections of Sexual and Reproductive Health Rights, Racial Justice, Neurodiversity Justice, Gender Justice, Queer Justice and many more.

This programme took over a year to emerge from multiple conversations with the Centric ecosystem. We took our time to listen to and observe the world around us, including communities facing health injustices. We took this information and shaped a programme that was founded in Kinship, fairness, safety, and love.

Programme content centred around asking and debating the following questions: Who benefits from a purely biomedical/individualistic analysis of health; What are the structures of power and violence (both present and historical) which enable health injustice to occur; What additional factors may explain the increased sensitivity to pollution and worse health outcomes for those in poverty?…and more

The design of the programme took shape through discussions with comrades, friends and the study of pedagogical programmes led by groups such as the Black Panthers. The methodologies we employed for the programme varied but included: Purpose to political consciousness; Healing as part of political consciousness; Relationship building; Examining medical violence and revolutionary medicine, and more.

A selection of reflections in the forms of quotes from the programme organisers and participants.