"[O]ur goal of forming tribes of kin-bonded circles speaks to long-held Black Trans practices of chosen family networks where mutual exchange of care enables marginalized communities to pool power to heal towards liberation."

- Ohene:Waa Nkrumah, Member of Liberation Medicine School

Dear Resister,

For this edition of our Amplify Series, we want to uplift the work of a Black-led frontline group working towards liberation in ways that reimagine alternatives to our current harmful and extractive structures in practical, creative, and transformative ways.

Below, you will hear from grantee Liberation Medicine School (LMS), who embodies a care system that supports Black Trans-Queer autonomy, healing, and thriving.

Read more about how Liberation Medicine School is disrupting the medical industrial complex and creating safe and transformative ecosystems of health and care for Black Trans peoples. Learn how to tap into their radical and necessary work!

Hello, RESIST ecosystem. My name is Ohene:Waa Nkrumah. I am a member of Liberation Medicine School (LMS). I exist within LMS in several roles, primarily as a vision steward, a story medicine practitioner, and a liberation medicine practitioner-in-training.

I am deeply honored for LMS to be part of RESIST’s AMPLIFY series. As this newsletter finds its way to you, I hope you are sharing proximal space with an entity that brings you deep peace. That makes you feel well within your soul, and that makes the land-space of your body feel like home. Perhaps a cup of warm tea (roasted dandelion is one of my favorite flavors). Perhaps cool, loose soil underneath your feet. Perhaps a friend, a kin, a lover, or a comrade. Perhaps the joy of your own company.

About Liberation Medicine School

Liberation Medicine School is an emerging African-Indigenous, decolonial, and Black Trans health/care ecosystem that seeks to abolish the Medical Industrial Complex (MIC) by fostering medical and educational sovereignty within the diasporic Afro-LGBTQI community. LMS was birthed by a Trans African healer in protest of colonial medical practices that harm Black folks.

We aim to achieve our vision of medical autonomy by building a village of wellness that:

A) is nourished by a School of Medicine that centers the indigenous medical knowledge, experiences, needs, and powers of the Black Trans community while being divorced from the MIC;

B) is rooted in a landed village where Black Trans folks have access to safe housing, sustainably grown food, economic self-sufficiency, and social/spiritual/mental/physical health support;

C) houses a tribe of inter-dependent Black Trans healers who teach, share, and practice with each other and with community life-giving medicines;

D) celebrates the role of Black TGNC people in anchoring Indigenous medicines.



What impact has this work had on you? What small steps have you taken that have a big impact on your life and other people’s lives?

To give name to the impact of LMS’s work on me is to step into deep vulnerability. Speaking truth to that vulnerability, I would say that LMS saves my life by creating space for me to heal.

What I have learned over the course of nurturing LMS is that for Black Trans people, revolutionary work - when it is founded upon a commitment to healing, restorative, and transformative justice - is a series of very small, quiet acts of care exchanged across bonds of healthy kinship. For me, this was the case when caught between a mental health crisis and concern about the harm that could come to me if I called 911 for support. Instead, I picked up the phone to call a Black Non-Binary kin of mine. That call led to an invitation to stay with them for a few nights, which turned into a few weeks. It emboldened me to reach out to my larger village for support. Their calls, visits, offers of cooked meals and walks, and words of affirmation - all held me through that crisis. Before LMS, I would have been too afraid to reach out to my kinship village for support. I nurtured a core belief that I did not deserve to be held or receive care. I also thought that if I attempted to heal facing community, I would inevitably be hurt or harmed - just as I had experienced within past relationships, the healthcare system, and other institutions of violence.

At LMS, we believe that each Black T/GNC/ENBY person is a medicine person. We believe that we abolish and build autonomy from pathologizing systems of violence by building healthy relationships of kinship; and by harnessing our own powers as healers to care for each other through these intentional inter-relational bonds. Autonomy and liberation through what LMS calls kinship medicine. LMS’s practice of small acts of care through kinship medicine is what guided me through that crisis. It is what has also allowed our work to impact the lives of others. This is evident when I hear from other Black Trans/GNC/ENBY folks who have attended one of LMS’s medicine circles say, “I feel seen; I feel heard; I feel cared for; I feel hopeful; I feel powerful; I needed this...” It is also hearing the indigenous Black Trans practitioners who facilitate those circles saying, “this is sacred work. This is healing work. And I feel so powerful in my medicines.” Our Black Trans medicine circles are often intimate - and yet that step of even dreaming them into existence outside of the MIC, and that indigenous medicine practice of creating spaces for inter-relational connection where care can flow outside the gaze of capitalism - leads to freedom-making effects that the healthcare industry could not begin to replicate.

These ‘small’ acts of care and their big impacts show up in other ways at LMS. Whether it is sending an email to seek housing support for a young Black Trans asylum-seeker and unexpectedly hearing from our kin about various ways they can support with housing and rental assistance, or accompanying a Black Non-Binary kin to a doctor’s appointment to support them as an advocate, where they feel their needs met for the first time and offering the same support in return later on.

Most of these acts of mutual care are often unplanned and “small” in nature. Neither LMS nor the Black Trans folks who engage with our ecosystem are deeply resourced, and oftentimes we are at our energetic or mental capacities. Instead, these acts happen in the quiet spaces of very intentional relationship-building. They happen in these spaces where Black Trans people are simultaneously stepping into our powers as care workers, healers, and medicine peoples - while also recognizing that we ourselves need and deserve care in return.

It is these quiet spaces of kinship within LMS’s ecosystem that have had an impact on me.

Can you describe what a Black Futures framework means to you and how your work is reimagining alternatives to our current systems to help move us all toward liberation?

To me, a Black Futures framework is one…

• that centers the self-determination, safety, wellness needs, indigenous powers of medicine, and knowledge-creation work of Black Trans, Gender Non-Conforming, and Non-Binary peoples throughout the global diaspora
• where each Black Trans person holds conscious awareness of our ancestral birthright as healers;
• where Black Trans healing justice visioning-scapes like LMS are fully funded to equip our community with the skills, knowledge, and social support needed for us to study our medicines and harness them in collective care for/by/with each other.

In this framework, we work to build a world where Black Trans people - and by extension, all Black people - are interdependently autonomous. A world where we are free of the medical industrial complex, the prison system, and other carceral institutions that limit our being-hood.

A Black Futures framework to me is also one that focuses on the liberation of Black Trans people of the now. I am weary of language and practices that ask Black people to be martyrs for future generations. I am not sure if we can consider our revolutionary work to be collective liberation if healing, possibility, abundant dreaming, and safety from harm are not in reach for those of us who live in the now. If the work is collective, those of us who are laboring for the revolution - especially Black T/GNC/ENBY people - are not left behind. We are invited to heal, build power, and decolonize ourselves as we also call systems of power to account. We are invited to experience joy, rest, pleasure, ease, healthy kinship, and abundance - instead of those offerings being viewed as practices that only our future descendants get to have. We too in the now deserve radical wellness, and we have a right to it. So for me, Black Futures is also Black Now.

LMS is not so much imagining alternatives to colonial systems as much as we are calling into dominancy practices that already exist. Black (Trans) people have always relied on our own ancestral medicines, on chosen family and kin-tribe networks, and on education justice to survive through harm. LMS’s goal of building a decolonial health/care ecosystem to resource multi-generations of Black Trans practitioners uplift this reality. Our commitment to embodying a home where our community can undo miseducation, create new-old medical knowledge, and build critical Black Trans scholarship speaks to the Black power tradition that knowledge is power. Our mission to create an autonomous village where Black Trans practitioners and our loved ones can live in safety calls to Afro-indigenous freedom movements that push for autonomy and self-determination. Finally, our goal of forming tribes of kin-bonded circles speaks to long-held Black Trans practices of chosen family networks where mutual exchange of care enables marginalized communities to pool power to heal towards liberation.

What kind of support does your collective need and what is the best way for folks to tap in and help?

As an under-resourced entity, LMS appreciates support to continue envisioning our work both in the now and into the future. Below are some ways you can support us:

• Donate! Funds go to several places in LMS, such as:
• Our mutual care funds, which we are building to provide universal multi-year funding to Black Trans practitioners within our ecosystem; as well as to support the safety and wellness of the larger Black Trans community.
• Bringing community together to create an Emergent Liberation Medicine Curriculum that will guide our practitioners-in-training.
• Our search for land upon which to root our work and our tribe.

• Again, donate! We are dreaming into being our next kin-cohort of Black Trans liberation medicine practitioners-in-training. This cohort will spend a year in a mutual care and knowledge-exchange ecosystem honing their chosen crafts of healing and learning liberatory practices to embody their medicine work.

Donate to Liberation Medicine School

Beyond funds, we invite Black Trans, Gender Non-Confomring, and or Non-Binary people who align with our vision, values, and goals to join our ecosystem. Below are some ways to get involved:

• Interested in being part of our next healer kin-cohort or learning more about it? Email us at liberationmedicineschool@gmail.com.
• Lead a medicine circle or teach a class within our Decolonize Medicine series. Learn more here or send us an email.
• Share your stories of medicine - how you experience the medical industrial complex as well as how you create your own care practices - with us for our narrative justice project: The Medical (Hx)Stories of My Black Trans Body. Learn more here.
• Attend one of our medicine, knowledge exchange, or story-telling circles. Because we do not have a social media presence, the best way to keep up to date with our offerings is to join our email list. Subscribe here.
• Connect with us as we continue to dream towards more power-building circles in our village - all of which aim to center the rights of Black Trans people to medicine and knowledge. We want to do this visioning work with community members who are most acutely impacted by medical injustice. If our work resonates with you, we would be honored to world-build with you.

In solidarity,

Kathy

Director of Communications and Storytelling

p.s. There’s a new world coming; Resist grantees are on the ground, ensuring that. Join us in making their vision a reality by becoming a movement sustainer today.