Bringing Community Resources Together

Carla M. Perez, founder.

Social change sometimes comes in the form of bringing together resources from those with backgrounds in different types of healing to those who have been traumatized. By receiving the opportunity for healing, those individuals can go on to speak out about social issues and provide healing for others. That forms the basis for what the Oakland area HEALING CLINIC COLLECTIVE does in its concentrated events.

Over the course of each event, a variety of healing arts services and classes help those in need receive comfort and healing without the usual pharmaceutical emphasis that usually comes from the western healing arts. When it first formed, those who lacked access to health insurance, as well as having had traumatizing experiences, were the focus of concern.



Carla M. Perez has a background of experience as an activist and community organizer. She also has earned her BS in Conservation & Resource Studies from UC Berkeley in 1999. In 2007 Carla joined MOVEMENT GENERATION and became co-founder of their Justice & Ecology Project. While engaged in work in resiliency and permaculture, she founded the Healing Clinic Collective, which provides the Women's Healing Clinic events and, now, the Men's Healing Clinic events. Her Native/Latin American heritage has been an important background within her activities.

Carla's underlying purpose in organizing these events can be summed up in her own words, "When people have an opportunity to heal as part of their process for building resiliency and the power to control their own lives, they will have the capacity and desire to be part of the movement for social change in the long term."

Of course, Carla doesn't run the programs alone. They take quite a bit of planning and promoting, along with the vision of those with backgrounds in other traditional healing arts. So, she has four other members of the organizing committee: Angela Angel, a healer, medium channeler, and ceremonialist, with experience as a traditional healer from Bontoc and Ibalot tribes in the Philippines; Sharena Thomas, an experienced community organizer and medical assistant with first-hand experience of police brutality; Suzanne Snyder, a California State licensed Acupuncturist and Clinical Herbalist; and Atava Garcia Swiecicki, a licensed clinical herbalist and certified in Accupressure and Jin Shin Jyutsu.

As you can see, there are a wide variety of backgrounds just within the members of the organizing committee. An important feature of the services is that gender identification is open and inclusive. If someone who has female gender features, but identifies as a male, wants services from the Men's Healing Clinic, that is provided, as requested. There is no evidence of gender discrimination, or any other type of discrimination, a commendable feature, indeed. There is information on the website for making monetary donations to its work.

One of the healing activities at an event.

Thanks to this article from Pollination Project: https://thepollinationproject.org/grants-awarded/carla-perez-womens-healing-clinic/, and information provided by the above links.

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