Practicing Liberation: Transformative Strategies for Collective Healing & Systems Change: Reflections on burnout, trauma & building communities of care in social justice work

How do we do effective, sustainable social change…without burning out, internalizing systemic toxicity, or replicating urgency culture?

A trauma-informed anthology with contributions from 13 activists and community organizers—for readers of adrienne maree brown, Staci K. Haines, and Ejeris Dixon

When your work is inextricable from your identity, your community, and your own liberation, you need a unique praxis of care to sustain it—and for mission-driven activists, organizers, and changemakers working under oppressive systems, making space to center vital needs like rest, self-care, and healthy boundaries isn’t as simple as clocking out.

Practicing Liberation reorients collective justice work toward a model that transforms the effects of injustice, harm, and oppressive systems into resilience, joy, and community care. Through frameworks like trauma-informed methodology, transformative movement organizing, engaged Buddhism, and healing justice, editors Hala Khouri and Tessa Hicks Peterson show readers how to:

• Embody healing, wellness, and beloved community
• Guard against replicating systems of harm
• Disrupt racist, classist, anti-queer, and anti-trans behavior and systems
• Celebrate creativity and radical imagination in movement work
• Center healing from intergenerational trauma, white supremacy culture, and extractive capitalism
• Honor that self-care is a necessity—not a luxury—that strengthens our collectives

Featuring essays from editors Hala Khouri and Tessa Hicks Peterson and contributors like Kazu Haga, Taj James, Nkem Ndefo, Jacoby Ballard, Sará King, Kerri Kelly, and more, Practicing Liberation can be used on its own or alongside The Practicing Liberation Workbook to help readers orient toward embodied leadership, interconnected collectives, and a bold vision for transformation—the vital tools we need for collective wellbeing, healing, and long-term social change.

TESSA HICKS PETERSON is a scholar activist and the Assistant Vice President of Community Engagement and Associate Professor of Urban Studies at Pitzer College. Dedicated to social justice, she combines art, movement, and academic rigor to empower communities.

HALA KHOURI, MA, has spent over two decades integrating the worlds of therapy, yoga, and trauma research. An adjunct professor at Pitzer College, she’s the force behind the Radical Wellbeing online community.

Contributors to the anthology include Jacoby Ballard, Leslie Booker, Kazu Haga, Taj James, Kerri Kelly, Dr. Sará King, Nkem Ndefo, Keely Nguyen, Dalia Paris-Saper, Claudia Vanessa Reyes, Valorie Thomas, Therese Julia Uy, and Davion "Zi" Ziere.
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