Communiversity 2026 Session

Collective Care & Healing as a Liberatory Practice

Facilitated by Cara Page, Jasmín Durán & Nordia Bennett

September 12

11 AM to 4:30 PM

About This Session

We will explore how collective care has been integral to our communities and movements and introduce healing justice as a political strategy that seeks to build a liberatory response to the criminalization of our bodies and exploitation of care.

We will also map the conditions of Black, Indigenous & People of Color communities and explore ways to think about collective care and healing justice as a response to these conditions. Please join us!

About Cara Page

Cara Page (she/her) is a Black Queer Feminist writer, cultural memory worker, organizer & producer.

For the past 30+ years, she has organized with LGBTGNCQI+/Black, Indigenous & People of Color liberation movements in the US & Global South at the intersections of racial, gender & economic justice, healing justice and transformative justice. She is founder of Changing Frequencies, an abolitionist organizing project that designs cultural memory work to disrupt harms and violence from the Medical Industrial Complex (MIC). She is also co-founder of the Healing Histories Project, which deepens and expands relationships between and among abolitionist healers/health practitioners, community organizers, researchers/historians & cultural workers building solidarity to interrupt the Medical Industrial Complex and harmful systems of care. While also generating change through research, action and building collaborative strategies & stories with BIPOC-led communities, institutions and movements organizing for dignified collective care.

As one of the co-architects of the healing justice political strategy; she is co-founder and core team member of the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective. She was the former Executive Director of the Audre Lorde Project in New York City and the former National Coordinator of the Committee on Women, Population & the Environment. She is a former recipient of the OSF Soros Equality Fellowship (2019-2020) and ‘Activist in Residence’ at the Barnard Center for Research on Women.

In 2020 she was chosen for the Yerba Buena Cultural Center’s ‘YBCA100’. She is co-editor and author with Erica Woodland, of the anthology, “Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care & Safety”(North Atlantic Books) is out now and available for purchase here. She is also director, writer and producer of the Virtual Reality film/installation, ‘Psalm for the Mismemoried’, a new project to elevate disappeared stories of the Medical Industrial Complex to reveal systemic abuses and harms towards transforming them.

Cara has organized and worked with many political and cultural organizations nationally & internationally including; Sins Invalid,Southerners on New Ground (SONG), Project South, INCITE! Women & Trans People of Color Against Violence, Bettys Daughter Arts Collaborative, and the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice. Currently she works with the National Queer & Trans Therapist of Color Network, EqualHealth Campaign Against Racism, and the Anti-Eugenics Project; toward building racial, economic, gender & healing justice strategies for our liberation, collective care & safety.

About Jasmín Durán

Jasmín Durán (she/they) is a clinical herbalist, community educator, urban grower and care practitioner based in unceded Lenapehoking territory (NYC).

Communing closely with plants, urban gardens, storytelling and immigrant communities, their work is focused in the remembrance of ancestral healing practices, technologies and traditions in the immigrant diaspora. Today you can find her facilitating herbal workshops, vending and sharing in community under her herbal project, meztli medicinals.

About Nordia Bennett

Nordia Bennett (they/she) is a Black queer eco-womanist and mystic — an interdisciplinary practitioner rooted in relationship with the earth, ancestral healing, and justice work. 

Nordia is a death doula, spiritual director, urban garden educator, yoga and meditation teacher, and social justice facilitator. Across their work, they create spaces for individuals and communities to return to their bodies, deepen their relationship with Spirit, tend to grief, and imagine more liberatory ways of living.

Their work is guided by a deep belief that the earth is both teacher and ancestor, offering wisdom about death, renewal, interdependence, and the many seasons of becoming. Rooted in ancestral remembrance, Nordia is interested in the practices, stories, and ways of knowing that help us remember who we are beyond systems of domination and disconnection.

Nordia holds a Master of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York.

Communiversity
Catalog

September - October 2026

People based in NYC are invited to register. We also are offering one full day devoted to youth programming. Please note that the sessions on September 12, 26, and October 17 are for people 18 and over. 

Space is very limited, and we ask that you not register for sessions unless you are sure you can and will attend.

We also invite those who can afford it to donate any amount to help defray our costs. If you cannot afford to donate, you can still register.