a community of practice for rest and revolution, for burned out public health and health care workers
the people’s health
this community of practice helps us hold the moral injury of bearing witness to atrocities, through narrative medicine, intersectional analysis, and collective integration.
what comes next
The pandemic was emergent, and demanded an emergent response. We — health care workers, public health professionals, and everyone under the umbrella of “health” — were thrown into something we were wholly unprepared for — no mentorship, no pandemic plans, no guidance. We had the hardest of hard choices — who got money, who got cleaning supplies, who got vaccinated first, who got sick, who lived and who died. We witnessed a systemic failure across every dimension of health care.
Most people do not know the tenderness of those choices. Most people do not know the harrowing frenzy of that time, the strange pride and unsettling satisfaction that comes with doing work that actually matters, alongside a growing unsettling dread of “who gave me this kind of power,” and the pit-in-the-stomach fear of “and what happens when I get it wrong.”
In the aftermath — the ongoing aftermath — there is silence. There is coverup of misdeeds, a numbing redirection. So many of us left our fields, our professions, what we thought was our life’s work. We left to tend to our grief (and often, our newly diagnosed illnesses) in our own hyper-independent ways.
But. But!
Perhaps we can take honest inventory.
Perhaps we can make amends, to ourselves and each other. Perhaps there is integration, acceptance, forgiveness to offer ourselves and each other.
Perhaps there is wisdom and discernment on the other side. Perhaps there is the peace of chosen solitude and chosen community.
Perhaps there is practice in this seemingly mundane work — but then again, we know that this work (our work) isn’t the flashy policy, it’s the messy middle. It’s the holding space and the mediating conflict and the repair after an argument. It’s paying for childcare at the events and making sure there’s a ramp available and not getting cookies or kudos for unseen labor. It’s preceptorship and mentorship and relationship.
Perhaps we can even rebuild that steady flame of commitment we used to carry, to health and wellbeing.
Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.
The enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition. (WHO)
Perhaps we can revel in the full texture of justice work, not in the simple binary of oppression.
this community of practice is for you if…
you came to “the helping professions” with the blissful naiveté and energy of youth, but a decade or two of Karen nurses withholding pain meds from your IUD insertion patients — not to mention public health Jills and social work Sarahs making political pawns out of people’s lives — even your rage is exhausted.
you want to practice abolition as a life ethic because your grief politicized you — not just disrupting policing in the world around you, not just eviscerating the systems that need to be undone, but learning to face and unravel the oppressor within us — gently, kindly.
you crave a circle that can hold your tenderness, your radicalism, your wildest imagination — a community of practice dedicated to learning slowly, working through a rich tapestry of justice.
you know deep in your bones that you would have been one of the lesbians cooking soup, donating blood, and tending to those dying of AIDS in the ‘80s, or you would have been a Jane performing abortions in Chicago in the ‘70s. You know it because you built mutual aid networks in your neighborhood in 2020, and you’re babywearing at marches for Palestine now.
you believe that play, joy, and delight feed our collective imagination, and you believe — fiercely and brilliantly — that this could all be different.
meet your facilitator
Hi! I’m Shivani, and I’m thrilled you’re here. I'm a maker and a mender, a queer disabled brown femme, an eldest immigrant daughter, and the founder of tulsi strategies, an equity and justice studio for people at the intersections. I work to nourish my communities and heal our systems of care, in pursuit of health equity and racial, disability, and reproductive justice.
Over the last twenty years, I’ve been a health equity expert for the COVID pandemic response, a leader in maternal mortality prevention, a crisis counselor for sexual violence survivors, a full-spectrum birth and abortion doula, a trauma-sensitive hatha yoga teacher, a sex educator, and a cognitive neuroscience researcher.
I love the elegant and imperfect chaos of our identities, our glorious riotous revolutionary ancestries. I believe that joy is the most vulnerable emotion, that the antidote to violence is resonant and relational connection, that queer and disabled and bipoc people and survivors have each other — that we have us.
why now?
I built my life around health care and health systems:
as a 7-year-old making “medicines” for her dolls from plants in the backyard, equally entranced by dusty herbal textbooks at the library and by the plastic pot of beeswax salve made at the local farm;
as a 9-year-old learning about chromosomes in a laminated binder from the geneticist and an orthopedist, in a clinic room with the room number painted in big blue paint across the door;
as a 12-year-old poring over an anatomy encyclopedia for children, sketching the ventricles of the heart with colored pencil;
as a 19-year-old touching a gloved finger to a brain slice during neuroanatomy practicals, enchanted by anatomic architecture and utterly bewildered by organic chemistry;
as a 23-year-old taking (and failing) the MCATs, submitting to public health and midwifery programs instead, spending three months on medical leave after two major surgeries five weeks apart;
as a 27-year-old testifying in the state capital to secure half a million dollars for maternal mortality prevention, explaining the role of systemic racism in public health and hospital policy, creating guidelines for more equitable data collection;
as a 30-year-old living and working in government public health through the start of a global pandemic and a summer of racial uprisings.
But after a career in government public health, six months of a pandemic deployment, and my own collapse into a year-long bout with long COVID, I burned out — hard.
From the bottom of that well, I took everything I knew about health, wellbeing, resilience, and disabled wisdom, and put it into practice. I rooted deeply into my own body’s healing and nourishment, found and cultivated my communities of practice, and rebuilt my politic and praxis, brick by brick.
Why now? Because you did, too.
Because “health” is so much more than just health systems, just policy, just clinical care, just behavioral health, just home aides, just shelter, just a kale salad. It’s necessary, foundational, collective.
It’s a prerequisite to and the ecosystem for revolution, and it needs you.
You might need it, too.
a summer in community
the people’s health framework
coming soon!
what people are saying