Co-organized by Healing in Colour and Ji-Youn Kim, this gathering is an opportunity for mental health professionals to confront our complicities in these harmful systems/behaviours and explore the need for anti-carceral practices that minimize further violence.

We’re trained as mandated reporters to surveil our clients and hand them over to a violently oppressive system. To police who routinely harass, abuse, and kill unhoused, trans, disabled, Black and Indigenous people, undocumented folks and sex workers. To Child Protection Services where the violent legacies of the residential school system and the Sixties Scoop continue in the modern foster care system.

As members of “helping” professions, mental health care providers must confront our practices of surveillance, policing, and involvement in the Prison Industrial Complex and Medical Industrial Complex that harm and kill those we claim to be helping.

Co-organized by Healing in Colour and Ji-Youn Kim, this gathering is an opportunity for mental health professionals to confront our complicities in these harmful systems/behaviours and explore the need for anti-carceral practices that minimize further violence. We will have a panel discussion followed by small breakout group discussions for all attendees. The event will be moderated by Ji-Youn Kim.

Join us and our speakers: Jennifer-Lee Koble MSW, K WooDZ (Kamilah Haywood) of the Toronto Prisoners’ Rights Project, and Rania El Mugammar.

We welcome all mental health practitioners and folks working in mental health services (eg. therapists, social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, peer workers, non-profit service providers, child protection workers, hotline operators, etc). We will be centering the needs and experiences of BIPOC, especially Black and Indigenous folks in all their intersections.

This event is also a fundraiser for Healing in Colour.

Healing in Colour was recently featured in the Globe and Mail for working to alleviate the barriers faced by BIPOC in accessing mental health supports.