The Freedom School for Intersectional Medicine and Health Justice is excited to present its inaugural…

Freedom School Healing & Health Justice National Fellowship

We welcome and encourage individuals - especially self-identified womxn of color - of all disciplines, backgrounds, activism, and journeys of life who are passionate about health justice to join. Health justice entails activism and collaboration from disciplines beyond medicine and public health. We prioritize the involvement of womxn of color and people of identities that have been forcibly excluded from ivory tower/academic institutions, though we welcome and invite people who are down with the cause!

Organizing Team: Bernadette Lim, Frances Fu, Anshu Gaur

The Freedom School Fellowship Philosophy: Transforming Ourselves to Transform the World and Our Communities

The Fellowship runs from October 15, 2019 to June 1, 2020 and includes:

(1) Year-Long Curriculum on Health Justice and Healing
Throughout the fellowship year (October 2, each fellow will engage in a curriculum that will connect personal transformation, anti-oppressive health justice topics, community-based health narratives, and community change. Aligning with the origins of the Freedom School, we will center the narratives, texts, and life experiences of womxn and communities of color throughout our learning to further learn from narratives that are valuable to the health and healing of our people. Readings for the curriculum will be bi-weekly (every two weeks) with breaks in January and February.

(2) Mentorship & Healing Circles
Fellows will engage in regular virtual healing circles with their fellow cohort related to curriculum content, personal development, and visions for healing and social change. These will be moderated by the organizing team and also invite activists, community leaders, and healing practitioners to partake in dialogue with fellows. Each fellow will also regularly have individual check-ins with the organizing team on their personal growth, vision for healing and social change, and curriculum content.

(4) Vision for Healing and Social Change
By the end of the year, each fellow will implement a Vision for Healing and Social Change. With support and guidance from the fellowship organizing team, their mentor, and fellow healing circles, each fellow will put their vision into action that bridges resources and opportunities of the academy for community-centered healing and social change.

(4) Access to Seed Funding
Currently in the works is a seed fund for all fellows to implement their vision for social change! If and when available, each fellow will have access to seed funding to implement a portion of their vision for healing and social change.

2020 FELLOWS

We are so excited to present our first 2020 Fellowship Cohort with amazing healers, activists, and lightworkers spanning community activism, medicine, public health herbal medicine, indigenous healing and birthwork, academia, and more. Learn more about who they are and their "love stories in the flesh” below.

Karen L. Culpepper (she/her/hers)

Location: Reppin' the DMV and Gorgeous Prince Georges County (read: Maryland)
Passions: Higher Care, Communities of Care, Healing, Magick, Liberation, plant spirit medicine
My work: Often involves playing on the edge and showing up as a fixer of all the things. I am a gen X momma healer, bodyworker, and clinical herbalist. I am the fierce possibility of miracles and a container of healing presence.
My vision/sack full of dreams: A world where we think critically about harm and repair and follow through with effective action. A world where all forms of liberation are actualized. A world where our bodies are emancipated and our bloodlines are healed. A world full of more naps, joy, pleasure and....orgasms! And so it is!

LaShyra Nolen (she/her/hers)

My name is LaShyra Nolen or as my friends know me, “Lash”. I am a Los Angeles native and alumna of Loyola Marymount University, where I obtained my degree in Health and Human Sciences in 2017 and nurtured my passions for social justice advocacy. My passions led me to spend two gap years before starting medical school—one, in Galicia, Spain as a Fulbright scholar where I engaged high school youth in community activism and the other in Chicago as an AmeriCorps member where I served as a health coach at Heartland Health Centers. Currently, I am a first-year medical student at Harvard Medical School, where I serve as student body president and use my platform to promote advocacy, equity, and community empowerment.

I see myself as a product of the sacrifices of my mother, who raised me as a single parent and is the first superhero I ever came to know. I believe my role in this world is to act as a vessel of empowerment for communities to recognize their superpowers, just as my mother helped me recognize mine. I plan to spend my life creating a world where melanin is seen as a gift and not a threat and reforming medical education and government infrastructure to ensure my patients of all creeds have access to the healing they deserve.

When I’m not fighting against systems of oppression you can catch me hoopin’, lost on an adventure, making rap music or eating some bomb food. I am so excited to be a part of this dope community and look forward to all to come!

Robert M. Rock (he/him/his)

Robert Rock is a New York native, passionate about the arts, building community, and social justice. Born and raised in Jamaica, Queens, he studied art history at New York University. While at NYU, he helped create a mentoring program for fellow students within the Higher Education Opportunities Program (HEOP) and the Collegiate Science and Technology Entry Program (CSTEP). After graduating from NYU, Robert went on to study medicine in New Haven, CT at the Yale School of medicine. While there, his commitment to social justice motivated him to co-develop the US Health Justice Course for health professional students interested in using medicine as a means to social justice. He went on to work with graduate students from across the university to further the multidisciplinary USHJ Collaborative, which was dedicated to continuing to educate and create a space for the growing health justice community. Robert is now back home, practicing Family Medicine as a second-year resident at Montefiore medical center in the Bronx, NY. When not wearing the white coat, Robert can be found soaking up the arts at various NYC cultural institutions and finding community among kindred spirits.

Crystal Peña (she/her/hers)

I’m Crystal, based in Austin, TX. Passionate about social justice, art, wellness and decolonizing mental health. My background is as a mental health therapist and I further pursued education and training in trauma informed somatic therapies, dance/movement therapy & expressive arts. Most recently through deep inquiry and identity exploration, I found a connection to ancient wisdom which led to a re-envisioning of how I show up and serve in the world. I’m launching Healing through Movement, using research based practices to create accessible spaces for those who wish to connect to their healing potential within and through community. I also recently accepted a role as a community manager for a wellness and co-working space and with a team hope to create more work/ life/ community connection around wellness. I grew up in Corpus Christi (also known as Selena’s hometown) with tortillas, tamales and tejano music. I’ve lived and traveled extensively and chose the growing city of Austin as home 10 years ago. Things I love are family, friends, dance community, getting lost while traveling, singing to my dog and being outside whenever possible. I hope to create new bridges to other places and spaces through this experience.

Tyrell Blacquemoss (and Blache Marie + Neyy Roma) (he/him/his and they/them/theirs)

Tyrell Blacquemoss (Flagstaff, AZ). My passion is living a life that is art. My work is preserving and researching modern applications for Black, African and indigenous practices for the liberation of Black folks. I imagine a world that is ready for abolition of the medical industrial complex and prison industrial complex and creating sustainability for the next seven generations. I am a kindergarten teacher preparing to welcome my own babies into this realm. I am an initiated Pachakuti Mesa Carrier, Sangoma initiate, trained herbalist, conjurer, practicing artist, and serial entrepreneur. I love naps and nesting and time travel and snacks.

Allie Dyer (she/her/hers)

Allie Dyer (she/her/hers) is a Portland-born, raised, and based, Antigua-rooted medical student, educator, writer, growing healer, and community organizer with a passion for reproductive justice, decolonial histories, and working with youth. She has a call toward bridging allopathic medicine and traditional wisdoms in service of the healing and liberation of all African people and all oppressed under the current colonial and capitalist systems. Within medical school at Oregon Health and Science University, she collaborates with fellow learners, faculty, and administrators to shape institutional accountability to equity as well as establish the Health Justice Co-op, an on-campus home for marginalized students and for collaboration among colleagues to advance justice in healthcare and education. She is an organizer with the Oregon chapter of the All African People's Revolutionary Party, and is also a co-founder and leadership team member for Brown Girl Rise, a group for young Black, Indigenous, girls and femmes of color to cultivate sisterhood in reclaiming their connection to land, health, body, and community. She gives thanks to her Afro-Caribbean and immigrant ancestors in blessing her with culturo-genetic resilience and resourcefulness, courage and fierceness in principled struggle for family and community, and curiosity in imagining freer futures.

Sharon Washington (she/her/hers)

My life journey has been shaped by trauma, resilience, being different and othered, and trusting my inner light, which illuminates my path to liberation. My family moved from Oakland, California, when I was 4 years old. I was raised in a small, all-white farm town in Oregon, where we were met with racism, death threats, violence, and vandalism. We were poor, Black, had physical and learning disabilities in our family, and simply could not fit into the identity box of this rural town. In addition to the external pressures of being othered and targeted, there was childhood sexual and physical abuse and neglect in our home. All of which primed me to be a rape survivor at 13 years old.

Out of these ashes, I arose and found salvation through education. Through the Gates Millennium Scholarship, I earned my BA in African American Studies, my MPH in sexuality and health, and my Ed.D. in health education. I bridge my passions for healing, activism, education, and anti-racism as a diversity, equity and inclusion consultant. I am currently working in Santa Rosa, California, with health care providers, facilitating organizational assessments, trainings, and coaching in order to eliminate interpersonal and institutional bias.

Haley Rabago Callahan (she/her/hers)

My name is Haley Rabago Callahan. I am an islander, raised in a small plantation town in the middle of sugar and pineapple fields on Maui. I am deeply connected to the many forms of medicine that surround me, most especially my ancestors, and am constantly amazed by the path that continues to unfold before me. I am a birthworker; a gatekeeper; a healer. I hold space for the sacred ceremony that is birth--in hospitals, at home, and everywhere in between. I host pregnancy and postpartum circles in my community, offer healing rituals before, during and after birth, and am an Indigenous Breastfeeding Counselor. I am passionate about strengthening my unique island community by supporting birthing people during their rites of passage, reminding them of their innate power, and holding space for them to connect.

Dyaami D’Orazio (they/them...comfy with she/they/he as well)

Dyaami Liana is a person navigating the human experience through relationships between nature and people. Dyaami hails from the Bronx, New York - Lenape and Wappinger lands - and Miami, Florida - Tequesta and Seminole lands - and currently resides in the Bronx. Dyaami has worked in the environmental field for many years and is deeply committed to rest, healing, and growth. A spiritual herbalism apprentice, a writer and facilitator, a dreamer and schemer, Dyaami wants to create spaces where conversations around transformation of both the self and the collective feel feasible and inspiring. Dyaami thinks critically about limiting and harmful structures that exist and imagines worlds where all people thrive, feel joy, and step into their power. We can create anything we want! Time is a construct and it is all that we have in this world - let’s live with love, community, and inclusivity. Dyaami is blessed with two parents, many siblings, a Boricua, Italian, and Venezuelan heritage, and appreciates their chosen family for guiding and supporting them through life. In Octavia E. Butler’s words, Dyaami is “positively obsessed” with liberation, baking, queer science fiction, Frank Ocean, and plants!

Reagan Dunham (she/her/hers)

Reagan Dunham grew up in Farmington Hills, Michigan and Ocean City, Maryland and will talk anyone’s ear off about Big Ten sports if given the opportunity. She is currently pursuing a BA in American Studies at Stanford University and is set to graduate in 2020. She has spent the past three years at Stanford taking studying sexual violence, prisons and immigration detention, and reproductive health in the United States. She looks forward to becoming a primary care physician and learning how to heal herself and her community. She also enjoys dancing ballet and journaling!