HEALTHCARE REPARATIONS COOPERATIVE
First a
Land Acknowledgement
The Healthcare Reparations Cooperative operates…
On the land of the Dakota people. Mni Sota Maḳoce, also known as Minnesota, comes from the Daḳota name for this region. "The land where the waters reflect the skies." This land is sacred and we honor the practices intertwined and irremovable from within it. We commit to furthering and uplifting our collective liberation.
About
Healthcare Reparations Cooperative
The Healthcare Reparations Cooperative works to create an independent system for health and healing that incorporates systemic and interpersonal reparations for society’s most oppressed communities while using a collective cooperative structure that allows for co-ownership of the intellectual property created. It also is a tool for community driven research that takes the form investigating research questions posed by the communities most impacted by health inequities who might not otherwise have access to public health scholarship.
In addition to the work of creating an alternative healthcare model, HRC engages in public health narrative change and community driven research. Community driven research takes the form of reconfiguring the power structures held in traditional academic investigation and giving it back to the communities most impacted by health inequities.
Conversations for change
About our founder
Hadija Steen Mills
I am mixed-Black, a first-generation immigrant, queer, and a parent. My intersecting identities brought me to the work and have influenced the creation of the Healthcare Reparations Cooperative, and continue to inform all aspects of the work. I have witnessed my communities in pain and being in pain alongside. This has provided a charge to push for change in the systems that tout health. This work is deeply embodied and essential to moving beyond a state of survival to one of an age of thriving.
I am traditionally educated in the area of human sexuality with a focus on reproductive justice and disparities and have a Maternal Child Health Masters in Public Health, with a double minor in Epidemiology and Health Equity. I was born and raised on the Dakota land commonly known as Minneapolis. I acknowledge my diasporic lineage does not pardon my responsibility as an occupier of this stolen land.
I am deeply passionate about the creation of a world free of inequities and advocates for autonomy for the most systematically oppressed.
photo by sally nixon
More About
Healthcare Reparations Cooperative
The Healthcare Reparations Cooperative is a push for unifying, creative, and anti-oppressive approaches to a new world where community care elicits health and healing. Starting from a place of liberation for the most under-resourced and oppressed communities then striving to bring that world to reality in a way that does not hurt communities already experiencing pain at the hand of inequitable systems. Each area weaves and feeds into each other, providing support and accountability.
Healthcare is a system that perpetuates violence and harm on Black people. Thus the core work of HRC is the application of abolitionist principles to the landscape of healthcare. This requires an internalization of the belief that a liberated future is possible that encompasses Black joy and healing.
Community care is a form of relational healing. And by being in relationship with one another we can also create meaningful change. As a budding cooperative, relationships and growing a movement are imperative values for the HRC. Working in isolation weakens movements and perpetuates the systems of white supremacy that fodder harm.
