Rooted in Resilience: Mapping the Expanding Horizons Where Social Justice, Spiritual Practice, and Healing Meet

The Rooted in Resilience Mapping Project was an attempt to capture one view of the significant and expanding body of work being done to integrate personal and collective transformation, spiritual practice, and healing, within frameworks for social change. The question of how communities can best equip and ready themselves for both the challenges they face today, and the looming threats of ecological and economic rupture in the years ahead is a serious one that we are discovering requires our attention and our resources. By providing this view of how individuals, organizations and entire movements are imagining and drawing on lineages of spiritual sustainability or holistic care to resist well and achieve freedom and justice for all of us, Rooted in Resilience, which has since become a program initiative at Faith Matters Network, seeks to emphasize how important the work of transformation, spiritual engagement, and healing is– and highlight the questions and challenges practitioners are themselves facing, and make the case for why and how we can invest in the roles and resources needed.

In the first nine months of the mapping project , FMN interviewed organizers, healers, spiritual leaders, artists, and thinkers who are approaching this work from different perspectives, drawing on distinct histories and cultural experiences, and experimenting with the new. Most of the people we talked with and the projects they pointed us towards can be found in this case study published in 2016.