As leaders working in networked ways, we have often found ourselves hungry for ingredients and recipes to serve our practice. As social justice practitioners and cooks, we know the wisdom is within us and among us—drawn from our cultures and communities, our ancestors and the deep knowing and resilience they use to survive and even thrive—to create something that would nourish us all.
Launched in 2017, the Network Weaver Learning Lab was an 18-month program created through a partnership between Change Elemental (then Management Assistance Group (MAG)) and CompassPoint Nonprofit Services.
During our time together as weavers in the lab, we were able to experiment with a number of practices and approaches to advance our own healing and increase our ability to work in networked ways to end relationship-based violence.
We are overjoyed to share this bounty with our partners and peers in this sacred, and sometimes depleting work, of creating our vision of the world as “a place where belly laughs are abundant, people are seen, and all beings are loved and nourished and able to thrive.”
The result of this work is a medicine card deck and a companion healing cookbook. The medicine cards and healing cookbook have been designed to support ending relationship-based violence and other intersectional forms of oppression and injustice. Each card, or section in the book, represents a reflection, invitation, tool, or experience that has helped an individual, organization and/or network make a sustained change.
Weaving Together a World Without Violence Medicine Cards and Companion Healing Cookbook
The medicine card deck is arranged into five suits: invocations, principles, ingredients, recipes and wild card.
These cards are designed to invoke the senses as well as the intellect, through visual representation, inquiry, and invitations to practice physical movement; they challenge the user to engage in the world differently. They can be shuffled, cut, arranged and drawn in any manner that supports your practice in healing, shifting and transforming our world. They include practices that can lead toward the shifting of individual habits, examination of systemic inequity and practices of collective liberation.
The companion healing cookbook provides more detailed information about the principles, ingredients and recipes and how they might be used.
Photo credit: Tracy NguyenThe cookbook also links these elements to the learnings and tools put forth by our mentors, partners and wisdom keepers in the field.
We are thrilled to share these offerings with you. And, we look forward to hearing from you about how you use them to deepen your practice and help co-create a world of love, dignity, and justice.
Download the Medicine Cards and Cookbook
Graphic design of the medicine deck + cookbook by Design Action Collective
Banner photo credit by Nadine Primeau | Unsplash
I love the Medicine Cards so much. What a beautiful tool! Thank you.