Curriculum & Tools

Our Stories of Care and Control: Practices Towards Building Strategy webinar series seeks to deepen healer/health practitioners' understanding of the Medical Industrial Complex (MIC) toward confronting and/or disrupting the harms and abuses of these systems of care as an extension of systemic oppression.

In this series, we also explore the many contradictions of community care spaces that unknowingly perpetuate similar beliefs & models to the MIC. As we grapple with how to find genuine care and safety that addresses our community’s needs, these webinars seek to provide a compass to ensure that collective care and safety are at the heart of every effort to address harm within and outside the healthcare system.

In 2024 & 2025, we brought together cohorts of participants through our MIC Organizing Institute to build a strategic alliance of grassroots healers/health practitioners seeking to build interventions within the Medical Industrial Complex.

The cohorts combined facilitated learning, collaborative practice, and strategy building. The curriculum covered a range of topics including:

• Relationship building and skilling up for strategies to interrupt the MIC;
• History and timeline of eugenics, colonization, and racial capitalism as root causes of the prison and Medical Industrial Complex;
• Analysis building of political frameworks including: healing justice, disability justice, transformative justice and reproductive justice, environmental justice and harm reduction;
• Understandings of complex trauma and its impact on both systems and individuals working within those systems;
• Introduction to the HHP’s Medical Industrial Complex Timeline, and how to use it to disrupt and organize;
• Tools for mapping context and conditions in your work & region toward building interventions.

Stay tuned for future cohorts!

Visit our project website for a study guide with reflection questions to consider as you explore the timeline, such as:

• What does it feel like to learn what you didn’t know previously when you look through this timeline? Why do you think you didn’t know these things? Were you taught, directly or indirectly, that some people “deserved” care, or wellness, or justice and other people did not?
• What are some of the institutional systems that you see operating on our collective bodies and experiences? How do we experience, or not experience, those same systems in our own lives, or the lives of our communities’?
• How do you see legacies of racial capitalism, ableism, environmental racism, and the carceral system sabotage collective care and wellness repeatedly in this timeline? Where do you see resistance?
• Knowing what you know now from these timelines, what do you imagine for our futures? What will we need to reground our collective respect, and dignity, for the care and survival of our communities?