By Breckan Winters, NRCDV’s Communications Manager
For Domestic Violence Awareness Month 2024, the Domestic Violence Awareness Project is building on the theme Heal, Hold & Center, first launched in 2023. This theme is all about building connection to foster healing and racial justice for survivors. As beloved ancestor bell hooks reminds us, “Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.”
About Heal, Hold & Center
The Heal, Hold & Center Reflection Guide offers the following framing for this year’s theme:
“For DVAM and beyond, the Domestic Violence Awareness Project calls on us to Heal, Hold & Center survivors, especially those navigating anti-Blackness and other systems of oppression. We know there is no survivor justice without racial justice. We must work together to embrace the many cultural ways we can heal from violence and oppression, hold space for survivors, and center those most marginalized in all of our efforts to end domestic violence.”
This theme embraces the framework of healing justice, a strategy articulated by the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective to “intervene and respond on generational trauma and systemic oppression, and build community/survivor led responses rooted in southern traditions of resiliency to sustain our emotional/physical/spiritual/psychic and environmental well being.” BEAM founder Yolo Akili Robinson shares that “healing justice is really about looking at the systems, legacy, intergenerational trauma—all these pieces where harm still lingers, and beginning to restore and heal that harm.” Healing justice is not about whitewashed “self-care” and bubble baths – it is a framework deeply rooted in Black liberation work. There is no survivor justice without racial justice.
In Healing Justice Is How We Can Sustain Black Lives, Prentis Hemphill offers some tangible ways that healing justice can show up in our liberation work, including following the lead of those who are imagining transformative responses to harm, creating space for different paths to healing and strategies for coping with trauma, and valuing emotional labor and care for each other as being “central components of sustainability that restore us to life.” 
While white supremacy, patriarchy, and other systems of oppression perpetuate individualism and isolation, healing justice calls us into community as a site of connection and resilience.
Throughout October and beyond, we invite you to reflect on the ways in which you can expand the strategies that you or your organization employ to promote healing for survivors. The Heal, Hold & Center Reflection Guide offers conversation starters, key considerations, and prompts for personal and organizational reflection to get you started. When we truly root our efforts in the expressed needs of the survivors we serve, we are working in service of healing justice.
Join us!
We’re excited to offer several opportunities for action and connection around Heal, Hold & Center for DVAM 2024 and beyond:
National Call for Unity: Connective Action for DVAM 2024 - This year’s National Call for Unity is an opportunity for “Connective Action” – an intentional pause and moment of recognition and togetherness for advocates and survivors across the country. Who do you want to celebrate? This #CallforUnity asks each of us to commit to reconnection with those we honor and appreciate in this work to end and heal from domestic violence. Tag an advocate who embodies what it means to Heal, Hold & Center survivors. Post your commitment to connective action on your social media platforms at #CallforUnity for the annual Day of Unity on Monday 10/7, or any time throughout the month of October.- Social Media Campaign: #HealHoldCenter reflection prompts – Throughout October, we’ll be sharing reflection prompts from the Heal, Hold & Center Reflection Guide across our social media channels. Follow @NRCDV and share your reflections all month long!
- Blog Series: Heal, Hold & Center for DVAM – Each week in October, NRCDV will post a guest article on the Awareness Blog written by members of the Domestic Violence Awareness Project Advisory Group. Throughout the month, authors will reflect on what Heal, Hold & Center means to them.
- Podcast: Celebrating National Hispanic Heritage Month 2024 with Despierta! In observance of National Hispanic Heritage Month and National Domestic Violence Awareness Month, NRCDV staff Patty Branco and Ivonne Ortiz chat with Juliana Lozano, Founder and Executive Director of Despierta, a culturally specific organization in Charlotte, NC, serving Latina immigrants. In this conversation, the panel acknowledges and celebrates Latinidad as a vibrant and rich spectrum of experiences and perspectives. Anchored by the belief that there’s No Survivor Justice Without Racial Justice, Patty, Ivonne and Juliana engaged in a candid discussion about the nuanced ways in which multiple intersections impact survivors’ experiences of domestic violence and how mainstream organizations can build equitable and mutually beneficial collaborations with culturally specific organizations.
- Wear Purple Day – Join advocates around the world in wearing purple for domestic violence awareness on Thursday, October 17. Post a picture on social media along with a message about what #HealHoldCenter and #NoSurvivorJusticeWithoutRacialJustice mean to you!
Sample social media posts, campaign imagery, and more are available from the Domestic Violence Awareness Project. We hope you’ll join us in our call to Heal, Hold & Center survivors this Domestic Violence Awareness Month!
