Project Name

The Cohort is a 16-month abolitionist, decolonial, and disability justice training circle that invites Black Trans, Gender Expansive, and Non-Binary practitioners into a space of critical knowledge-building, medicine-making, storytelling, collective witnessing, and mutual care. Guided by LMS’s core principle of “Each One Teach One, Each One Heal One - Across Bonds of Healthy Kinship”, this 16 month-long fellowship seeks to center Black Trans people within our powers as indigenous healers and medicine stewards. It also aims to support healers in adopting a liberation framework within their medicine practices.

The Cohort is a 16-month circle that will take place from April 2025 - November 2026, with a 4 month rest period between December 2025 - March 2026.

This means we will meet, learn, and actively engage together weekly from April 2025 - November 2025 and then return back again between April 2026 - November 2026.

Across the 16 month period, Cohort members will do the following:

1. Form connections of care-based kinship with other Black Trans practitioners who are thinking critically about how to apply a liberation lens to their healing practices.

2. Build a historical understanding of the medical industrial complex, its role as a carceral state within Black (Trans) communities, and why abolition of the healthcare industry (instead of reform) is a necessary freedom path.

3. Pool knowledge together of Black Trans historical and contemporary peoples whose healing practices have subverted systems of violence.

4. Create rituals to identify and nourish the medicines that they themselves carry; and build strategies on how to harness these medicines in mutual care of each other, in support of the larger Black Trans community, and towards a world where our communities can self-determine paths to autonomy.

5. Collaborate with LMS to develop Liberation Medicine as an abolitionist decolonial framework that informs the healing justice movement by centering Black Trans powers, needs, and experiences of medicine.

6. Narrate, document, and archive their own experiences navigating the healthcare industry as survivors of medical injustice, and creating their own care practices as healers.

At the end of the Cohort, members will be formally invited to join LMS as core liberation medicine practitioners-in-training.

We hope for practitioners who join this Cohort to be activated within the knowledge that Black Gender-Expansive peoples are Medicine-Makers as much as we are Medicine-Seekers; are Teachers as much as we are Learners; are Scholars as much as we are Creatives. We hope for members to gain the confidence to not only identify, legitimize, and put name(s) to their own innate and/or learned skills of indigenous African medicines, but to also learn with each other on how to harness those skills towards collective liberation.

Training practitioners in this Cohort will be able to:

Kinship & Conflict Resolution

• Build intentional relationships, community, and kinship with other Black Trans practitioners

• Learn skills of conflict resolution, relational repair, and accountability for times of relational rupture

Storytelling & Narrative Justice

• Use storytelling as a way of building knowledge (i.e. undoing epistemic injustice); engaging in collective healing (i.e. through mutual witnessing); and honouring silenced Black Trans narratives of medicine (i.e. undoing narrative injustice)

• sit deeply and sit intentionally with our own stories of medicines - including how we have experienced the medical industrial complex + how we create our own modes of care

Root Causes of Medical Injustice

• Develop an understanding of the historical and contemporary formations of the medical industrial complex, namely:

  • The creation of the MIC through the pathologization of Black peoples

  • The role of the MIC in in binarization of Black genders and sexualities; the disabling of Black bodies; and the criminalization of Black being-hood

• Build political awareness of the root causes of medical injustice; and how medical injustice itself breeds anti-Blackness, transphobia, ableism, classicism, xenophobia, and femme-phobia.

• Connect their own lived experiences within the medical system — and within other systems of oppression — with the larger history of anti-Black healthcare injustice

Our Own Medicines

• Name and define their own powerful skills, tools, interests, and/or knowledge of medicines, including the roles and histories of these medicines in African indigenous practices.

• Situate their skills, interests, and powers of medicine within a larger history of Black Trans medicine-makers and medicine-seekers

• Begin building knowledge and practices on how to mobilize their individual skills, practices, and knowledge of care towards black trans collective justice

Abolition, Decolonization, & Liberation Medicine

• Explore and add into the core tenets of Liberation Medicine

• Develop liberatory frameworks to guide their medicine practices.

• Learn how to harness their medicines as tools of political organizing against medical injustice

• Strategize collectively to map out abolitionist/decolonial pathways through which Black - and Black Trans - peoples can divest from the MIC while building our own ecosystems of collective care

We welcome into this cohort Black Trans folks who:

• Have been impacted by medical violence and/or healthcare injustice

• Are crafting, building knowledge within, or are actively nurturing care skills/medicine* practices that are necessary for communal thriving.

• Hold, or are interested in holding, their medicinal/healing practices outside of the medical industrial complex.

• Have an ardent desire to A) build a deeply political and historical analysis of the healthcare system; B) learn how to apply a Black Trans-centered liberation framework to their healing justice work; and C) build relationships of kinship with other Black Trans practitioners who hold shared values around medical abolition.

• Are interested in homing their skills of healing and medicine within a mutual care village like LMS**

  • **Because this Cohort is also one way in which LMS is building capacity within our village, we prioritize those who are interested in joining LMS after this program ends.

For this Cohort, we especially prioritize Black T/GNC/ENBY practitioners who are disabled, neurodivergent, poor, and/or displacement-impacted (i.e. migrants, refugees, asylum-seekers, etc). We are also prioritizing those whose lived experiences have been informed by colourism, trans misogyny, and or classism; and thus highly encourage dark-skinned folks, trans women and femmes, and poor/unstably employed/working class folks to apply. One must also be 18 years of age or above to join.

*For this Cohort (and for LMS), you do not have to embody a specific type of medicine or care work. You also most certainly do not have to have been degreed by an academic institution. Your medicine can be traditional healing; singing; dancing; hair care; mental health support; community organizing; conflict resolution work; embodied movement work; spirit/ancestor work; history-keeping; visual art; performance art; writing; divination; surgery; storytelling; witnessing; farming; herb/plant medicine; etc. As long as you have a skill, knowledge, tool, or trait of care (and most likely you do) that you are interested in harnessing in support of Black Trans liberation, and as long as you are committed to sharing this trait of care across/within relational bonds grounded in safety and accountability, we welcome you. To learn more about LMS's indigenous approach to reframing "Medicine", kindly go to the "Key LMS Definitions" tab to read further.

In acknowledgement that Black T/GNC/ENBY folks – especially those of us who are disabled; who hold our healing practices in the margins outside of the dominant medical system; and/or who are displacement-impacted – live under oppressive systems of capitalism that price us out of survival, we will be offering a mutual care fund of $10,000 to each practitioner in this Cohort.

These funds will be disbursed over the course of the 16-month training period.

This will be a virtual gathering.

We will meet weekly from April 2025 - November 2025, break between December 2025 - March 2026, and then reconvene weekly from April 2026 - November 2026. We hold that this schedule may shift pending real-time world events, health needs of Cohort members and facilitators, and apprenticeship schedules.

To be part of this Cohort, you are asked to:

• Attend orientation from March 29-30, 2025.

• Attend weekly 2h virtual gatherings between April 2025 - November 2025 and April 2026 - November 2026. (Timing to be determined with circle members)

We have some expectations and requests for practitioners who join this cohort. We ask that all members:

• Lead a Decolonize Medicine circle (which will be open to both Cohort folks and the wider Black Trans community). Learn more about LMS’s DM Circles here.

• Co-Lead one Cohort circle (this circle open only to Cohort members)

• Engage in a (minimum) 3-month apprenticeship with a practitioner whose medicine practice aligns with your interests

• Collectively design a project that addresses root cause issues of gender justice, disability justice, reproductive justice, and/or migrant justice within your community.

• Contribute three narratives of medicine to Medical HxStories.

  • One will be a self-narrative

  • Another will be an oral and/or visual hxstory interview of another Cohort member

  • A third will be an oral and/or visual hxstory interview of a Black Trans practitioner in community

• Activate the collective stories shared by Cohort within Medical HxStories in a community exhibition

• Co-Organize 2026 Liberation Medicine Convergence

*While some of these generative asks will be time-based, we are also aware that creativity does not always occur on pre-planned linear timescale. If you may have trouble meeting these asks, either now or at any point during the cohort, please let us know so we can work as a group to meet each other’s access needs. As well, we are aware that as spirits in human bodies, we tend to stuff more than is doable within the time frames available to us (and thus as organizers, we may very well be doing the same thing with the asks listed above). As per our emergent curriculum praxis, we are open to these expectations and requests shifting as this project proceeds; and/or incorporating ideas from Cohort members .

1. When applications are open again, there will be an application form with questions that can be engaged via an audio or video response.

2. We will engage applicants in a conversational interview with LMS .

This is a rolling application process. We will interview weekly as we receive applications.

Get in touch.

• Email us: liberationmedicineschool@gmail.com

  • We will respond to emails on Mondays between 3 - 5 PM PST

• Attend virtual office hours (RSVP here to get the link):

  • Tuesday, October 29th @ 12 PM - 2 PM PST

  • Wednesday, November 6th @ 12 PM - 2 PM PST