Liberation is Good Medicine

Dawn Belkin Martinez: the way we see health, it's sort of in accordance with the United Nations view of health, is that it's much more than the absence of disease. It's the right to live in a community that has parks and to live in a space that has grocery stores that are nearby that you don't have to take three buses to get to. It's the right to be able to go to the doctor and not have to worry about how much your copayment is. It's the right to not be worried about racism and classism and individualism and all sorts of things. So when we think about health, we don't think about it in a really parsimonious way. We think about it in this broad, comprehensive, living quality of life. How can you live your optimal life? And that involves many different factors, not only like disease.

Phillipe: Welcome to From Issues to Action. I'm your host, Philippe Copeland. In a world full of challenges, what can we do? Join me for conversations that answer this question. If you want to be informed and inspired, this podcast is for you. This episode features an interview with Dr. Don Belkin-Martinez. Don is a clinical professor at the Boston University School of Social Work and a founding member of the Boston Liberation Health Group. We explored this group's efforts to create a world filled with justice, care, compassion, and equity. This requires creating a new narrative about health itself. I hope you enjoy it. All right, Don, thank you so much for coming on from issues to action today.

Dawn Belkin Martinez: Thank you so much, Philippe. It's an honor.

Phillipe: Excellent. So I wanted to start with having you introduce yourself to the listeners and what I'd like you to say is what you most want them to know about you as a person.

Dawn Belkin Martinez: Okay, so hello everyone. My name is Dawn Belkin Martinez. I use the she pronouns and I have been a long time organizer in the movement for our collective liberation for over 30 years. Actually over close to 40. And What's important to me as a social worker is the capacity to help move the needle towards our North Star, is a world filled with justice, a world of care, a world of compassion, and most importantly, a world that's much more equitable than the one we have now.

Phillipe: That is amazing. Thank you so much for that thoughtful answer. So tell us a bit why the focus on health in particular.

Dawn Belkin Martinez: That's a great question and lots of people ask us this because I think for the most part in the United States and probably other parts of the developed, know, the global north, health is defined in a very narrow way, the absence of disease, right? You so if you don't have... high blood pressure, if you don't have asthma, you're healthy. But the way we see health, it's sort of in accordance with the United Nations view of health, is that it's much more than the absence of disease. It's the right to live in a community that has parks and to live in a space that has grocery stores that are nearby that you don't have to take three buses to get to. It's the right to be able to go to the doctor and not have to worry about how much your copayment is. It's the right to not be worried about racism and classism and individualism and all sorts of things. So when we think about health, we don't think about it in a really parsimonious way. How can you live your optimal life? And that involves many different factors, not only disease.

Phillipe: It's interesting. So what do you think is important about thinking differently or shifting the narrative on what health means for people?

Dawn Belkin Martinez: Well, I think that involves a lot of, well, changing the narrative, right? Because I think, I just was at the medical school last week, and even there, where they have amazing classes in doctoring, and patient-doctor relationships, I mean, it's an amazing place doing really comprehensive work. And part of the work is being able to remind people that, good health involves so many different factors that are often beyond the sphere of the 15 minute appointment that you have with your primary care physician. Now obviously the primary care physician isn't going to be able to do anything you know in that 15 minutes about the fact that you don't have a playground nearby or that you have to take two buses to get to buy healthy food if you have diabetes. You need to know and you need to understand health in the broadest holistic way. So I think that changing the way people understand health, changing the way health is talked about, changing the way that people experience being healthy, all involves challenging some of our, as we would say in Liberation Health, dominant worldview messages about what health is.

Phillipe: And when you talk about the medical school, you mean the BU School of Medicine?

Dawn Belkin Martinez: Yes, yeah.

Phillipe: Okay, I just wanted to clarify that for listeners. So you've started talking a little bit about this. This is a great way to move into this discussion. Explain liberation health for people who are unfamiliar with that language. What does that mean?

Dawn Belkin Martinez: Great question. we borrowed from the term, liberation theology. So it's not like we made this up on our own. So if we think about liberation, we think of freedom, right? You freedom like freedom from, you know, external and both internal oppression, which we can get into maybe later on in the podcast. So when we think about why liberation health? We think about the need for us to be able to treat the various physical, and in my case, I'm a social worker like you, so mental distress, emotional distress, trauma that people are suffering from. In addition to that, we need to have a comprehensive understanding of why these things happen, right? So the traditional medical model is really great at making clear what the personal factors are that influence health, things like your family history, right? And any kind of conflict within the family or... trauma or loss or illness and things like that. So that's certainly a big component of health. we would add in liberation health that another large component is the ideologies that we're living under. in our society of racial capitalism, the ideologies of racism, classism, sexism, individualism, ableism, ageism, And also the institutions that people have to interface with, right? So understanding that, as we would say, the triangle of factors that are affecting your health and the problems that people experiencing that bring them to the doctor and the social worker is essential to being a good provider.

Phillipe: Alright, so it looks like you're getting into the triangle, so you're talking a bit about the model. Break down the model for listeners,

Dawn Belkin Martinez: the model of liberation health involves doing a comprehensive assessment, liberation health is really a very specific assessment tool and intervention tool. So it's an actual practice. So if somebody comes in to see me as a liberation health social worker, right, you the first thing I would do in all of this is I would ask them, you know, what are the problems that are getting in the way of their optimal level of functioning, right? You know, and usually people can come up with a long list of things that, you know, are getting in the way. I'm trained as a family therapist, so I often see multiple people at the same time and you know we ask each individual person to make a list of the factors that are getting in the way and sometimes people will put other family members on the list right we have to let them know that no it's not your uncle George no it's you know what's happening between you and your uncle George that is influencing you you know not being able to live your optimal life and that's a intervention in and of itself because most of the time when people talk about their problems they're you to sort of seeing them in this really narrow, as I said, parsimonious way and looking at just sometimes people, like if you see kids, for example, they'll put their parents, their parents are the problem or their parents will put the children on the list. And so the first step in all of this is really coming up with an externalized vision of the problem. know, what is it that's getting in the way? So is it diabetes? Is it anxiety? Is it depression? Is it nervousness? You know, whatever the family or individual that you're working with says. And then the assessment tool that we use, and this, I mean, I didn't really talk about the history of how liberation health was developed, but this comes directly from the families that we were working with when we developed the assessment tool. were very clear that they wanted something very simple. They didn't want to be filling out a chart with flow sheets. I think we went through five or six iterations of what kind of assessment tool we would use and the triangles where we landed. So once you identify what the problem is, you put the problem in the middle of the triangle. So let's say the problem is anxiety or know. conflict with your mother or whatever. And then from there, there are three points in the triangle. So there's three levels of factor analysis. The first one are the personal factors influencing the problem. And that's pretty easy for people to do because they're used to that. That's the medical model, right? So that comes pretty quickly. So people will say things like, I have a long standing history of trauma. I was abused, I have significant loss, I have conflict with my mother. So all those different personal factors people list at the one point of the triangle. And that is probably the easiest part for people to do. The second part of the triangle are the cultural factors that influence their problem. And these cultural factors are, we don't mean, when we say culture, we don't mean like the food you eat or like how you drink. or where you're from, we're talking about dominant worldview messages, ideology that comes directly from the work of Antonio Gramsci. And so we're talking about the ideologies around racism, classism, sexism, ableism, individualism, our culture of productivity, all sorts of things, ideas that influence the problem.

Phillipe: So could I just stop you there not to interrupt you because you're putting out a really, really important concept. And so I wanted to have an opportunity to unpack it just a little bit in terms

Dawn Belkin Martinez: Sure.

Phillipe: of dominant worldview messages. Could you give listeners maybe an example of what one of those sounds like or one that they might have encountered?

Dawn Belkin Martinez: I just heard this the other day. was talking to a mom about some difficulty she was having with her. child, her male child that was about 13, and she said, asi son los hombres, right, you know, which means boys will be boys, right. So that's a concrete example of dominant worldview messages that you can really unpack. Like, what does that mean? So this was somebody that was getting into problems at school, exhibiting quote unquote aggressive behavior, and you know, there is a dominant worldview message and certainly that's something that we see on the TV, something, you know, we hear about all the time that, you know, boys will be boys. That's just how they behave. They're aggressive, you know, that's the way it is, so on and so forth.

Phillipe: that was actually a really good example. As a father of two sons, I can definitely relate to that particular story. And I think that that's something that many people have heard. I think given some of the things that have been happening recently politically, I think that's actually a really good example of how a story that seems commonplace and innocuous might actually be having an impact on people's health.

Dawn Belkin Martinez: No, that was a really good segue and I like the drawing of the concept to the example. So those are all like things that I said in productivity, your worth is what you produce externally. All of these ideas come from a dominant worldview message and ideology that benefits a small group of people at the expense of many people. And then finally the last piece of the triangle, the third point on the triangle are the institutional factors, right? You know, we think of institutions, we think about our economic system of racial capitalism, we think about the transportation system, we think about the quote unquote criminal justice system. injustice system. We think about the health care system. We think about the housing system, right? And all of these different factors will impact, you know, the presenting problem, And in the case of that mother, to take that example further, one of the things that was happening was that she had, she was she had seen a another provider somewhere at a big hospital. they gave her all of these sort of worksheets to do, know, sort of like to how to, know, behavior management kind of stuff. And she kept losing the worksheet or she wouldn't bring it in the next week. She wouldn't quote unquote do her homework. And one of the things that came up in the discussion is that she is one of the many Bostonians that is at risk of being evicted because her rent is out of control And she's totally stressed out. So she's completely stressed out and keeping track of the paper that has all of the different, you know, anger management techniques and behavioral plans is going to be, you know, not the top priority when you don't have a place to live. But that wasn't something that she had spoken about very much when she went to see this other provider because they were focused on the child's behavior. housing, you might think, how does the housing system impact somebody's aggressive behavior? Well, quite a bit because if you're stressed out about housing and you're sort of feeling badly because people are blaming you that you didn't save or you're not good with your finances, this is all going to be in the mix of why the parenting might be hard at a particular moment. So it's the personal, the cultural, or the ideological and the institutional factors that are affecting the problem.

Phillipe: Excellent. Thank you so much for breaking down the model. So let's talk a little bit about the Group itself. Can you give some examples of the kind of work that this group has been involved in? We're going to get into the history a little bit, but let's start with just right here, right now in the present. What kinds of things is the Group up to?

Dawn Belkin Martinez: Great, so I can tell you a bunch of different things that are, well, one of them is very related to this situation, this clinical situation that I shared with you. As you know, here we are in Boston, and for our national audience, Boston is one of the most expensive housing markets in the country. And one of the things that local housing groups are doing is trying to put a ballot question to the voters in November on rent control. So our Boston Liberation Group had a... meeting maybe, I don't know, I think it was in the fall, October, maybe November, where we had somebody come from these housing groups, City Light Vida Urbana, and explain the ballot, explain the strategy, explain the tactics, So that's a concrete example of something we've done recently. Another sort of activity of ours is with the increased ICE activity, our neighbors, our brothers and sisters and siblings being abducted from the streets. We had a Luce training. Luce is the, you know, immigration network that is putting together an ICE watch, a verification of ICE at one of our liberation health meetings

Phillipe: Yeah, thank you for those really concrete examples. So let's step into the time machine for a minute and go back, go way back. How did you first get involved with Liberation Health?

Dawn Belkin Martinez: actually it's a really fun story. I was working, before I worked in academia at Boston University, I was the chief social worker on the inpatient psychiatry unit at Boston Children's Hospital. And we... worked with lot of families, that's my area of expertise, family therapy, and we had gotten quite a bit of feedback from the families they felt like some of the people that they interacted with thought they could be better parents than they were. They also felt a lot of shame and blame. So around that time, I had gone down to Brazil and I spent a bunch of time with comrades at the Paulo Ferry Institute, which is located in Sao Paulo, but I was in Puerto Alegre, so there were a of people there who were doing this work and had applied it to work that they were doing with folks that... that didn't have any land that would take over the land, basically just campesinos that would take land over and build a school, they did amazing things and they used a lot of the ferry methodology. And I was totally blown away. There were many psychologists that were involved too. So when I got back to Boston, I thought, my God, there's so many great ideas that they have, but Boston's really different than Puerto Alegre, so we can't really do the same thing that they had. so I kind of connected with a colleague of mine we're both in them doing the PhD program at the same time Nelson Ochoa and we said you know let's try to think about this let's try to think about how we can take some of these amazing ideas about empowerment and you know individuals being in the driver's seat and apply them to our mental health work as social workers And at that time, was 25 years ago, there weren't a lot of folks that were interested in the model and creating a new model. It involved a lot of reading. And we basically spent a year just studying together, know, Nelson and I and a couple of other people reading the works of, know, Antonio Gramsci, thinking about how we could apply Paulo Freire's ideas to our work as mental health providers, We read the work of Bertha Capen Reynolds, who's a radical social worker. You know, we were very influenced by black feminism, the Combahee River Collective Statement. And so we just spent a lot of time reading. And then the next step was to sort of take some of these ideas about how we do an assessment, how we can, you know, create interventions with individuals and families that we're working with and apply them. you know, sort of make it really like on the ground, real, not just theory. And that took a while too, because, you know, one of the things that I'm the most proud of with this model is that the people that are the most directly impacted, right, by the problems, the oppression, we're really the leaders in developing our assessment tool and intervention plans. And they taught us a lot because we initially came out with all these like fancy assessment charts and, you know, and flow, you know, And they were like, well, I'm not going to fill this out. I'm not going to do this. And so the triangle, which I initially thought was kind of simple, I was like, oh, I need something more complicated. I'm in graduate school. But the families, they weren't interested in that. They wanted something very simple. So we took our lead from the people that were most directly affected by the oppression and created this assessment tool that we've been using for 25 years. and a series of intervention techniques that we're teaching really all over the world now.

Phillipe: that's great. You anticipated my next question because my understanding is that the work is is international. Talk a little bit about that. What does liberation health look like outside the US?

Dawn Belkin Martinez: Well, you know, I have to say that I had anticipated our first sort of real work. studying this on the ground was in Greece. And I had thought, you know, don't speak Greek, I was sort of wondering what it would be like. But I have to tell you that the social work programs, least the ones that I'm familiar with in Germany, in Spain, Latin America, and Greece, the students have a pretty good understanding of the political economy, which I think is, we do some of that in our programs, but I think they get more of that. So I actually found that students... were very receptive to the model and they got it very easily because they had all this different training around the political economy that we do some of in the United States but not as much. So the first study that we did was in Greece because of the colleagues that I've worked with there, Dora Deloni at the University of... Western Attica, Athena and Pantheon University in both in Athens. And we trained for six months line workers in this model. And so people would get on the Zoom every month and we had a curriculum, we taught the model. I taught it in English because I don't speak any Greek. And then I went there in the fall of 2024 and spent several months evaluating the model. And you know, we're... people were very happy with the model. What they liked the most, and I think this is what was really, it made me happy to hear, was that it was a very concrete tool, right? many people don't have a method, That's what was missing, the method. How do you do this assessment with somebody and not just in your office? How do you offer specific interventions? And the feedback we got from the participants in Greece was that it was a concrete model, it was very doable, it made a lot of sense, it was easy to teach to their clients, and the only real, we've just written up the study, the only real sort of drawbacks where they wanted more time. They wanted more time practicing. They wanted the group to go on for longer. And the language issue, right? Which is that English was their second language. So that's Greece and Germany, similar feedback. In Spain, we're just about to launch our study there starting next month where we're going to train social workers from Madrid.

Phillipe: Congratulations.

Dawn Belkin Martinez: thanks. And then, of course, we're applying the work to many different settings that I would have never anticipated, which includes our own Boston University Medical School. we had to do a lot of adaptation in order to make the model work for what physicians do.

Phillipe: Yeah, yeah, thank you so much for that. And you touched on this a little bit. I think you've touched on this really throughout the conversation. But I wanted to ask you, when you think about all this work that this group has done and that you've been fortunate enough to be part of and helped to craft and to lead, what do you feel that the impact has been on people?

Dawn Belkin Martinez: Mm. Well, what I would say is that the feedback we get is it's very profound

Phillipe: Mm-hmm.

Dawn Belkin Martinez: and very impactful because

Phillipe: Mm-hmm.

Dawn Belkin Martinez: very often we hear from providers, that they, I mean especially social workers, they want to be able to do this sort of stuff, right? They know that the world, you know, our system isn't, you know, broken. It was designed to sort of, you know, keep some people, you know, really happy and most of us kind of miserable, right? You know, they know that

Phillipe: Mm-hmm.

Dawn Belkin Martinez: on a... sort of personal level and experiential level, but they don't know how to, like they don't have the tools, you how do I have these conversations with people? Like, how do I intervene in sort of this stuff? And what we like to say in Liberation Health is that, you know, we, our work is challenging the cop in the street, which is, you know, all of the laws and policies that oppress us daily. And just as importantly, the cop in our head, right? And that comes directly from Augusto Boao, the cop in our head that tells us, can't, know, boys will be boys, you know, they're just gonna fight, right? I can't do this because I'm, you know, a woman, you know. I'm Latino, like I'm just lazy. I'm black and so I don't try, you know, like so that cop in our head is just as, it's so oppressive, right? And we take in these dominant worldview messages. without even realizing it. It's like the water we

Phillipe: Mm-hmm.

Dawn Belkin Martinez: drink, right? Because this is what we heard our whole lives. And so in terms of getting back to your impact question, I mean, it's wonderful to hear from providers to say you know this gives me a concrete method a tool to have these you know in depth counter-hegemonic, against the grain, against what we're told, conversations with our clients. And I'll never forget, one person said to me, she was talking about, we have these five interventions, and one of them is activism as a therapeutic intervention. And she was talking about how she got involved in this neighborhood group, and she's very involved in it now. And she also has, like a pretty serious health condition, That she has to, know, she could potentially be lethal. And she said to me, I can remember this, and this is probably about 15 years ago, she said to me, know, they give me pills, but I don't really think my pills help me. So she said, what helps me is I go to these meetings and I go to these meetings and that's, she said, I see, that is my medicine, is what she said, going to the meetings and the activism and that like. That has stayed with me many years. hearing those kind of stories over and over again is so inspirational because this directly comes from the folks that were most directly impacted by the oppression. And so it's something that people are able to do for themselves and collectively. challenge the individualism of health, is, you you just have to exercise more, you just have to eat, you know, more proteins, you have to stop eating sugar. Now, I'm not saying that those things, you you just probably should still do those things. But nonetheless, like that's, that's for us, just a small component of what it takes to be healthy.

Phillipe: So you mentioned that there are five interventions, and you talked about activism. Could you just say a little bit about what the other four interventions are?

Dawn Belkin Martinez: Sure, the first one is identifying the dominant worldview message. So what might be a message that's affecting you, right? And that is something that, you know, I just had the reason I was a little bit late today was because I was meeting with a physician that's using this model. And what she said is often, physicians get messages that they're not supposed to bring up, you know, political topics or, you know, ideological topics. And she said, that's so interesting because, you know, we're taught we can bring up medicine, we're taught we can bring up lifestyle stuff. So why couldn't we bring up this, right? So the first step is to ask questions that would help people realize, you know, what might be a dominant worldview message that's affecting the problem. So if we go back to the example that you asked about the mom, When she said, asi somos hombres, that's how boys are, One way that I could help her identify that that's a dominant worldview message, can say, Where did you hear that? And then she could say, well, that's something that's on TV. Where did you see that? How do you think that affects us? And then you ask a lot of questions that will help pull apart and draw out the dominant worldview messages that boys are, it's OK for boys. to be aggressive or men is actually with it direct translation is men it's okay for men to be aggressive because that's how they are right so that's the first one the second one is deconstructing the dominant worldview message taking it apart and that takes you know a lot of time because again people often don't bring that up and that's what my you know the person I was talking to today said she's you know I have to be the one bringing that up and asking the questions and you don't lecture people God that's a dominant worldview message, know, that's about gender roles and but you ask questions about like is that always like that? You know, like so I might say to this mother if we were talking about deconstructing the dominant worldview message about gender roles I might say, you know, is that always like that? You know, have you ever seen boys that don't behave that way? What happens when boys behave in an aggressive way? What happens when they behave in a non-aggressive way? Are there other ways? So you ask a lot of questions that enable people to take apart these taken for granted assumptions that they have. Martin Barrow, know, Ignacio Martin Barrow talked about lifting the veil of ignorance. That was the word he used. Sort of like, there's this like, you know, that we're taught a certain thing and then you lift that veil, you take it up and you say, well, you know, is that always that way? And a question that I always ask that I think gets people to, you know, think differently, like it's like, well, who benefits when you think this way, right? Like, who gains and who loses when you think this way? And that's a really interesting question for people to ponder. So that's That's the second sort of piece, the deconstruction of the dominant worldview. And then the third one is introducing new information and that's probably the most similar to psychoeducation which is what you know many providers do but it involves you know doing it alongside with people so you're interested and we go back to that's bring it back to that example of the boy that's aggressive you might say so let's look at what's happening in Boston I wonder if there's any boys groups you know let's go on the internet and sort of find what's happening being at DEMEC, you know, Community Health Center, and you're introducing new information that's counter-hegemonic, that's counter the dominant worldview message. And that's the third one. And then the fourth one, which is really fun, is rescuing the historical memory of change. Because if you think about this, and particularly in the English language, there's a million idioms that tell you you can't change anything, right? And that's why I love the title of your podcast, because that's counter-hegemonic, man. You know, there are think about it. Don't rock the boat. Don't spit in the wind You know, can't beat them join them like there's a million of them that say don't even try that's the way it is I see so you know, that's the way it is and but we know you and I know right as folks in the movement, that the only way we've gotten change, right, is people pushing and people create the change. So, right, there's legislation, but the people force the legislation, the people make it happen, right? So it wasn't like one day they sort of, you the powers that be woke up and said, gee, we shouldn't be, you know, hiring children to work in factories. Like, that's not a good idea. We all know that's not what happened, right? The only social change that we've had is because people make that change. But that's often hidden, right? We don't know. So rescuing the historical memory of change is about asking about movements, groups of people that have made changes, big, small, in their community, in the world, in their family, and drawing those stories out, creating master narratives of revolutionary change. And then the final... intervention is activism is a therapeutic intervention and you can be sure that after a couple of weeks that I will be sharing City Life Vila Ravana with the person that I'm working with and maybe even going to a meeting with her to sort of you know if the first meeting can be a little intimidating for anyone so going with her to that meeting and seeing if that's something that she feels comfortable with So when people push back at me and say, hey, you have a political agenda here, I say, no, I'm not lecturing anybody. We're just asking questions. And that's when you really are able to master liberation health, you're able to just naturally ask questions that help people think and challenge these ideas in a way that can be incredibly liberatory.

Phillipe: That was amazing. So what's next for this group?

Dawn Belkin Martinez: well, a couple of things. One, a new project that we're working on is we are sort of training several, well, quite a few faculty at Bridgewater State, I'll say where, in this model. And so I'm super excited about that, spreading the model. social work schools. We have introduced it in other social work schools around the country and we're opening up, I mean this is something that somebody else is leading, it's called the Center for Liberation Health Praxis, right, and that center is I think going to be so cool and amazing. We're just in the early stages of that but our idea is to have know, training run through that center and be able to see individuals and families at that center do macro consultation at that center, you know, writing come out of that center. So yeah, that's pretty exciting for us around liberation health. I think it's, you know, it's a lot of work to get, as you know, to get something like that. Yeah.

Phillipe: Yeah, yeah, that's what I was thinking. So I'm curious, at this particular point, what made you all decide to create a brick and mortar space to do this work, to center this work? I'm so curious.

Dawn Belkin Martinez: Yeah, think it was, you know, it's kind of like in some ways it's a crazy time because look at what's happening in our world, right? You know, it's just like

Phillipe: Exactly.

Dawn Belkin Martinez: everything is falling apart. Like you just can't pick up the newspaper without like another crisis of racial capitalism, another war, I think about Gramsci's really famous quote, Antonio Gramsci, the Italian... revolutionaries, you know, this is the time of the monsters, but like, but he talked about that, because what he said was, yes, it's the time of the monsters, but that's because the old world is dying, and the new world is struggling to be born, right? So like, now we're in the monster time. So I suspect that many of your listeners will agree, this is the time of the monsters. but if you and I'm not minimizing, you know the damage that's happening to so many of us all over it's hard to get up in the morning right and at the same time I mean my hope is we're gonna have a new world we're gonna have a world where you know we can have more liberatory spaces and for that to happen right we need to be able to do more of the work that you're doing that I'm doing that many of the guests that come on your podcasts are doing so somebody a lot younger than me is in the process of you know setting up all the paperwork that you need to do to have a you know a center and we we keep getting requests for trainings and you know the one thing I want to say about liberation health is that it's all volunteer it's not an NGO it's not a non-profit there's nobody that's paid everybody has a day job right so like This has been going for 25 years. It's pretty amazing. It's all volunteer and pretty much the same steering committee for it.

Phillipe: It is amazing, yeah.

Dawn Belkin Martinez: I mean, you know most of the steering committee

Phillipe: Mm-hmm.

Dawn Belkin Martinez: members, I for over 10 to 15 years have been at it with their day jobs. This would be an opportunity for folks to, we could expand our training. We could be able to do a lot more than we do because of our commitments

Phillipe: Mm-hmm.

Dawn Belkin Martinez: to our day jobs. We can involve more people. I frequently, I don't know about you, get email requests, I need a therapist, I want a liberation health therapist. So how can we

Phillipe: Yeah, I've seen that, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Dawn Belkin Martinez: place to refer them? Amazing, right? Be able to do some writing.

Phillipe: Yeah, yeah. It sounds like a real opportunity to level up to use that language.

Dawn Belkin Martinez: Yeah, kind of scary because it is the time of

Phillipe: That's great.

Dawn Belkin Martinez: the monsters, right? I mean, we didn't talk about the monsters, you know, it's bad out there, man.

Phillipe: Yeah, you know that that's something I'm really interested in, so we could have a whole conversation about the monsters. I think we'll save that for a different episode.

Dawn Belkin Martinez: I know, I know, I think that...

Phillipe: But before we end, there's a couple more things I wanted to do. Thank you so much for everything you've shared so far. So just practically, so if people who've been listening and they're like, hey, I'm really interested in this, I'd like to learn more about it, where would you recommend that they start if they're like, I just want to learn more about liberation health?

Dawn Belkin Martinez: Okay, so there is a five minute video on YouTube that you can watch that introduces, we purposely made this for people to answer the exact question that you asked, right? Sort of like you asked the question that we made the video. It's a five minute animated video about liberation health and it gives you just a little bit of an idea of... what the model is, the assessment tools, the intervention tools, the history, all in five minutes, right? So that's something I

Phillipe: Mm-hmm.

Dawn Belkin Martinez: would recommend everybody watch. And then there's different podcasts. mean, you know, hopefully your podcast will give people a little bit of a, and Toho, little introduction to the model. And you know, they could sort of from there, I think there's different. opportunities to branch out and read more so they could read about the model in the book that we wrote. So there's a book called Social Justice and Clinical Practice, a Liberation Health Framework for Social Work. And we're actually going to be working on a new edition of the book, but that won't happen for another like year and a half or two years until it's out. even though this edition is from 2015, I believe, it's still it's a casebook. really great case book And I think that's a great way to get information. There's articles.

Phillipe: No, no, that's great. There's nothing like a good book plug. All right. So everybody,

Dawn Belkin Martinez: hehe

Phillipe: could you say the book one more time what it's called?

Dawn Belkin Martinez: It's called Social Justice in Clinical Practice, a Liberation Health Framework for Social Work.

Phillipe: Excellent. The other thing is I have seen the video. It's a great video. Hey, listeners, watch the video. That's a great place to start. So that's my endorsement of the video. That's my review of the video. It's awesome. Okay, so for people who are like, yeah, I'm really motivated and energized and they think, you know, maybe I'd like to get involved with this group or to support what they're doing. How might they do that?

Dawn Belkin Martinez: Okay, that's great and one of the things that we did was we wanted to make our group as accessible as possible to as many people as possible So we meet every month The first Friday of every month. I know Friday night you think my god, but like believe me you go to a meeting You'll come out energized people say that all the time. I didn't want to go It's Friday night the end of the week and I come out and I'm like, wow, that's great So every other month they're in person and they happen at you know, local community agency. And the best way to find out about that would be to go to www.bostonliberationhealth.org and you can join the email list or whatever it's called and you'll get notifications about the meeting. But every other month they happen online and that's really amazing because that means no matter where you live, you can participate and those meetings are case meetings and we have them on somebody comes in, we practice together. one of the things I wanted to say about our Boston Liberation Health Group, we really have three purposes. The first one is to sort of offer training and education about the model. Because all of us need practice. It's not something that is done naturally. lot of schools don't teach it. So we have to practice together. And so we offer that education and training vis-a-vis these online meetings every other month where somebody volunteers to present a case. It's on Zoom. The triangle goes up there right on the screen and we triangle it together and then we break down into groups and talk about Liberation Health Intervention. So that you don't have to live in Boston to participate. We've had people join our meeting from Germany and Greece where it's like two in the morning there and they stay up and come to the meeting. So that's one thing that we do. The other thing we do is we provide support and solidarity for each other because it can be hard you know to have a different you know way of thinking about things if you're particularly if you work in a very traditional medical setting if you're in a state that's you know not even allowing you to say words like anti-racism you know like so having this space online with other folks that think like you can be like a therapeutic intervention for you I know it is for me every month when I go And then the third thing is to act in the communities where we live. So we take on a lot of political campaigns, as I mentioned with the rent control, with ICE, and with labor, housing, lots of different things. Yeah, so you can come and join the meeting and you don't have to. know, present a case right away, you can wait and watch other people do it, and then, you know, when you feel more confident. We initially, as you know, Philippe, we started out where we just all social workers, right, and now we have, you know, we have nurses, we have just people that are... Consumers, community members

Phillipe: So as we move towards the end of the conversation, I'm thinking about listeners who are concerned about health, worried about health, passionate about health. but they're not necessarily providers, right? And so they've been listening to this conversation. is there anything that you would like to say to those people, to those listeners?

Dawn Belkin Martinez: Yes. So what I would say to my comrades that are listening, that are not providers, is that we are all, all of us, you may not be paid to be a provider, but you are providing by your presence and by your relationships with other people, you're providing health to people. You are. You just may not have a paid job doing that. And we welcome everybody and we have lots of people that are just interested in health that have been we have a number of people that come that have had negative experiences with the health care system because of racism, classism, sexism, all those sort of things and they find a home in liberation health you know because they they can be sort of providers with their with their family members we've had people in our group that are incarcerated, that participate in our meetings via technology, and they're able to provide some of this analysis to their fellow prisoners, right? And that's pretty cool, right? I think you'll find a warm and welcoming home at Liberation Health whether you come to the physical you know brick-and-mortar meetings you know in our in community space or whether you participate online.

Phillipe: Thank you so much for joining me today.

Dawn Belkin Martinez: You're welcome.

Phillipe: Thanks for listening to From Issues to Action. If you've been informed and inspired by this episode, rate it, share it, and become a subscriber. You can find additional episodes on the podcast website from Issues to Action.com and wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also follow me, Philippe Copeland, on social media.