Introducing Synergi’s Abolition in Practice Group!
Who is this group for?
This is a free, monthly, online, peer-led space for Black People and People of Colour * collectively working toward mental health justice, racial justice, and abolition—whether through activism, advocacy, peer support, or community care. Grounded in intentional peer support principles, it’s a space for connection, reflection, and learning outside of harmful systems.
How will sessions run?
Each month, we’ll explore a different theme related to abolitionist mental health. We’ll suggest resources in advance, but there’s no expectation to engage with them beforehand – come as you are. These materials are here to support our collective learning around mental health, racial justice, and abolition, helping us reflect on how they show up in our movements and organizing work.
Our sessions are dynamic, participatory, and shaped by your needs—this is not a lecture, but a shared space for discussion, reflection, and connection. You’ll be invited (but never required) to engage in different ways, including:
- Reflective questions to deepen discussion and connect ideas to our lived experiences
- Simple grounding practices to connect with our bodies as a source of resilience, insight, and care, while helping us process charge and integrate our learning.
- Opportunities to connect and build relationships, strengthening the networks that sustain us in movement spaces.
We hope this space becomes a source of care, learning, and collective resilience—a place to hold the emotions that come with activism, support one another, and build sustainable movements for justice.
- *(While we use this language, we recognize the limitations and the charge around these terms and that you may identify with different terms—we want to welcome you in all the ways you may self-define)
Upcoming sessions
What do anti-psychiatry and abolition mean to and for us?
Date: Monday 10th March
Time: 12-2pm
Where: Online (zoom)
Theme of session: Decolonizing mental health, reframing madness and history of othering and carceral practices
Main resources: ‘There is no abolition without anti-psychiatry’: The Fight for Psychiatric Abolition- Campaign for Psychiatric Abolition (audio version here)
*Registration for this session is now closed*
Please join our waiting list:
What’s the Body got to do with it?
Date: Monday 14th April
Time: 12-2pm
Where: Online (zoom)
Theme of session: Somatic abolitionism, decolonizing ‘wellness’, embodied social justice and the body as a resource as well as locus of trauma
Main resources: A Therapist Breaks Down How Our Bodies Carry Racial Trauma (video)
Navigating conflict
Date: Monday 12th May
Time: 12-2pm
Where: Online (zoom)
Theme of session: Non-carceral alternatives to policing, community processes around accountability, transformative justice and intersectionality
Main resources: Connected Conflict – Reimagining podcast by Ayandastood
June 9th: Holding space for grief – exploring rage, fear and numbness
July 14th: From surviving to thriving – decolonizing healing, radical rest, resourcing, community care
August : no session
September 8th: Imagining a future – review of 5 sessions, harvesting themes, radical imagination, centring creativity, Afro-futurism, imagining a future for BPOC, creating a future we want
Our Facilitators
Almas (she/her)
I’m Almas (she/her) and I’m an activist based in Bristol.
Increasingly I am thinking about the sociopolitical context of distress, the importance of social justice in healing and what radical, abolitionist care could look like. I am part of the Synergi funded group Abolitionist Healing Collective. Through this group, and more generally in my work, I like to think about how decolonising and abolition are central to understanding our own and others’ distress and can help us build anti-oppressive communities of care. I am cautious of how pathologizing and criminalizing narratives claim to look after us and keep us safe but, in reality, perpetuate the exploitation of many of us under racist Capitalism. We need ways of understanding and looking after ourselves outside of Western medicine, the Psy sciences and policing – I’m keen to learn what this looks like.
I am trying to slowly build a relationship with somatic practices whilst experiencing, as many of us do, the numbness imposed by the harmful structures we live under. I’ve been enjoying yoga and am exploring the world of joyful movement where I can.
Matthew (he/him)
Hello, I’m Matthew – my pronouns are he/ him.
As a light-skinned black cis man of mixed and global majority heritage I spend a lot of time thinking about how I’m shaped by the different intersectional identities I hold and present in the world, those I choose as well as those that are ascribed to me without consent, wondering how best to navigate this fraught landscape. I’m interested in what W E B Dubois calls ‘double consciousness’ – what is it like to live in an unjust world full of harms while yearning to stay in relation to parts of my heritage sometimes elusive that on occasion whisper to me of other ways of being in this world?
Inspired by black feminism and somatic abolitionism, I’m deeply curious about how music, nature, grounded spirituality, creativity, deep rest and listening can be anchors as we engage with some of the huge challenges of our time including the marginalisation of people, planet and parts of ourselves. I aspire to remember what it would be like to embody equality, justice and interconnection.
Synergi and NSUN’s Conduct Agreement
We want virtual Synergi spaces to be safe, welcoming, and inclusive. Harassment, hate speech, and inappropriate behaviour of any kind, verbal or in the chat/Q&A, will not be tolerated.
We reserve the right to immediately remove any attendee we consider to be in breach of this conduct agreement. This includes anyone making racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, or otherwise discriminatory, offensive, or hateful remarks.
Removed participants will not be able to re-join the session, or, if applicable, join any of the rest of the sessions in a day or series of events. In order to avoid the derailing of sessions we will not enter into conversations around why conduct was deemed inappropriate in the sessions themselves.
Please read the full Online event conduct agreement here.
Information you provide when registering will be shared with the account owner and host and can be used and shared by them in accordance with their Terms and Privacy Policy.
Please read our Community Intentions for this space below:
Late admittance
Please note that to avoid disruption or distraction, we will be unable to admit latecomers (anyone who arrives ten minutes after the event’s start time).
Access
You can find an Easy Read Guide to joining Zoom meetings here.
If you need help with costs to be able to access this event, we may be able to make a contribution – please get in touch with us at synergi.info@nsun.org.uk
We will be asking that attendees keep themselves on mute while others are talking to avoid audio distractions.
Please let us know of any access requirements in your sign up form and we will try to accommodate them as best as we can.
Get in touch
If you have any questions in the meantime please email us at synergi.info@nsun.org.uk
