Prefigurative Community Building (Part 26)
Growing Community Health Collectives: A Power With Guide to Peer-Led Healing
Long before institutions formalized care, communities did it themselves. We grew herbs, shared stories, offered touch, held grief, and showed up with food and time. This wasn’t charity or a service economy, it was life. Community health collectives return to this root truth: that well-being is interdependent, and healing is more powerful when it is shared.
In a world dominated by medical hierarchies, pharmaceutical monopolies, and insurance-driven gatekeeping, reclaiming health as a collective practice is radical. Not because it shouldn’t exist, but because it already did and was taken from us. This project isn’t about creating new forms of power over health, it’s about remembering, restoring, and reweaving care as Power With.
Peer therapy, herbal knowledge, somatic wisdom, and emotional support don’t belong behind paywalls. They belong to us. Here's how we take them back, together.
Step-by-Step Guide to Starting a Community Health Collective (Power With Approach)
Step 1: Begin With Conversations, Not Plans
Start with a kitchen table or a group message, not a blueprint. Ask your community: What do we already do to care for ourselves? What do we wish we could do together?
Hold open gatherings where people can name their health needs and their care skills. Map your collective assets; herbalists, breathwork guides, people with lived experience in mental health, massage therapists, emotional support workers.
Resource: Asset-Based Community Development Toolkit (ABCD Institute)
Step 2: Co-Create Shared Agreements
Don’t rush into structure. Instead, hold sessions to co-develop guiding values. Avoid hierarchy from the start: rotate facilitation, use consensus, make decisions slowly and together. Values like consent, care without credentialism, and healing over fixing will guide your shape.
Resource: Seeds for Change: Consensus Decision-Making Guide
Step 3: Start Small, Practice Often
Offer one free clinic day, one peer support circle, one herb share. Make space to learn together, make mistakes, and celebrate small victories. Focus on doing, reflecting, and adjusting, rather than building perfection.
Resource: Free Peer Support Group Toolkit (Fireweed Collective)
Step 4: Build Your Peer Skill Library
Host skillshares where people teach and learn somatic tools, herbal medicine, trauma-informed care, listening practices, and basic first aid. Compile a zine or online folder with community-generated guides.
Resource:
The Icarus Project’s “Harm Reduction Guide to Coming Off Psychiatric Drugs”
Herbalists Without Borders Community Apothecary Guide
Step 5: Make It Accessible, Not Exclusive
Avoid gatekeeping through language, certification, or elitism. Use plain speech. Ask: Who’s missing? Integrate disability justice from the start. Always center those historically excluded from care systems: BIPOC, queer, disabled, undocumented, unhoused, neurodivergent folks.
Resource: Sins Invalid – 10 Principles of Disability Justice
Step 6: Develop Collective Care Infrastructure
Create a rotating schedule for shared labor (e.g. cleaning, herbal prep, emotional support availability). Use mutual aid principles to fund supplies, not wages. Consider timebanks, solidarity funds, and resource swaps to keep things flowing without depending on grants or burnout.
Resource:
Solidarity Apothecary – How to Start a Herb Share
Step 7: Document and Decentralize
Encourage other collectives to grow, not as branches, but as siblings. Share your learnings in zines, websites, or simple posters. Open-source your failures and your rituals. Use oral storytelling, not just digital.
Resource: The Care Manifesto (The Care Collective)
Two Examples of Real-World Inspiration
1. Fireweed Collective (formerly The Icarus Project)
Fireweed provides peer support education rooted in disability justice and radical mental health. Their toolkits, workshops, and community calls offer a model of collective healing grounded in mutual care, not medicalization.
https://fireweedcollective.org
2. Solidarity Apothecary
This UK-based project grows and distributes herbal medicine to people impacted by incarceration, state violence, and trauma. It models how apothecaries can be built on mutual aid and trauma-informed organizing, not expertise or extraction.
https://solidarityapothecary.org
Conclusion: Medicine Shouldn’t Belong to the Market
We don't need massive budgets or institutional permission to care for one another. Every shared tea blend, every listening circle, every gently held story is an act of resistance. When we build these collectives with Power With, never Power Over, we weave health back into the commons, where it always belonged.
This isn't about scaling up, it's about spreading out. Let healing travel like mycelium: underground, nourishing, expansive. The more localized and peer-rooted it becomes, the stronger our collective immune system grows.
Because care isn’t a service. It’s a way of being. And we’re remembering it, together.