MHSJN - Underground Resistance: Mycelial Lessons for Mental Health Activism
On Friday 17 April the Mental Health Social Justice Network invites survivors and practitioners to a hybrid meeting at Birkbeck for Underground Resistance: Mycelial Lessons for Mental Health Activism with Kim Loliya Director of Black Psychotherapy and Nisa Chisipochinyi Founding Member of Black Mental Health Manifesto. The event will open at 6:30pm for a 6:45pm start, and run until 8:30pm.
This is a social justice event rooted in the understory (thinking of mycelium being underground, play on words!?) that quiet, vital space beneath the surface where the real work of nourishing and sustaining life happens.
We will explore what nature generously offers us through the underground networks of mycelium: how to communicate danger, share resources, and hold one another across distance, and what it might look like to bring those lessons into our mental health organising. Slow, intentional, yet alive to urgency.
Creativity runs through all of this as reclamation - reclamation of our minds, our attention and what’s important to us. A way of imagining otherwise, of fabulating futures that we’re building and of resistance that begins from within.
This is an invitation to root deeply, reach widely, and organise like the mycelium does! Nourishing the wider organism of human life, unifying without flattening, and finding in nature a model for the world we are trying to build.
Bios:
Kim Loliya they/she
Kim is a trauma psychotherapist and supervisor trained in African-Centred and Western approaches offered through an anti-oppressive, justice-based lens. Their practice specialises in working at the intersection of marginalisations, with the intention of individual and collective liberation. As Director of Black Psychotherapy, Kim leads on operations, and develops education and community engagement programmes within the service. Outside of their clinical role, Kim teaches pluralistic psychotherapy and lectures on postgraduate programmes, and they research Afrofuturism and other speculative practices as creative tools for resistance and expansion.
Nisa Chisipochinyi She/Her
Nisa is a trained Creative and Psychodynamic therapist, currently serving as National Head of Equity and Racial Justice at a UK-based mental health charity, where she works closely alongside marginalised communities to influence policy and practice from the ground up.
She is a founding member of the Black Mental Health Manifesto, a whole-community collaboration that has made its way to Parliament, built on the belief that the people closest to the problem are also closest to the solution.
A lifelong learner, Nisa is endlessly fascinated by what nature can teach us about community and collective/collaborative justice (biomimicry)!
When she’s not advocating or organising, Nisa is a practising artist in the process of reclaiming her attention and creative focus. Her most recent exhibition explored migration, diaspora experiences, and the meaning of home.