At PDX Alliance for Self-Care (PDX ASC), our mission is to connect marginalized and vulnerable communities with self-care resources, practitioners, education, events, and advocacy.

​

For communities of color, refugees, activists, and other vulnerable and marginalized groups, simply existing is exhausting. These groups often earn lower wages and have to deal with both covert and overt acts of racism, sexism, xenophobia, transphobia, ableism, and the like, day after day.

 

With the increase of black families losing loved ones by police shooting and the increased restriction around and paranoia toward refugees, people are taking to the streets. The same black and brown bodies facing oppression now also have to take on tear gas, rubber bullets, and flash bang grenades  as they stand against these unjust acts.

 

And yet, there’s often not an opportunity to recuperate or recover from these activities. A day after a protest, the work of merely existing continues. A massage or foot rub or acupuncture would be nice, but it may be out of reach. And how helpful are these activities, really, if the care provider implicitly (or explicitly) engages in racial bias?

 

At PDX ASC, our mission is to change this by connecting marginalized and vulnerable communities with self-care resources, practitioners, education, events, and advocacy. In addition, we will offer diversity training for practitioners who want to support our vision of community care by providing self-care resources. Our trainings will also be available to the public as we believe everyone can benefit from better understanding the obstacles that keep the most vulnerable among us from accessing safer, more inclusive, accessible, and intersectional self-care resources.

 

Because most self-care practitioners in our city are white, we will require white practitioners to take cultural competency and diversity training in order to minimize harm and improve safer access to traditionally white healing spaces for marginalized communities and to reinforce the truth that self-care is for all people.