Woodbine Health Autonomy Center
= "a communal space in the neighborhood of Ridgewood, Queens"
URL = https://edgeryders.eu/en/woodbine.nyc
Description
1.
"Our goal is to examine what health autonomy would look like and how to begin to build it for ourselves here in New York city. We are beginning by providing ways to interact with neighbors, to think of health and care as a communal process, and becoming a point of aggregation where people can come together and share resources. We currently facilitate health related skill shares, create concrete ways to navigate the overwhelming health infrastructure that exists while lessening our dependence on it, in order to build an autonomous health community.
We are beginning to experiment with providing care outside of the realm of state control. This practice may involve working outside the structure of licenses, certifications and insurance. Our intention is always to heal, and so we are finding ways to do this that protects providers and patients." (https://edgeryders.eu/en/blog/after-occupy-how-we-are-developing-structures-to-empower)
2.
"Woodbine is a hub for building autonomy in the wake of a dying culture. Our mission is to expand collective material and organizational capacities in order to build revolution in the 21st century. With a workshop, library, kitchen, and meeting space, we focus on efforts to self-organize, connect, create infrastructures, and develop greater individual and collective efficacy. The Woodbine Health Autonomy Resource Center is a communal space in the neighborhood of Ridgewood, Queens. It is part of the Autonomy General Assembly, which is a gathering space for the different projects that are housed within Woodbine. The idea behind Woodbine comes in the wake of Occupy, but takes its motivations from the Zapatistas in Chiapas, the ZADs in France, communities in Rojava, and all those who have struggled for liberation.
As we begin answering questions of autonomy, we are faced with the myriad of material obstacles in our way. Health, or our lack thereof, can be seen as a crucial weakness in the revolutionary struggle. We are tied to a “modern” health system that fundamentally removes our bodies from a larger physical reality. We are made to become cells in revolt, aberrant genes, failed organs, physicalities riddled with disease. Disease becomes individualized as “health” and “wellness” becomes commodified. States of mental health become symbols of individualized weakness. Propensities toward depressed states, or anxious disorders, and “imbalances” in the brain necessitate chemical intervention, while never addressing the overwhelming emptiness of modern life. An insane mind is the mind that can adapt to an insane society, and from the news today, we are surely going insane. Insanity as the only rational response to an insane world, but what contemporary visions of “health” require of us, in order to perpetuate this economy, is that we be atomized, necessarily taking on our struggles alone, seeing them as the individual product of a weak, chemically imbalanced mind. If we refuse this logic, begin to express the anger necessary for a health that recognizes the truly horrific nature of the time we’re living in and develop shared practices of care that diffuse that isolation, we can begin to grow the collective backbone we so desperately need.
Apart from a critique of modern theories on health, we as a community have lost all control over our health. Our individualized choices to workout, eat right, not smoke, etc are important, but wholly insufficient to answer the demands of this century. In order to access healthcare, we are tied to jobs that are literally killing us, whether it be mental depravity or physical degradation. Many people are in constant fear of losing this state granted access, but then are also in fear of having to access such a system, a system that is the cause of more than 50% of bankruptcies. Because we have relegated health to these institutions, we have lost our ability to heal ourselves. We no longer know the abundance of nature in helping to create health. Most people cannot perform basic first aid or use simple techniques for health. Many communities lack any cognizance or skill to handle the inevitable emotional collapse of our comrades. In addition, these institutions fundamentally cannot address the issues of climate change, economic collapse, or disruption of key infrastructure. They are as weak as we are, as evidenced by the effects of superstorms on the health infrastructure of New Orleans and New York. How can these institutions help us when the very air we breath is killing us? How do they help us adapt to a world without clean water? To answer the sadness in our souls to live in a world where we have killed all the fish in the ocean?
To answer simply, they cannot." (https://edgeryders.eu/en/woodbine-health-autonomy-center)