We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Amanda Hill a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Amanda, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Setting up an independent practice is a daunting endeavor. Can you talk to us about what it was like for you – what were some of the main steps, challenges, etc.

The work that Healing by Choice! engages is done through a Healing Justice Framework. Per the originators of this framework – Cara Page and the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective – HJ “identifies how we can holistically respond to and intervene on generational trauma and violence, and to bring collective practices that can impact and transform the consequences of oppression on our bodies, hearts and minds”. I came into this work through community organizing with BYP 100 Detroit chapter, where we had deep investment in divesting from police and prisons to invest in community-driven solutions for collective well-being. Much of our visioning focused on what it would look like to build rapid response teams to address crises that folks feel forced to call police to intervene in now – things like mental health crises and medical transport needs.

Meanwhile, In June 2020 Rachel and Yoda.Kai lost their six month old daughter, Amaru. After calling an ambulance for help, instead of being met with empathy and gentle care, Rachel was greeted by multiple police officers who arrived at her door with the EMT’s. They declared her home “a crime scene,” detained, and interrogated the family until abuse was ruled out. Directly following this traumatic experience, her Indigenous neighbors lit a funeral fire in her backyard in Southwest Detroit. Her family was assisted and held by the fire keepers, community healers, therapists, death doulas, Reiki practitioners, tarot readers, musicians, herbalists, and dear friends who streamed in and out of the home funeral during the following four days. It was at this sacred funeral fire where the idea of a collaborative mobile healing unit that can respond to crisis, outside of law enforcement, was born. Amaru’s family experienced first hand how compassionate community care and expertise offer a safer alternative in de-escalating already tense situations.

In 2021, Rachel and I began working together to realize the dream of mobilizing a community care team to offer this type of safer response within a co-op, and with much support from Detroit Community Wealth Fund and Detroit Justice Center, Motor City Mobile Wellness was birthed. We began just talking with each other about what we were hoping to accomplish and surveying community members about their desires for wellness response for several months. Then we went through about a year of the DCWF Co-op Academy, during which we crafted our mission, vision, values, financial sustainability models, operating agreements, and more. Finally, once we graduated the academy, we put out calls for applications to join the co-op, and invited members to officially join in June 2023.

Some of the challenges faced through this process were navigating folks who expressed interest in helping us build, but then dropping out because of other commitments, or just general disinterest in the less sexy administrative pieces of work necessary in the beginning.

My advice for anyone interested in starting their own practice is to build trust and commitment early. Understand that challenges and conflicts will arise when you’re working with other people, so try to create mutual agreements for conduct, and make plans for managing conflict ASAP, With shared values and strong communication, these challenges can strengthen relationships rather than break them. Lastly, I encourage folks to ask for feedback and support from trusted resources (accountants, mediators, community leaders, etc.) throughout the process.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I am Amanda Hill, and I use she/her pronouns. I am a Black Queer Feminist and abolitionist organizer, a healing justice practitioner, as well as Director of Healing by Choice! and co-founder of Motor City Mobile Wellness. Motor City Mobile Wellness is a cooperative project of Healing by Choice! MCMW believes that Detroiters deserve access to safe, person and community centered wellness services that honor our dignity. We are committed to first listening to the expressed needs of communities, and then building networks of diverse care that allows healing within community. Our practitioners operate from a social justice and abolitionist lens that increases access to holistic wellness practices and resources that affirm the whole person and/or community.

Motor City Mobile Wellness offers a variety of holistic wellness services and resources to Detroiters ranging from reiki, massage, and energy readings to wellness consultations and counseling – all at sliding scale rates. Our cooperative of healing practitioners operates outside of the medical industrial complex to address the spectrum of wellness needs of our communities.

We are building out capacity to launch rapid response teams to respond to mental health crises and medical transports long-term.

Do you think you’d choose a different profession or specialty if you were starting now?

I would absolutely choose this route as an energy working organizer if I had the chance.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

I began my career in a corporate wellness setting, knowing that I wanted to be involved in wellness, but having limited exposure to the many ways that could happen. I realized through my radical organizing work with BYP 100 – a Black Queer Feminist group – that the corporate space was not for me. It was not serving the communities most important to me. I moved into care coordination for folks with Medicaid who had high ER usage, thinking I could be more supportive to those who were having hard health outcomes, but realized the insurance company I was working for truly just wanted to save money, not support care. Pivoting into organizing spaces dedicated to addressing the root of the many challenges facing folks living under oppression struck me as more impactful.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.motorcitymobilewellness.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/healingbychoicedetroit/