With Love and Rage: building community spaces in the gaps the system leaves

The system is failing us. With waiting lists, referral forms and means testing becoming synonymous with mental healthcare we have reached a crisis point as a community. We are more and more connected with the world and the impacts of late-stage carceral capitalism, yet we are more isolated than ever in how we experience the impact of these crises on our personal and communal wellbeing. This talk with The Convivial will explore abolitionist approaches to peer support and mental health, as well as how we can come together as a community to ensure we are supported by one another when the system lets us down.

We'll grapple with some of the questions this throws at us, like how to ensure these spaces are safe, and how they can exist alongside the systems that make them necessary. Taking from the experience of the last few years in peer spaces, Love and Rage reflects on how leaning into expressions of radical love and radical rage that we are systemised not to acknowledge can open up new ways of working with and for our communities.

Speaker

Abbie is a writer and activist based in the Falmouth area. She runs
creative writing workshops for radical change, and for people who have
experienced trauma, through the organisation Love and Rage DIY, est.
2022. Abbie set up Love and Rage as a radical project taking a community approach to
support and mutual aid. It was born from a desire to embrace our rage
and turn it into a powerful tool for personal and societal healing.