Our Philosophy:

The Fragile Work of Freedom: Healing Justice in the Third Space

What if the work of healing justice begins not with answers but with a willingness to dwell in what we cannot yet bear to know about ourselves, in the aftermath of harm?

In partnerships that move between crisis and complexity, between individual wounds and institutional failures, a different kind of attention becomes possible—one that resists the pressure to resolve, to fix, to restore. Instead, it holds space for the unspeakable, the unfinished, and the unresolved. This is the ground of our work—what we call Third Space Practice.

It is a space between roles, between disciplines, between knowing and not-knowing. Neither a place of clinical detachment nor of immersive solidarity, it is a relational field in which authenticity, autonomy, and the freedom to be and become are not granted from above but cultivated in dialogue.

Here, healing is not an endpoint. It is a process of co-existing with pain and possibility, contradiction and care.

Our Position

We believe that to accompany others ethically from this position is to be affected by what we encounter. It is to recognise, as Ruth Behar writes, that "when we deny our vulnerability, we lose the ability to be truly responsive to the pain of others." The vulnerable observer is not outside the scene. We are within it. Our presence, and our responses, are never neutral.

Our donation-based initiatives, pro bono support, and contracted projects may at times function as defences—rituals of usefulness that shield us from recognising how our own presence is entangled in the very systems we seek to change.

Our Influences

Drawing on liberation psychology, and inspired by Paulo Freire’s insistence on learning as a mutual, transformative encounter, we resist the rescuing dynamics of the Karpman Drama Triangle and the unconscious pull of the white saviour position. We are not here to uplift the oppressed as though they were passive recipients of help. Instead, we work to co-create enabling environments, where voice, agency, and collective memory can emerge.

We centre relational ethics, not as a theory, but as a way of being-with: uncertain, porous, and accountable.

Our Approach

Healing justice, in this sense, becomes a practice of psychological saying—a refusal to erase what is difficult to hear, a space where fragmented narratives, stammering truths, and contradictory longings can surface. Saying does not mean solving. It means making the unsayable speakable, without demanding it be made palatable.

W.G. Sebald, writing on memory and exile, offers a haunting image of how loss insists on its return. “Memory,” he writes, “often struck him like a blow… as if the images were pressing themselves through a crack in the shell of the present.” To facilitate such a space is not to seal those cracks, but to remain beside them—listening to memory leaks.

Grief lingers. And healing is not a matter of closure, but of learning how to stay near what cannot be undone.

The Need to Resist

We take seriously Naomi Klein’s caution that disaster is often used as a strategy of control. “Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change,” she writes. “When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” In our work, we resist ready-made ideas. We resist the industrialisation of healing. We slow down. We ask: Who is this urgency serving? What possibilities does it foreclose?

Ethical Accompaniment

In this light, accompaniment becomes a form of ethical practice—not a service transaction, but a mutual act of presence. We ask not only what needs to be remembered, but also what is being systematically forgotten. We sit with the question of whether some wounds are not meant to close—whether the work of healing may lie in the ongoing tending, not the final resolution.

The most meaningful conflicts are rarely those that are solved. They are the ones we learn to carry together.

To practise healing justice in the Third Space is to honour the unfinished. To create the conditions for autonomy without isolation, authenticity without performance, and freedom—not as a slogan, but as a slow, relational unfolding.

This is not a politics of certainty. It is a poetics of care.

Thinking of Working With Us?

If you’re exploring collaboration with us, we offer not a package of solutions, but a shared space of reflection and becoming. We invite you to consider:

• What if healing is not about fixing what’s broken, but creating space for what hurts to be heard?

• What does your organisation ask people to forget in order to function smoothly?

• Are you seeking solutions—or are you ready to stay with the questions?

• What if your vulnerability is a condition for authentic dialogue, not a threat to your professionalism?

• What might change if the goal is no longer resolution, but relationship?

• Who are you, when you are no longer the helper, the hero, or the expert?

• What kind of freedom becomes possible when we stop trying to save—and begin learning how to stay?