An Ongoing Vision for Collective Liberation, Healing, and Justice

The Land-Based Healing and Justice Project is a growing initiative rooted in the belief that healing and justice emerge through deep relationships with land, water, memory, and community. Led by Dr. Jenny Escobar, a Colombian immigrant scholar, educator, and community practitioner, this project brings together over 20 years of experience working at the intersections of state violence, restorative and transformative justice, and decolonial land pedagogy.

Centering the wisdom of river-based communities, the project honors rivers and land as sacred relatives, memory keepers, and co-survivors of violence. These collaborations have given rise to river pedagogies, which are healing-centered, land-based educational approaches that cultivate dignity, resistance, and collective care.

In parallel, Dr. Escobar’s longstanding work in restorative and transformative justice, from Los Angeles classrooms to community groups, grounds this project in community accountability, trauma healing, and reimagining justice beyond punishment. Whether facilitating healing circles in schools and communities, mentoring first-gen students, or training practitioners across the U.S. and Latin America, her work centers relational approaches to justice rooted in spiritual and political solidarity.

This project envisions becoming a Center for Land-Based Healing and Justice to serve as a home for storytelling, circle practice, research, and learning across generations and geographies. Until then, it continues to grow as a collective effort, guided by water, memory, and the ancestral wisdom of those who resist, remember, and heal.

The Center is a home for remembering and re-rooting where the land teaches us how to resist and heal.