Health Justice’s 5 year anniversary: Reflecting on our journey
Text in an orange bubble that reads “Health Justice’s 5 year anniversary: reflecting on our journey.” Underneath is more text against a dark green background that reads “Quality over quantity, depth over breadth, and slowing down to move ahead.” A brown bar runs across the bottom. To the right is an image of a person in a puffy jacket with their hair tied up in a bun, facing away, while a grey long-haired cat nuzzles into their arm affectionately.
This year marked the five-year anniversary of Health Justice as an organization and as we release our 2024/25 Impact Report we wanted to take some time to reflect on where the organization has been, where we are, and where we want to go. Before getting to that though, we wanted to say thank you to all of those who have supported this work. We would not be able to do this without the support of this incredible community.
Where we’ve been
Health Justice began in spring 2020, which turned out to be a very intense time to start an organization. With the strength of an amazing community, we were able to bring together something great.
In the formation of Health Justice, we worked to ensure people with lived and living experience of BC’s mental health system are central to our organization and have power to shape it. To do that, we had to challenge assumptions about who has “expertise” so we would not repeat the typical tokenistic ideas of representation. We adopted a governance model that shifts traditional power dynamics by centring the communities most impacted by our work. This model was built from the Community Engagement Governance Framework as a way to rethink equity and power in the organization, which helps us establish a culture that supports meaningful and diverse participation in our work. Our governance model involves three governance groups who share leadership: the Lived Experience Experts Group, the Indigenous Leadership Group, and the Board of Directors. Using an ecosystem approach, our work is also informed by stakeholder groups indirectly impacted, like health care providers, family members/supporters of people with lived experience, and community organizations.
With the leadership and expertise provided by those most impacted by our work through our shared-governance model, we’ve managed to do a lot! While our past impact reports don't cover everything that we've done, they are a good summary of our work over the years.
You can see the past impact reports below:
Over time, our team and governance groups have grown and changed and with each change has come more learning from the expertise that folks have brought with them into the organization. As we continued to grow and change, we began to see the need to slow down and ensure that we stayed focused on why we do this work and ensuring that we keep doing it in a way that aligns with our values. We needed to keep aligned with and accountable to people with lived and living experience who are most impacted by our work.
Where we are and where we want to go
While reflecting on our impact over these 5 years something that came to mind is that it isn’t only about our impact, but also the impact of the community on us as they continue to guide and inform our work. In the spring of 2025, we undertook an organizational planning process as a chance to slow down and reflect. We created an accessible and inclusive approach to planning to support different participation needs and ensure we were able to meaningfully hear the thoughts of everyone involved in our work.
The result was a beautiful planning document that captured Health Justice’s shared values, aspiration, and key priorities for our work going forward. The overall theme we heard during the planning process was “quality over quantity, depth over breadth, and slowing down to move ahead.” The four priorities that came out of the planning process were:
Develop slow, deep expertise
Listen and learn in relational ways
Communicate, educate, and mobilize
Nurture a holistic and transformative workplace
In our latest Impact Report, we have shared some key highlights of our work last year under each of these priorities. Some of that work included:
Independent Rights Advice Service (IRAS) resource development
Façade of Safety: Gender-based violence in BC’s involuntary mental health system
Intervening in the deemed consent case
…and much more!
As we move forward, we continue to rely heavily on the leadership and expertise provided via our community engagement governance model, especially the leadership and expertise of people with lived and living experience of involuntary treatment in BC.
These values and structures continued to support our work throughout 2024/25, and we have our work cut out for us as the political and public rhetoric related to involuntary treatment has escalated and become increasingly polarized. Going forward, we trust that our way of working will create a foundation for us to create meaningful change.
Curious about our areas of focus for our work? Check out this page!