We started here because we had to.
The Bodymind Coalition came out of the lived experiences of trying to find support that actually understood your story as a young person.
Founding Values
The Bodymind Coalition was created around the pillars of peer support and storytelling in order to focus on supporting the whole person rather than just the diagnosis. It shapes how we approach caregiver education, asking communities to understand physical and mental health as one system. And it shapes our policy work, refusing to treat healthcare and mental healthcare as separate fights.
Our namesake, the concept of the bodymind, was developed within disability studies to challenge one of the most persistent assumptions in Western medicine and culture: that the mind and the body are separate entities. The bodymind framework is a way of understanding how physical and mental experience are connected and mutually constitutive.
"The bodymind... resists the Cartesian dualism that splits mind from body and has been used historically to pathologize, institutionalize, and marginalize people whose minds and bodies do not conform to dominant norms."
Especially in the context of disability and chronic illness, it is crucial to recognize that each shapes the other in ways that can't be cleanly pulled apart.
The daily reality is that it is challenging living in a body that medicine has divided into specialties, that insurance has divided into coverage categories, and that mental health systems often treat as though it exists separately from physical experience.
Our goal with this organization is to honor the complexity of the bodymind framework and empower the next generation of changemakers with a more nuanced perspective in order to inform best practices across healthcare, policy, and community building.
This is how our beliefs shape our work.
We invest in you.
Participation should give something back. Fellows leave with skills, references, and a network for future advocacy and careers, so the time you give supports your goals too.
Co-creation, not consultation.
Being "youth-centered" means the young people we serve shape what we build from the start. Our programs and decisions are guided by diverse young voices.
Power beyond just access.
Access to services matters, but it's only a starting point. You deserve the power to actively shape the systems you move through with the expertise of your lived experiences.
Want to help us build?
We're actively looking to scale with young people, advisors, sponsors, and institutional partners.