Colibrí Academy for Health & Language Justice
Colibrí Academy for Health & Language Justice is an in-depth Language Justice Capacity Building and Mentorship program of Wave. For the past three years we have worked with organizations representing a spectrum of groups and impacted communities, with emphasis placed on organizations and programs led by queer and trans folks; Black, Indigenous and other People of Color, and People Living with HIV. Colibrí meets organizations where they are — building on their strengths, priorities, and existing structures — to foster an organizational culture shift towards greater language justice that strengthens relationships between actors in the HIV and Language Justice movements.
Colibrí Academy panel at USCHA 2023
We do this through applying Wave’s Language Justice Leadership Program curriculum, working with our partner organizations to develop a language justice analysis in their work, identify language justice practices to implement, and training up interpreters within their networks with whom they can begin to partner.
Beginning in our next program cycle, Colibrí plans to expand our focus areas to include not just organizations working on issues related to HIV, but also organizations working on the intersecting issues of reproductive justice and gender-affirming care.
We know that language is deeply personal and connected at a foundational level to our wellbeing. Yet people seeking out reproductive care, HIV treatment and prevention, and gender-affirming care face mounting challenges in the form of loss of bodily autonomy, criminalization, and stigma. For people who use non-dominant languages or who are marginalized for their way of communicating, these struggles are magnified.
In the multilingual future of our dreams, all people can advocate for their own health and welfare, access quality and culturally responsive care and services, and are meaningfully involved in their care and organizing to address issues of access, regardless of the language(s) they speak.
Why
Colibrí?
Colibrí means hummingbird in Spanish. Hummingbirds serve as critical pollinators within our ecosystems, going from plant to plant sowing the conditions for a possible abundance of blooms in the future. When we created Colibrí Academy we envisioned our work as that of cross-pollination within the ecosystem of the movements for HIV and language justice — leading to the blossoming of change within these spaces. With the name Colibrí, we also honor the life and legacy of poz activist and filmmaker, Marco Castro-Bojorquez, for whom the hummingbird was also a resonant image, and appeared in the title of one of his films, “El Canto del Colibrí”, in reference to the seldom heard song of the hummingbird. Marco, whose decades of advocacy for racial and language justice for HIV laid the groundwork for our project’s existence, became an ancestor in June 2021, shortly before he was set to collaborate with us. We seek to honor him and the work that he so passionately carried out during his life with the Colibrí Academy.