GLIDE's healthcare training program, "Healers at the Gate", interrupts patterns of discrimination and harm. Rooted in empathy and service, it brings together campus security supervisors, nurses and nursing supervisors, social workers, and other healthcare professionals from across the UCSF campus to come face-to-face, in service and dialogue, with people impacted by racism, homelessness, and substance abuse. Hosted in the Tenderloin and framed as a justice pilgrimage to GLIDE, the program changes the perspectives of healthcare workers and interrupts patterns of harm inflicted upon BIPOC patients and families on the UCSF campus.
GLIDE is a nationally recognized center for social justice, dedicated to fighting systemic injustices, creating pathways out of poverty and crisis, and transforming lives. Located in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco, GLIDE is home to the disenfranchised and unhoused of San Francisco. For nearly 60 years, GLIDE has been dedicated to lifting up and centering the voices of marginalized people while welcoming the powerful into our beloved community to transform themselves in the fight for justice.
GLIDE's Values and Approach
- Radical Inclusion - a radically diverse group of people break through normalized patterns of interaction in the service of cultivating beloved community and distupting patterns of racism and classism in healthcare
- Truth-telling - the conditions our unhoused neighbors' experiences in the Tenderloin are truth-telling symbols; by bearing witness, we are affirming the value of wrestling deeply with the most painful American truths. Upon reflection, pilgrims see clearly how SF's radicalized inequalities are rooted in the history of slavery.
- Loving and Hopeful - meeting Tenderloin leaders and elders infuses us with hope; their heroism and resilience provide fuel for our work; their non-violent approach reinforces the power of working for justice in a GLIDE-like, loving way.
- Celebration - combating compassion fatigue experienced by front-line workers through music, spoken-word, and joyful engagement is an invaluable source of hope, helping us to see a life-affirming through-line from our current work to the work of generations that have gone before us.
- For the People - making room for folk-wisdom that comes not from the people who always get listened to, sometimes known in African-American culture as mother-wit; surfacing the modern-day Ella Bakers and Sojourner Truths that live and work in the Tenderloin; by listening to those who want to share their lived experience, we are directly addressing America's original sin of slavery.
- Purposeful Relationship Development - the Tenderloin pilgrimage convenes and coalesces cohorts of influencers with positional power within the healthcare system to change their daily actions and the action of others through policy change to center the well-being of BIPOC patients.
- Believe in Participant Dignity and Humanity - the pilgrimage is built on a no-blame, no-shame approach to addressig racism; this preserves humanity and dignity; learning flows in all directions; we temporarily flatten hierarchies, which make space for all participants to be teachers AND students.
GLIDE's Recommended Education Materials
Pediatric Grand Rounds (FYI only)
Healers at the Gate Song List (Spotify)
Videos
Podcast
Books
- Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson
- Between The World & Me by Ta Nahesi-Coates
- The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
- The Warmth Of Other Suns by Isabella Wilkerson
- Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent by Isabella Wilkerson
- Heavy by Kiese Laymon
- Evicted by Mathew Desmond
- Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons Our Own by Eddies S. Glaude Jr.
- The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee
- The Sun Does Shine by Anthony Ray Hinton
- My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem
- Amazing Grace by Jonathan Kozol
- There are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing up in the Other America by Alex Kotlowitz
