DismantlE Oppression.
Build Justice.
A public health and public policy social enterprise committed to building the analytical tools, the community infrastructure, and the strategic capacity that just systems require.
We do not manage harm. We dismantle it.
Reconstruction Institute exists to dismantle oppression and build just systems through education, policy advocacy, case management, and the community infrastructure that makes the work sustainable.
Founded and directed by Maeva Veillard Perry, MPH
Public Health Practitioner, Policy Advocate, Educator, and Community Activist.
our pillars
1. Centering Those at the Margins
Systems must be evaluated and rebuilt based on the experiences of those most impacted by harm. We begin and end every engagement with that commitment — not as a rhetorical gesture, but as a structural requirement.
2. Making Policy Accessible
Communities deserve to understand, engage with, and shape the decisions that govern their lives. We translate policy into power — building the literacy and capacity for communities to participate in their own governance.
3. Working Collectively
Across sectors and movements, we work to create a just, safe, and sustainable world for everyone. No single organization changes systems alone. Coalition and collaboration are not strategies — they are requirements.
4. The Long Arc Commitment
Real systems change takes generations. We work with urgency and with patience — investing in the infrastructure of justice, not just its appearance. We are accountable to the people who come after us, not just to the moment we are in.
Faqs about the institute
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The Reconstruction Institute is a public health and public policy organization based in Lawrence, Massachusetts. We build analytical tools, community infrastructure, and strategic capacity for the work of dismantling oppressive systems and building just ones in their place.
Our name references the Reconstruction era following the Civil War — the most rapid democratic experiment in American history, and the one whose unfinished work we understand ourselves to be continuing. We are not reforming existing systems. We are building the intellectual and organizational infrastructure that genuine reconstruction requires.
The Reconstruction Institute's work stands in the tradition of the institution-builders and truth-tellers who demonstrated that analysis without action is insufficient — and that reconstruction requires both the clearest possible diagnosis and the most determined possible building.
Ida B. Wells
Fannie Lou Hamer
Marie Mc.Leod Bethune
Shirley Chisolm
Florynce Kennedy
Audre Lorde
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This is a deliberate structural choice, not a default. Most social justice and public health organizations are nonprofits, which means their survival depends on the approval of funders whose interests do not always align with the communities the organization serves. Foundation priorities shift. Grant cycles compress work into deliverables. Donor relationships create informal constraints on what an organization will say publicly and which fights it will pick.
The Reconstruction Institute operates as a for-profit social enterprise so that the analysis is accountable to the work — not to a funder's strategic plan. We generate revenue through course enrollment, consulting, training, and speaking. That structure gives us the organizational autonomy to say what the evidence shows, advocate for what justice requires, and serve the communities most harmed by the systems we analyze — without managing a donor relationship that requires softening any of that.
Organizations that cannot afford to lose a funder cannot always afford to tell the truth. We can.
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We are based in Lawrence, Massachusetts — a majority-Latino city with a deep history of labor organizing and one of the most concentrated expressions of structural inequality in New England. Lawrence is not incidental to our work. It is the context we analyze from and the community we are accountable to.
Our consulting, training, speaking, and policy work extends nationally. The course is available to anyone. The Liberation Room is an online community with no geographic restriction.
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This is the question we are most often asked, and it deserves a direct answer.
Most DEI training operates at the interpersonal level — it addresses unconscious bias, microaggressions, cultural competency, and individual behavior change. That work has value. It does not address the structural conditions producing the outcomes it is trying to change. An unconscious bias training does not close a racial wealth gap produced by seventy years of discriminatory federal housing policy. A cultural competency workshop does not fix a hospital's financial assistance policy that systematically fails to screen the patients most in need of charity care.
The Reconstruction Institute's work is structural. We use analytical frameworks to name the specific policies, practices, and institutional cultures producing documented harm — and we build action plans targeted at the domain of power actually producing each condition, not at its interpersonal expression. The intervention that addresses an interpersonal problem will not close a structural gap. Naming the domain correctly is the prerequisite for effective action.
services
Reconstruction Institute provides case management, consulting, training, facilitation, strategic planning, and policy work for organizations committed to structural change. Our work is grounded in the analytical frameworks of The Architecture of Harm, and goes deeper into the specific institutional context you bring.
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Direct support for individuals and families navigating complex systems — healthcare, housing, legal, and social services — with a structural analysis that names what the systems are doing and builds the navigation strategy accordingly.
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Structural analysis of policy proposals, regulatory frameworks, and legislative landscapes through the policy violence framework and the Reconstruction Framework. Supports advocacy organizations, community groups, and government agencies in naming and addressing structural harm.
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A structural analysis of your organization through Collins' four domains, CREA's power framework, and Okun's white supremacy culture characteristics. Produces a named, evidenced diagnostic and a specific set of recommendations — not a values statement, a structural change plan.
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Facilitation of organizational strategic planning processes using the Reconstruction Framework — grounded in the structural analysis of where the organization is, not where it wants to appear to be. Produces specific, accountable, equity-centered strategic commitments.
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Custom training programs using the frameworks of The Architecture of Harm for organizational teams, cohorts, and professional communities. Available as single sessions, multi-session series, or full course delivery for organizational licensing.
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Maeva delivers keynotes, lectures, and panel presentations on structural racism as a public health emergency, the architecture of harm, and the reconstruction of just systems. Available for conferences, organizational convenings, and community events.
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One-on-one coaching for individuals doing the work of dismantling oppressive patterns in their own lives, relationships, and immediate circles — not organizational consulting, but the personal application of the same structural analysis. For people untangling internalized narratives, navigating family or community systems shaped by the frameworks this Institute teaches, or building the individual capacity to interrupt harm in their own daily sphere of control.
working with reconstruction institute
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Use the contact form and describe your organization, the challenge you are working on, and what you are hoping our work together would produce. We will respond to determine whether there is a good fit and discuss scope, timeline, and fees.
We work with a limited number of organizational clients at a time in order to do the work well. We do not take engagements where the expected outcome is a report that will not be acted on, a training that substitutes for structural change, or an audit designed to produce the appearance of accountability rather than its substance. If that is not what you are looking for, we want to hear from you.
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Yes, with the same conditions that apply to all of our consulting work. We do not take engagements where the analysis will be managed to produce predetermined conclusions, where structural recommendations will be softened before reaching decision-makers, or where institutional protection takes precedence over community accountability.
Government agencies genuinely committed to structural change — including change that requires naming what their own policies have produced — are clients we want to work with. Maeva's background in community benefits program management at the Massachusetts Attorney General's Office gives us specific grounding in state and municipal government contexts.
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Use the contact form and include the event name, date, audience, and what you are hoping the keynote will accomplish for your attendees. Maeva speaks on structural racism as a public health emergency, the architecture of harm, the Reconstruction Framework, and the reconstruction of just systems in public health, policy, and organizational contexts. We will respond with availability and fees.
FLAGSHIP COURSE
The Architecture of Harm:
See It. Name It. interrupt It. reconstruct it.
Most systems producing harm aren't broken — they're working exactly as designed. This course teaches you to see that design, name it precisely, and act using the Reconstruction Framework.
For public health professionals, policy advocates, organizational leaders, and community practitioners ready for more than awareness. No prior background required — only the willingness to apply the analysis to your own context and build something different.
3
Modules
13
Lessons
1
Action Plan- Yours
self-paced
Online
module 1
Frameworks for Understanding Oppression
Before you can act on a system, you have to see it clearly. This module builds the analytical foundation the course depends on: Collins' Matrix of Domination, Young's Five Faces of Oppression, Okun's White Supremacy Culture, and the CREA power framework — applied immediately to documented cases like Cancer Alley and Flint. By the end, you have the vocabulary to name what you're seeing and the frameworks to trace exactly how it operates.
5 Lessons
Power and Its Faces — CREA Framework Applied to Cancer Alley
The Matrix of Domination — Patricia Hill Collins’ Framework Applied to Indigenous Genocide
The Five Faces of Oppression — Iris Marion Young’s Framework Applied to The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
White Supremacy Culture in Institutions — Tema Okun’s Framework Applied to The Founding of America
Putting It All Together — All Frameworks Applied to The Flint Water Crisis.
module 2
How Oppressive Systems Persist
Individual frameworks explain individual mechanisms. This module scales up — examining ten American systems and the 400-year economic architecture from enslaved labor to the gig economy. You'll learn the policy violence framework: named actors, documented harm, different decisions available. It closes by applying the Reconstruction Framework to the nation itself — not asking whether these systems can be reformed, but what it takes to build what should exist.
4 Lessons
The Policy Blueprint — Policy Violence, Intersectionality, and The Examination of Project 2025 as a Form of Policy Violence
Systems vs. Symptoms — How Ten American Systems Sustain Oppression
The Economic Architecture of Exploitation — From Enslaved Labor to the Gig Economy
The Path Forward — The Reconstruction Framework Applied to The Nation
module 3
Your Role in the Work
The frameworks matter once applied to your own practice. This module starts in the body — structural racism as a public health emergency — then maps your professional sphere using CREA, Collins, Young, and Okun together. From there you build a specific, accountable action plan using The Reconstruction Framework. It closes with what it takes to sustain this work across the long arc, rather than burning out in year one.
4 Lessons
The Body Under Oppression — Structural Racism as a Public Health Emergency
Mapping Your Sphere — CREA Framework Applied to your Professional Context
Your Action Plan — The Reconstruction Framework Applied to your Work
Doing This Work Sustainably — The Long Arc of Reconstruction
Faqs about the course
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The course is designed for practitioners — people working in or alongside systems that affect community health who are looking for the analytical tools to understand what those systems are doing, why, and a structured framework for acting on that understanding.
That includes public health professionals, policy advocates, organizational leaders, community health workers, social workers, clinicians, educators, researchers, and community organizers. No specific credential or professional background is required — only intellectual seriousness and the willingness to apply the analysis to your own context.
The course is also for community members who want to understand the systems shaping their lives — not as an academic exercise but as preparation for changing them.
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No. The course is rigorous but it does not assume prior academic training. The frameworks are introduced from first principles and applied immediately to documented case studies — Cancer Alley, Flint, the 400-year economic history of racial labor exploitation — so the analysis is grounded in evidence rather than abstraction.
Learners with advanced academic backgrounds will find the course deepens and applies frameworks they may know theoretically. Learners without that background will find it builds the analytical capacity they need from the ground up.
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Thirteen lessons across three modules, with each lesson running approximately 25-35 minutes plus reflection and application work. At one lesson per week the course takes about 13 weeks. At two to three lessons per week it can be completed in four to six weeks.
The course is self-paced with no deadlines, no cohort schedules, and no expiration on access. The reflection and sphere mapping work is designed to be returned to over time as your professional context evolves — many learners find the course most valuable when approached slowly enough to apply each lesson before moving to the next.
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Yes. We offer organizational licensing for teams, cohorts, and institutional professional development programs — including access for a defined group of learners, facilitation support, and the option to customize the reflection and application components for your organizational context. Contact us to discuss
Be the first to know when the course is live!
LEGISLATIVE PRIORITIESWhat reconstruction requires
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Citizens United v. FEC (2010) produced a documented relationship between concentrated financial power and policy outcomes in which average citizens have near-zero independent impact after controlling for elite preferences. The Federalist Society's fifty-year judicial pipeline has produced a Supreme Court whose decisions reflect generational ideological engineering rather than the population's evolution. These are not natural conditions. They are the products of named decisions that named decisions can change.
Specific Demands
Repeal Citizens United through constitutional amendment — restore campaign finance limits to end the documented oligarchic capture of policy outcomes
18-year staggered term limits for Supreme Court justices — preventing generational capture and ensuring the court reflects the population's evolution
Binding judicial ethics standards for the Supreme Court — addressing documented conflicts of interest with no current accountability mechanism
Age limits for elected officials — reducing the gerontocracy of American political leadership and its distance from the communities most harmed by its decisions
Anti-gerrymandering legislation and independent redistricting commissions in all states
Restore and strengthen the Voting Rights Act gutted by Shelby County v. Holder (2013)
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The racial wealth gap is the compound interest on named federal exclusions — the GI Bill's discriminatory administration, the FHA's racial covenants, the USDA's systematic loan denial, Social Security's original occupational exclusions. The debt is documented, measurable, and owed by the institutional successors of the actors who produced it. The Evanston model, the German Holocaust reparations program, and the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 for Japanese American internment establish the legal and institutional precedent. The acknowledgment has not been made. The repair has not been delivered.
Specific Demands
Pass H.R. 40 — the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans — and advance it to implementation
Federal acknowledgment of the specific documented harms of slavery and its successors — named programs, named agencies, named decisions
Material repair of the racial wealth gap through a dedicated federal reparations program grounded in the documented economic history
Reparations for Haiti — formal acknowledgment of the $20 billion equivalent debt extracted for Haitian independence and its compounding economic consequences
Acknowledgment and repair of forced sterilization programs targeting Black, Indigenous, and disabled women — documented through as recently as 2010
Repair of USDA-documented land theft from Black farmers — 14 million acres to 2 million acres across the 20th centuryDescription text goes here
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The United States has attempted to pass universal or near-universal healthcare legislation six times since 1912. Each failure was produced by a specific, documented combination of industry lobbying and political calculation — not by the absence of a viable mechanism. An estimated 45,000 Americans die annually from lack of health insurance. Every other wealthy nation has solved this problem through a variety of mechanisms. The United States has chosen not to. That is policy violence — named actors, documented harm, preventable with different decisions.
Specific Demands
Universal healthcare coverage — through Medicare for All, a robust public option, or a multi-payer system with universal coverage requirements
Repeal the Hyde Amendment — end the prohibition on federal Medicaid funding for abortion that makes reproductive healthcare a right for those who can afford it and not for those who cannot
Expand and fully fund Title X family planning — restore and increase funding for the reproductive healthcare infrastructure that serves 4 million low-income patients annually
End Medicare drug price prohibition — require Medicare to negotiate pharmaceutical prices as every comparable nation does
Address the Black maternal mortality crisis as a federal public health emergency with named accountability, funded infrastructure, and measurable outcome targets
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The federal minimum wage has been $7.25 since 2009 — the longest period without an increase in the history of the federal minimum wage. A full-time worker at that wage earns approximately $15,000 annually against a federal poverty line of $30,000 for a family of four. Union membership has declined from 34.8% at its peak to approximately 10% today — a documented consequence of deliberate policy decisions. The gig economy's independent contractor classification extracts full-time labor while eliminating full-time employment obligations. The Thirteenth Amendment's exception clause makes prison labor constitutional and compensates it below minimum wage. These are named decisions with documented consequences and available alternatives.
Specific Demands
Federal living wage indexed to inflation — ending the decade-plus wage freeze and ensuring purchasing power is maintained without periodic political battles
Pass the PRO Act — restore effective labor organizing rights, eliminate captive audience meetings, and strengthen NLRB enforcement
Reclassify gig workers as employees — close the independent contractor loophole that extracts labor value while eliminating employer obligations
Abolish the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers — a post-Civil War institution designed to make Black service workers' wages dependent on white customers' goodwill
Progressive wealth tax on net worth above defined thresholds — reversing four decades of regressive tax policy that has produced documented dynastic wealth accumulation
Repeal the Thirteenth Amendment's exception clause — end the constitutional permission for prison labor that has sustained convict leasing from 1865 to the present
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The American housing crisis is not a market failure — it is a market functioning as designed around the racial and economic exclusions the FHA's racial covenants and HOLC's redlining maps built into the infrastructure of homeownership. Environmental racism is the documented pattern of siting industrial facilities, waste dumps, and pollution sources in communities of color — a pattern so consistent that race is a stronger predictor of proximity to toxic facilities than income. Both are produced by named decisions. Both require structural intervention, not better programs within the existing structure.
Specific Demands
Eliminate exclusionary zoning — condition federal infrastructure funding on local zoning reform that ends the land use architecture that concentrates poverty by design
Fully fund the National Housing Trust Fund — close the documented affordable housing gap of 7.3 million units nationally
Expand and enforce tenant protections — eviction prevention, just cause eviction requirements, and anti-discriminatory rental screening
Mandatory cumulative impact assessment for all industrial permitting in documented overburdened communities — before any new permit, not after community opposition builds
Restore and fund the EPA Office of Environmental Justice — with independent enforcement authority protected from political capture
Federal climate justice framework — addressing the documented disproportionate burden of climate consequences on communities of color through investment, infrastructure, and just transition policy
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The criminal justice system traces from slave patrols established in 1704 through the Black Codes of 1865 through the Thirteenth Amendment's exception clause to the present prison industrial complex generating $450 million in Alabama prison labor revenue in 2023. The immigration system has recruited labor through the Bracero Program and criminalized the same population when economic convenience demanded it. Both systems extract maximum labor value from racially targeted workers using the threat of state violence and incarceration as the coercive force. Both require structural dismantling, not reform.
Specific Demands
End qualified immunity — restore civil rights accountability for police violence through legislative reform of 42 U.S.C. Section 1983
Abolish the bail system — end pretrial punishment for poverty and replace cash bail with risk-based alternatives that do not criminalize financial precarity
End for-profit immigration detention — terminate ICE contracts with private prison companies whose business model requires filled detention beds
Pass comprehensive immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship — ending the recruit-when-needed, criminalize-when-convenient labor control architecture
End mandatory minimums and the sentencing disparities that produce documented racial outcomes across equivalent offenses
Invest in community-based alternatives to policing and incarceration — mental health crisis response, violence interruption programs, and restorative justice infrastructure
TAKE THE COURSE
The full analytical foundation for each of these priorities is developed in The Architecture of Harm — including the historical genealogy, the documented harm, the named actors, and the theory of change for achieving structural intervention at each level. The course is the evidence base. These priorities are the accountability.
These are not aspirational values. They are specific, documented, precedented structural interventions that the Reconstruction Institute names as the policy demands accountability requires. Each addresses a documented harm produced by named decisions. Each has documented precedent. Each is prevented by the power architecture that The Architecture of Harm course teaches practitioners to read and change.
MASSACHUSETTS LEGISLATIVE PRIORITIESbills we support at Beacon Hill
The Reconstruction Institute actively supports Massachusetts legislation that advances health equity, economic justice, incarceration reform, reproductive rights, and democratic participation. These are the specific bills before the Massachusetts legislature that align with our pillars and the analysis of our course.
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Supported Bills
An Act to Establish Health Equity — Addresses structural determinants of health, improves access to quality care, ensures investment in underserved communities, and builds a representative healthcare workforce. Fact Sheet →
An Act to Alleviate Medical Debt — Protects people who carry medical debt from future financial harm and prevents new accumulation by making hospital financial assistance policies more uniform and accessible while restoring Health Safety Net coverage. Fact Sheet →
An Act Promoting Birth Centers and the Midwifery Workforce — Creates a state fund for midwifery education, ensures sustainable insurance reimbursement for midwifery practices and birth centers, and creates a community birth registry. A direct intervention in Black maternal mortality and the reconstruction of a care system that was deliberately dismantled. Read Bill →
An Act Relative to Rate Equity for Community Health Centers — Requires MassHealth to reimburse FQHCs at the federal prospective payment system rate and ensures commercial payers pay no less than MassHealth. Read Agenda →
An Act Prohibiting Discrimination Against 340B Drug Discount Participants — Prohibits Pharmacy Benefit Managers from applying discriminatory contracting terms to 340B covered entities — protecting safety-net providers from pharmaceutical industry practices that undermine care for low-income patients. Read Agenda →
An Act Relative to MassHealth Reimbursement for Schools — Redirects school Medicaid funds back to schools for health services and administration, maximizing federal funds and expanding access to student health services. Fact Sheet →
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Supported Bills
An Act to Lift Kids Out of Deep Poverty — Raises cash assistance grants to the Deep Poverty level and provides annual inflation increases — addressing a fundamental social determinant of health for families with children. Fact Sheet →
An Act Combatting Off-Shore Tax Avoidance — Requires large global corporations to pay Massachusetts's existing corporate tax rate on a higher share of the profits they conceal offshore — recapturing public revenue. Learn More →
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Supported Bills
Safe Communities Act — Ends voluntary involvement of public safety officials in civil immigration matters, prohibits questioning about immigration status, protects basic rights in courts, and prohibits 287(g) collaboration agreements making local law enforcement a tool of ICE. Fact Sheet →
An Act Relative to Human Rights for Incarcerated People — Establishes universal access to programming, education, and vocational training, meaningful out-of-cell time, and ensures human rights are protected behind prison walls. Fact Sheet →
An Act Creating Independent Correctional Oversight — Establishes an independent oversight office within the Office of the Inspector General to enforce the recommendations of the Special Legislative Commission on Structural Racism in Correctional Facilities. Fact Sheet →
An Act Relative to Sexual Assaults by Adults in Positions of Authority — Adds statutory protections defining penalties for sexual assault by mandated reporters or others in positions of trust, authority, or supervision over a child. Read Bill →
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Supported Bills
Increasing Access to Menstrual Supplies (I AM Bill) — Ensures free menstrual products, without stigma, to all menstruating individuals in public schools, homeless shelters, prisons, and county jails. Learn More →
An Act Relative to Healthy Youth — Requires school districts offering sex education to provide medically accurate, age-appropriate, LGBTQ-inclusive information focused on healthy relationships and consent, with parental opt-out rights preserved. Learn More →
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Supported Bills
An Act Establishing Same Day Voter Registration — Permits eligible individuals to register or update registration on Election Day and during early voting — already implemented in 23 states and DC. Read Bill →
An Act to Provide Sunlight to State Government — Makes legislative testimony and committee votes public, requires 2-week notice before hearings, and applies public records law to the governor's office. Learn More →
An Act to Protect Safety and Privacy — Location Data — Requires affirmative opt-in consent for location data collection, restricts retention, and requires law enforcement to obtain a warrant for location data from data brokers. Learn More →
An Act Regarding Free Expression — Protects intellectual freedom in Massachusetts libraries by preventing book bans, ensuring fair material selection, and safeguarding librarians from political pressure. Fact Sheet →
An Act to Limit Political Spending by Foreign-Influenced Corporations — Prohibits foreign-influenced corporations from making independent expenditures on ballot questions and requires certification of non-foreign influence. Read Bill →
Take Action
Contact your Massachusetts legislators. Show up to hearings. Share these bills.
ABOUT
MAEVA VEILLARD PERRY, MPH
Maeva is the Founder and Director of Reconstruction Institute, a Public Health and Public Policy social enterprise based in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Maeva focuses on helping individuals, institutions, and communities understand how inequity is produced—not by accident, but by design—and how those systems can be transformed to serve the collective good.
She built The Architecture of Harm — the course, the framework, and the analytical infrastructure — from the foundational conviction that the most “well-meaning” individuals perpetuate oppression due to a lack of understanding of their role in a rigged system. Maeva believes frameworks for seeing oppression clearly should be as accessible as possible to the people most urgently in need of them: Policymakers, legislators, practitioners, advocates, community leaders, and the communities themselves.
Her career spans the public, nonprofit, and government sectors, supporting regulatory oversight and policy initiatives that ensure equitable healthcare access and affordability. Her prior roles include leadership in HIV/STI prevention, elder care and memory support, and community-based health navigation across the Boston area. She integrates evidence-based Public Health models with justice-centered leadership, bringing clarity to complex systems, helping audiences connect history, policy, and institutional design to present-day outcomes.
Her stated motivation is direct: She wants to dismantle oppression, period. Reconstruction Institute is the institution she built to do that.
BACKGROUND AND SERVICE
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DePauw University- Greencastle, IN
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Tufts University School of Medicine- Boston, MA
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Northern Essex Community College
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Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office
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Essex County Commission on the Status of Women
Land and Reparations Acknowledgment
Reconstruction Institute operates on the unceded land of the Pennacook, Pawtucket, and Massachusett peoples. We acknowledge Maeva's Haitian ancestry and demand reparations for Haiti, who was forced to pay the equivalent of $20 billion dollars to France and the United States for gaining its independence and becoming the First Black Republic in 1804 — a debt that took 122 years to repay and whose compounding economic consequences persist to this day. We also demand reparations for the descendants of all enslaved people in the United States and throughout the Diaspora. The racial wealth gap, the systematic theft of Black land and labor, and the documented multigenerational consequences of slavery and colonization are not legacy issues. They are present conditions, produced by named decisions, owed named remedies.