Healing Landscapes

The Healing Landscapes Program reconnects Indigenous communities and other under-resourced groups to the land through culturally specific, land-based education and restoration work. This program integrates healing practices, ecological restoration, and Indigenous worldviews, offering participants transformative experiences in mindfulness, art, and stewardship. Participants engage with nature not only as a physical environment but as a relative, fostering reciprocal relationships and biocultural restoration that address ecological and human well-being.

Program Goals

1. Transformative Engagement: Provide culturally rooted healing practices and hands-on land stewardship activities that deepen connections to place, promote mental well-being, and foster ecological awareness.

2. Program Development Tools: Create facilitation frameworks and best practices to guide future programming, ensuring sustainable and replicable models that align with Indigenous knowledge systems.

3. Strengthen Partnerships: Collaborate with Native-led organizations, local conservation partners, and educational institutions to address shared conservation challenges, such as water security and biodiversity, while supporting cultural revitalization efforts.

Recent Program Highlights

• Indigenous-Led Restoration: Indigenous volunteers advancing ecological restoration by constructing Low-Tech Process Based Restoration structures along Spencer Creek, improving riparian habitats and supporting creek health.

• Youth Education and Hands-On Stewardship: Providing experiential learning through classroom-based fire ecology lessons and field trips to the Vesper Meadow Restoration Preserve, where high school students participated in native plant garden maintenance, riparian restoration, and streambank stabilization.

• Community Outreach and Cultural Sharing: Engaging with local communities using Fire Ecology and Human Relationship curriculum at cultural events and workshops, fostering greater awareness of Indigenous ecological knowledge.

• BIPOC and Indigenous Programming: holding a BIPOC group cohort workshop centered on Indigenous worldviews, co-hosting an Indigenous women and Two-Spirit gathering, providing spaces for connection, healing, and cultural expression.

These efforts highlight the program’s holistic approach—connecting community members with land stewardship through cultural education, environmental restoration, and inclusive partnerships.

Target Community and Focus Areas

Local Native, low-income, BIPOC, and other under-resourced communities have expressed a need for safe, land-based spaces to reconnect with their cultural roots. Healing Landscapes addresses both historical and contemporary harms resulting from settler-colonial with activities that restore both the land and the people connected to it.

Program efforts include:

• Addressing Ecological Challenges: Engaging participants in land restoration focused on water security, wildfire prevention, and species conservation.

• Revitalizing Indigenous Practices: Offering mindful movement activities and guided meditations that frame land and nature as living relatives.

• Supporting Community Needs: Collaborating with Native community leaders and conservationists to provide meaningful, trauma-informed programming, incorporating traditional ecological knowledge into Western restoration frameworks.

By collaborating for program design and strengthening partnerships with local organizations, the Healing Landscapes Program aims to create lasting, reciprocal relationships between people and the environment.