At the heart of our work are the Black Healers Collective and the Healing House series—our place-based community activations that move with the rhythm of liberation, wellness, and remembrance. Over the past year, these houses have held intimate circles and open community gatherings, large-scale events, and quiet moments of personal reckoning. We've seen stories unraveled and rewritten. We've made space for grief and joy, for rage and release. We've trained over 100 healers in politicized healing practices, spiritual caregiving, bodywork, and community-based wellness approaches. These aren't abstract numbers—they’re neighbors, aunties, organizers, teachers, doulas, and elders who’ve stepped into their power, reconnected to ancestral wisdom, and deepened their healing work in community.
We’ve also reached dozens of youth through the NOW (New Opportunities for Wellness) Program, anchoring our intergenerational commitment to wellness. These young people are being taught to care for themselves and each other with radical tenderness and a keen political clarity. The Healing Houses are not just for them—they are shaped by them, too. Their presence reminds us that the futures we are birthing require imagination that can stretch beyond what we've seen or survived. They remind us that our healing cannot be separated from theirs.
Healing Takes Root in the Region: From Personal Growth to Community Impact
An InPower Institute Reflection from OUR FUTURE SELVES…
We moved deeper into the land.
Our Earth-based healing initiative is now taking shape—with plans for community gardens, land ceremonies, and seasonal programming that centers our relationship with Mama Earth. This isn’t just about being outdoors—it’s about returning. It’s about remembering the ways our ancestors healed in rhythm with the soil, the water, the moon, and each other. The land is not a backdrop to our work—it’s a co-teacher, a partner, a mirror. And in the year ahead, we’ll be bringing this vision even further into form.
Over the last year, InPower Institute’s Healing Houses have grown from a budding idea into deeply rooted sanctuaries across the St. Louis region—spaces where healing, truth-telling, and transformation are not only possible, but expected. This work has always centered the lives and needs of Black people, and over these past twelve months, the soil has been rich with intention, investment, and the kind of deep communal care that can only emerge when Black women lead, dream, and build together.
This year also marked a major leap in our infrastructure and capacity.
Through intentional fundraising and powerful partnerships, we’re expanding our operating budget, increasing staff support, and activating nearly every corner of our organization. Support from our partners and funders has helped us deepen our roots and extend our reach. These collaborations are not transactional—they are relational. We’ve built them on trust, aligned values, and a shared vision for what Black and Indigenous healing could look like across this region.
Spirit Rising, our weekly soul salon, has become a rhythm of refuge—a space where healing is not a one-time event, but a living, breathing part of life. Spirit Rising offers deep rest, joyful play, collective ritual, and practical tools for navigating this wild world. It’s become a vital gathering place for those who need to pause, recalibrate, and be held.
Our Healing Weekends and Communiversity courses add texture to that rhythm, creating a yearlong arc of learning, engagement, and collective growth. Whether learning about ancestral plant medicine, meditation, justice-centered somatics, or the history of healing traditions, our community has come to rely on these offerings as steady nourishment.
One of the most powerful shifts this year has been witnessing the ripple effects of our work. Healing is not a solitary journey. As more people have stepped into these spaces, we’ve seen the impact reverberate through families, organizations, and communities. Our healers are being called into churches, schools, birth centers, justice circles, and organizing tables. They’re leading rituals, offering reiki and bodywork, holding space for grief, and facilitating conflict transformation rooted in love. We’re witnessing a shift—not just in language, but in how people are showing up. The culture is changing, and healing is becoming a non-negotiable part of that change.
And still, we know the work is not done. Our region is tender. We are still reckoning with trauma—individual and collective, past and present. But what we’ve proven this year is that when people are invited to heal in community—when they are met with care, cultural resonance, spiritual depth, and political clarity—they respond. They show up. They soften. They grow.
As we look ahead, we are dreaming even bigger. We envision Healing Houses becoming permanent, rooted hubs across neighborhoods—staffed by local healers, open to the public, connected to gardens and cultural centers. We are building the Big Book of Medicine, a living archive of our collective wisdom. We are preparing to host a regional Healing Summit that brings together practitioners, thinkers, and seekers from across the country to share and shape the future of healing. We are nurturing new leadership, deepening our organizational sustainability, and inviting more people to step into this sacred labor of repair, remembering, and restoration.
Healing isn’t just something we offer—it’s who we are. It’s how we lead. It’s how we live. And in this season of rooting deeper, we give thanks for every hand, every heart, and every moment that helped this vision grow. The healing is happening,