About
Create a holistic, safe, sustainable center that heals, fulfills and empowers people providing services and programs promoting physical, nutritional, emotional, intellectual and spiritual well-being.
The Vision
Adaptively reuse the 55,000 sq. ft. former historic Universal Furniture Building at St Claude and St Roch in the City of New Orleans into a Healing Center. The center will include among other uses yoga, pilates, a cooperatively owned organic grocery, a hydroponic rooftop garden, a street university, a health food café, juice bar and coffee shop with a youth training program, emotional and alternative healers and visiting master healers and teachers, environmental offices and related retail bazaar and a New Orleans police substation.
We recognize that healing must occur holistically and synergistically on the energetic, physical, environmental, economic, intellectual, emotional, social, cultural, and spiritual levels at once. It must be available to everyone, no matter what race or income.
The Healing Center will bridge the gap between polarized aspects of our society and culture, bringing together profit, non-profit, public and private business models, government and grassroots organizations, Black/White/Hispanic/Asian, rich/poor, male/female, tourist/local, Uptown/Downtown, spiritualist/police, and Eastern/Western approaches to healing. It will do so naturally and organically.
We come together to create healing on every level for every individual, for our community and our city. New Orleans is a unique city, but it is not unique in its need for healing. If we can heal New Orleans (and we will, the healing has already begun), the most toxic of places, we can apply our model to other communities and cities, and eventually our world.
1. Following Hurricane Katrina, a diverse background of concerned citizens came together to form a salon think tank.
2. The members met to explore creative solutions to New Orleans’ vast recovery challenges.
3. Out of that salon they developed a multi-media cultural project,
4. A proposed energy policy for the city, and now a plan for an urban healing center like no other.
