Harvesting the Wisdom: Building Healing Infrastructure Through the Integrated Wellness Fellowship

My spirit is uplifted. My body is content. My emotions flow. I have grown. I have learned. We are a larger family of healers.
IWF participant

January is a time of openings and closings, and on January 31st, CIIS’ Division of Community Engagement and Belonging (DCEB) and their community partner, Healing Clinic Collective (HCC), hosted an afternoon that harvested the abundant wisdom gathered from their Integral Wellness Fellowship.

The Integrated Wellness Fellowship (IWF) was a yearlong program designed to train emerging clinicians in cultural and ancestral healing practices while strengthening their clinical skills in community-based settings. The Integrated Wellness Fellowship was supported by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation awarded to Healing Clinic Collective (HCC), with CIIS serving as a key institutional partner in implementing the yearlong, cohort-based hybrid program during the 2024–25 academic year.

The event was hosted at EastSide Arts Alliance (ESAA), which uses arts and culture to build community power and self-determination and is dedicated to building deep connections between and among working class & low-income communities of color, communities whose histories, stories and cultures are actively erased from mainstream narratives. 

The event began with welcomes from Carla Maria Perez, founder, core member, and lead coordinator for Healing Clinic Collective. Carla shared more about the partnership emphasizing how all those involved have been partaking in a long period of growth. “There's a reason why this was a year long scholarship, a year long fellowship, not a weekend course,” she reminded those present. “Ancestral medicine and approaches to healing is not something that you can learn by only reading and studying. It. It must be experienced, felt, and integrated over time.” Rachel Bryant, Vice President of CIIS’ Division of Community Engagement and Belonging, then shared some overarching insights from the Fellowship and the lasting impact it had on both Healing Clinic Collective mentors and CIIS mentees. 

Rachel closed by introducing a video message from Eduardo Duran, Indigenous thinker, healer, writer, and Veteran, who had spent time with Integral Wellness Fellows during their tenure. Eduardo offered healing words and energy, which transitioned into reflecting on the Fellowship through visuals, music, and testimonials in an artfully designed slideshow by Division of Community Engagement and Belonging program manager Valentina Salazar.  

More wisdom was shared via an engaging panel discussion moderated by Valentina and featuring Integral Wellness Fellowship mentors Samantha Garcia and Nekia Wright, and CIIS mentees Yaneé Ferrari and Anthony (Tony) Gannon Robledo. All four panelists shared how the Fellowship impacted them and the communities they serve. As Yaneé shared, “I know those are tenets that I have been able to tap into by way of my spiritual practices. And I also wanted it to be infused into my clinical work. So to have an incubator to do that, but to also be able to offer that tangibly to other folks, I think is such a huge gift.”

Everyone was then treated to song medicine by Phoenix Song, a queer, nonbinary Korean American adoptee performer who specializes in world fusion and sacred ritual through Korean shamanic music, Indian classical, neo-soul, and wordless chanting. 

Carla then closed the event with words of gratitude and the hopes that the seeds planted by the Integral Wellness Fellowships will blossom across other organizations and universities. As Samantha shared, “My wholeness is your wholeness. My presence to the ancestors is all of our present to my ancestors. And so that is the magic that happened, right? I know we, all of us who were there, and I'm sure I'm hoping and praying that you all are feeling it too, because it was potent and as I said, transformative. That was my way because this was a transformative experience for me and I will not be the same practitioner I was before.”