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"New Orleans is
rebuilding, but its enduring pulse and resilience is found in the
expression of literature,
music, art, and traditions steeped in a culture as rich and old as the
city itself."
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 The New Orleans
Healing Center
The New Orleans Healing Center grew out of a salon think tank, whose members
met to explore creative solutions to New Orleans’ vast recovery challenges
following Hurricane Katrina.
MISSION STATEMENT
To provide a holistic, safe, sustainable center that heals, fulfills and
empowers the individual and the community by providing services and programs
promoting physical, nutritional, emotional, intellectual and spiritual
well-being.
VISION STATEMENT
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..
Challenges and Strengths
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 challenges we face are precisely our strengths and elucidate the
absolute necessity that we fulfill our mission. Our significant challenges
include establishing the first, nontraditional, holistic healing center in
the Gulfsouth, a pioneering location, serving all races and income ranges,
subsidizing the poor, and requiring the contributions of a developing team
with disparate viewpoints and skill sets.
The Healing Center Governing Board will be composed of racially diverse
businessmen, healers, artists and academics, all with well-considered
opinions and perceptions who share our commitment. It is the diversity of
worldviews and talents among the members of the Governing Board that will
assure our extraordinary mission and vision will be accomplished.
Additionally, we are aware that we will need to make significant outreach
efforts into the community.
City Revitalization Impact
The Healing Center together with the planned revitalization of the St Roch
Market has implications far beyond the immediate neighborhood. Intense
development at this intersection (Universal Furniture and St. Roch Market)
including the adjacent and vacant Colton School will catalyze the
revitalization of the entire St.Claude/Rampart corridor. This corridor is
the front door to the French Quarter, Marigny, Bywater and Upper Nine
neighborhoods on the riverside and the Iberville, Treme, St. Roch and St.
Claude neighborhoods on the lake side.
St Claude can become an eclectic and vibrant Magazine St. which 25 years ago
was in the abandoned and underutilized condition that St Claude is today..
St.Claude/Rampart occupies the same relationship to the river on the
downtown side of the historic city as Magazine does on the uptown side.
MORE
Description of The Healing Center
Housed within the Healing Center are five complementary and synergistically
interrelated “silos” each of which, in their own unique way, crystallize the
Center’s mission—to tend to the mind, body, and environmental health of the
resilient citizens of New Orleans.
Complementary and Alternative Healing Arts and Shamanic Studies Center
An association of holistic specialists and indigenous healers, whose focus
is to ameliorate stress, trauma generally and particularly the endemic
stress symptoms resulting from Katrina and subsequent individual, family,
social, and cultural violence. ...MORE
Yoga Studio
Wild Lotus Yoga, with over 7,000 students testifying to its well-established
programs in Uptown New Orleans, will open a downtown branch, bringing a
variety of specialized classes and yoga styles to the New Orleans Healing
Center.
MORE
The Street University
In the belief that comradeship and learning are fundamental to
self-awareness, self-integration, self-healing, and community healing the
Street University conducts adult education courses of every sort taught by
anyone in the New Orleans community with a practical skill, craft, or life
experience to communicate....MORE
The Healing Café, Juice Bar and Coffee Shop
Nutrition is the corner stone of health and life. The Café will function as
a social hub for the Healing community and the neighborhood, extending the
spirit of healthy eating and friendship to everyone. The Café will offer a
full menu of moderately priced organic and vegetarian dishes drawn from a
variety of cooking traditions including healthier versions of local Creole
dishes. After an establishing year of operation, a program will be
instituted to train at-risk-youth culinary and restaurant skills....MORE
The Healing Center Retail Bazaar
Intended to be the supply resource for The Healing Center’s community
programs, a number of retail vendors in a Bazaar setting will offer Healing
Center logo brand clothes and supplies, sacred music discs, self-improvement
and educational books, video and audio instruction manuals for exercise and
life-style enhancement, and homeopathic and herbal supplements as well as
other related products. The Boutique will actively engage the surrounding
neighborhoods and beyond by offering a window into the variety of
intellectual, spiritual, and physical experiences The Healing Center offers....MORE
The New Orleans Food Co-op
This will be Louisiana’s first cooperative grocery store in the Center.
There are no other grocery stores in the Marigny/Bywater/Upper Ninth Ward
area. The emphasis will be on organic and locally grown foods.
...MORE
Art Space
Galleries will showcase local artists’ artworks.
Other Tenants
An assortment of complimentary, health-related tenants will use the
remaining space in the building. To date we have received positive interest
from WWOZ, the local community-owned radio station, The Regen Group, which
develops home-based regenerative energy designs, The Vitality Blend Café, a
juice bar/health café, The New Orleans Police 5th District Sub-station,
which would contribute significantly to the Center’s security.
The entire Center works synergistically between silos. The uniquely
conceived NOHC will provide immediate availability, within the same
facility, to a variety of services offered concomitantly, all of which
strive to eliminate the causes of illness—physical and emotional. While the
NOHC offers integrating paths to a balance of mind and body and, as a
multidimensional institution, is itself an integrated balance of form and
function: in the same way all the healing modalities—Rolfing,
Shiatsu—symbiotically complement each other, they, collectively, interact
with the physical, exercise components—Yoga, Tai Chi—which in turn augment
the educational component’s efforts, through lectures and seminars, to
clarify the impact of mental, spiritual perspectives and life style on
personal health. All of these then focus on the community grocery store
which encourages appropriate diet while the health food restaurant
demonstrates how nutritional food may be prepared. To embrace all of these
synergistic therapeutic systems will be a fine art component displaying the
themed work of community artists celebrating multi-cultural images of the
struggle to achieve mind, body and spiritual equipoise.
Conclusion
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. The healing of these
polarities has already begun in the planning process as diverse members of
the community come together in trust and positively in order to make the
Center manifest. As people from all walks of life begin to work together,
they get to know each other as fellow human beings, all committed to the
improvement of our common human condition.
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.
Web Design SuJen Webs
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