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Donations by check, addressed to "The Healing WELL," are also welcome. Please mail them directly to:
The Healing WELL
234 Hyde Street
San Francisco, CA 94102
ALL DONATIONS ARE TAX-DEDUCTIBLE.
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Wintertime, with its short days and rainstorms, invites us to slow down and look deeply at what’s most fundamental to our being. We direct energy to our roots so we can bloom fantastically in the spring. That is exactly what we are doing at The Healing WELL, and the promise of what is to come is invigorating.
We welcome our new program manager, Sarah Combs, who brings to us a powerful intellect, gentle spirit and great experience. We continue our search for a new site, currently considering 4 very different possibilities - and celebrate all the new community partnerships that this search has invoked. We proceed with our new participant leadership program - buoyed up by the outreach team spreading the word about The Healing WELL at community gatherings, those who are piloting a 1x1 companionship program at a nearby supportive housing site, and the leaders who have stepped forward into several volunteer opportunities needed for our daily programming.
As this new growth gets ready to burst forth, we continue to cultivate our core, too. The profound experience of relationship and community among us - the friendship and wisdom offered to us by the Faithful Fools, which has graciously hosted us during our incubation period - and the unshakable commitment to being a healing force within this neighborhood - are gifts we will forever nurture. We are profoundly grateful to all our friends and supporters for helping shore up The Healing WELL as it deepens its root system and prepares to stretch its limbs and bear even more fruit .
Sincerely,
Kathy Curran
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New Program Manager: Sarah Combs
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Sarah is very humbled and excited to join the Healing WELL community. She was born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska and is grateful to have grown up in a place that values the outdoors and nature. Sarah’s journey to San Francisco is one of many twists and turns, which led her to upstate New York for college, New York City for graduate school, South East Asia with the Peace Corps, New Zealand as a waitress/traveler, and many other places in between.
After her Peace Corps work ended, she decided to pursue her Masters in Public Health at Columbia University, which subsequently led her to work for the past five years as a Health Educator and Health Education Manager at a network of community clinics in New York City. Although she loved her work at the clinic, her other passion - fitness and wellness, (as well as the difficult winters!) drew her to leave New York City and head to Hawaii where she worked as a yoga instructor for the majority of 2016. California was always the ultimate goal and by a stroke of good luck, she found the Healing WELL - the perfect marriage of her two passions!
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Antonius and Sr Katie on the day of the donation
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As Antonius Dinchto and Justin Visser were creating their new skateboard shop, they also were befriending Jerry The Wizard, a homeless man living near their storage site. Inspired by his spirit, they honored him by naming their on-line shop The Blood Wizard. They promised that as their store experienced success, they would dedicate a portion of their profits to address homelessness. Antonius turned to his dear friend and “neighborhood homeless expert,” Sr. Katie O’Shea, CSJ, for a recommendation of an organization to whom they could donate $10 for each skateboard they sold on cyber-Monday. Thank you Blood Wizard for believing in The Healing WELL, for your generous donation, and for the custom-made skateboard which will adorn the walls of The Healing WELL in our new site!
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Community Programming: Chair Yoga in the Community
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Through the vision and leadership of some of our participants, the Healing WELL forged a partnership with The LeNain Hotel, one of DISH's supportive housing site's in the Tenderloin. We are piloting a weekly chair yoga series led by volunteer Alex Johnston. Overcoming her initial skepticism, Angelina captured hers and her classmates' experience of the class when she
commented, “this class helps me find my center."
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Yoga participants featuring their favorite poses
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Marty as featured in Genesis.
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Volunteer Spotlight: Marty
This month we express our great gratitude to Marty Murphy, one of the Healing WELL’s 12-Steps for Healing facilitators. Reflecting on his experience with the participants of his Wednesday group, Marty stated that he “never drives away unhappy about [his] time here” and that “the reality is that without a few breaks in our own lives, that would be us." Marty, along with other members of the Healing WELL community, were featured in GENESIS, the quarterly magazine of St. Ignatius College Preparatory School in San Francisco, with a circulation of 25,000 people.
To read the full article, please click Finding Christ in the city's Tenderloin.
Quotes and picture reprinted from Genesis magazine, St. Ignatius College Preparatory, with permission.
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The Healing WELL featured in
Stories Behind the Fog
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One of our regular participants, Don, was recently featured in
Stories Behind the Fog
, an online collection of stories from 100 homeless residents of San Francisco
.
In the article, Don describes his time living in the Presidio and other local places. He says, "I don't blame people for getting at the end of the rope with homelessness in the City. I usually kept out of the way. I cleaned up after myself, and kept it looking the way I found it." Click here
to read Don's story.
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Participant
Expression
: Art
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"What is photography?" pondered Patrick, whose photo of wet leaves on pavement (featured right) sparked a rich conversation about rain during a recent Poetry class. "For me, it is a form of healing meditation. Instead of focusing on sometimes crazy and often negative things that happen to me, I clear my mind by my constant observations of the things around me. I look for things to photograph and it relaxes me and lets me forget troubling things."
To see more of Patrick’s beautiful photographs, visit his Instagram account.
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Participant Expression: Poems
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Spansive. Beams quiver like a brass bell and bugs hum and sip from our navels. The high seas visit our warm toes and cast bead necklaces about our ankles. Sand rides the wind, dashing fine pollen pellets against cheeks and shins. Amanda. Your arms, looping around each hold of the slick granite cliff you climb. Look at me. Raise the hair up on my arms again. Throw those apples from your pockets. Let them drop to the sea and sing. I long to see those reds trace fire from the bi-wing Papa piloted during that war.
- T
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The Healing WELL is a fiscally-sponsored project of Community Initiatives
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234 Hyde Street (Between Turk & Eddy)
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