The Archive of Healing™ grew originally from a project among distinguished professors of Folklore at UCLA. Under the direction of Dr. David Delgado Shorter, the archival content was reviewed by students of Dr. Shorter over six years. Working regularly with UCLA’s Center for Community Engagement (CCE), Dr. Shorter would enable students to work in three areas: better understanding the scholarly literature on healing across cultures, in the archival data here, and in service learning projects with community partners. These CCE courses offered opportunities for students to provide assistance to community organizations and service learning partners such as midwives, Indigenous communities, doulas, acupuncturists, mental health and social justice organizations, and more. Over the years, the archive has slowly become a means through which to apply for grants to assist with cultural heritage projects.
For example, after several years of working together, we assisted in the creation of the Koreatown Archive. This endeavor demonstrated our ability to help community partners gather, curate, secure, and manage data that they could then share with their chosen audiences. This first partnership provides the Koreatown Storytelling Program an opportunity to showcase their incredible holdings of oral histories, photographs, and community concepts of healing from the diverse area of Los Angeles known as Koreatown.
If you work in community health and can think of ways qualified UCLA students can join you on projects such as nurturing community gardens, promoting mental wellness, facilitating art therapy, yoga, meditation, or energy work, we would be thrilled to hear from you. Please use our Contact Us form.
Beyond partnerships fostering opportunities in higher education, the AH is interested in
- Programmers and speakers who specialize in non-allopathic healing and whom we can feature at Archive of Healing events
- Secondary investigators or Co-Principal investigators who can help us write grant applications for research surrounding folk healing and complementary medicine
- Educators who can help us design K-12, secondary, or college curricula on decolonizing medical archives
- Co-organizers of workshops, roundtables, and presentations on alternative medicine
The Archive of Healing™ is open to partnerships that continue its mission towards creating a community of shared knowledge on health and healing. If you feel your mission can in any way align with ours, please reach out to us.