The Southern Healing Support Fund is A community driven fund that gives awards to Black mental health and healing practitioners including clinicians, yoga practitioners, community workers, and group facilitators to implement FREE and innovative healing and support strategies in the southern states where medicaid has not expanded. In addition the public work, this fund goes to support emergency support services for Black folks in the southern United States.
Why this fund?
According to the office of minority health, African Americans are 10% more likely to report having serious psychological distress than Non-hispanic whites. Medicaid plays an incredibly important role in mental health access. The federal program is the largest provider of behavioral health (mental health and substance use treatment) coverage in the United States. In 2015, Medicaid covered 21% of all people with mental health needs, 26% of adults with serious mental illness, and 17% of adults who received substance use treatment. The Affordable Care Act helped make behavioral health services as widely covered by insurance as all other health services. However, only four Southern states have expanded Medicaid, keeping the affordability of mental health programs out of reach. Nearly 90 percent of all people left without health coverage are in the Southern states, due to the lack of Medicaid Expansion. African-Americans are 13% of the total population but represent 24% of those left without health coverage without Medicaid Expansion.
Mental and emotional health is critical to the lives of Black folks’ well-being. And yet, it is often overlooked. We are more likely to be uninsured and can’t often afford the services or activities that support our healing, or they’re not accessible because they’re not located in our neighborhoods. If you’re in the South, where most states didn’t expand Medicaid, access to all kinds of health care, including mental health services, are further out of reach.
History of the Fund: BEAM and the National Queer and Trans Therapist of Color Network (NQTTCN) came together to establish a fund aimed at supporting the mental health and wellness of Black communities in states where Medicaid has not been expanded under the Affordable Care Act. This project builds on the pioneering work of NQTTCN in establishing a mental health fund for queer and trans people of color.
2021 Southern Healing Star Awardees
We are so proud of Georgia and the South, and in partnership with LIPTON, we are excited to announce the recipients of the inaugural Southern Healing Star Awards!
These awards are given to phenomenal Black individuals doing innovative wellness work in Black communities in the South, especially now in the midst of the radical election work. Each award comes with a $4K gift to support their community projects and wellness. It is so important during this time that we lift up and express our gratitude for these phenomenal wellness leaders.
These awards are a new initiative of BEAM's Southern Healing Support Fund! Learn more about the awardees here.
2020 Awardees
Our communities cannot practice wellness, without access to food. The 2020 Southern Healing Support Fund focused on dispersing grocery cards and funds to Black Elders, single parents, disabled folks,People living with mental illness, People living with HIV, trans, queer and undocumented folks in the south. In addition, limited awards will be available to support community garden efforts that support our folks with local green foods.
Southern Healing Support Fund congratulates our 2020 Community Garden Awardees, Historic Mableton Community Garden, and Alliance for African American Health in Central Texas! #Foodjusticeishealingjustice
2018 Southern Healing Support Fund
BEAM’s first round of Southern Healing Support Fund awardees focused on supporting dynamic organizations and individuals in the south. From Doula’s to Herbalists, Black folks are doing amazing healing work in the south.
2018 Awardees
The Melanated Birth & Yoga Retreat, Memphis, Tennessee ($1,000.00)
Miajenell Peake, Birth Doula & M.P.H
Description:
The Melanated Birth and Yoga one-day Retreat goal is to reach 50 Black women who are mothers or expecting mothers in the Memphis Tennessee area. With the help of the Southern Healing Support Fund, Black women will be informed about birthing options, prenatal informed consent and the benefits of yoga in one setting. After attending this event, Black women will be reenergized and given a suitable and useful tool to destress in their everyday lives, despite the disparities and injustices that they face every single day.
Community Roots Clinic, Atlanta, GA ($1,000.00)
Dionne Hills, Herbalist
Description:
Southern Healing Support Funds will be used to support a once a month free pop-up clinic at Lost-N-Found (a center in Atlanta that provides resources to queer youth without housing), as well as additional clinics in collaboration with other social justice organizations centering Black wellness in Atlanta. At each free-clinic, Community Roots provides herbal educational resources, one-on-one consultations with our certified herbalists, dispenses herbal medicine sourced from their own apothecaries, as well as offers an herbal tea blend and a hot meal for the youth and volunteers. They make almost all of the medicine for the clinics by hand which involves: growing or harvesting herbs or purchasing dry herbs, drying the plants, and making the medicine into its final form as tinctures, pills, salves, teas, etc.
The Confess Project, Little Rock, Arkansas ($1,000.00)
Lorenzo Lewis , Mental Health Advocate
Description:
The Confess Project focuses on men of color in regards to mental health awareness and education within local barbershops in Arkansas. With support from the Southern Healing Support Fund, the project will continue designing an intervention-based curriculum that will enhance conscious dialogue in the barbershop, storytelling among its participants, while allowing mental health professionals to provide mental health resources and services to those who are underserved. The Confess Project targets the Arkansas counties with the highest number of unhealthy days (in the past 30 days), the highest risk for suicide, and the highest risk of adolescent depressive symptoms. The Confess Project uses the barbershop as a transformative place to apply direct action to men of color and families and to help increase the applicable services and resources that are available.
Chocolate Soul Revival, Durham, North Carolina ($1,000.00)
Ratasha Elise, Healing Justice Facilitator
Description:
Chocolate Soul Revival is a healing justice initiative created by and for Black cis and trans women and femmes, gender non-binary, queer, low/no income, youth, and people living with disabilities. The Project’s ongoing work takes the form of 1 on 1 sessions, community healing circles, workshops, arts infused healing work, and multi-day intensives. Through a decolonial Black queer feminist lens, they are committed to centering the experiences and voices of those most marginalized amongst us in moving through individual and collective grief, trauma, and oppression, into wholeness, clarity, power, and wellness.
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