Healing in Color is workforce development for teaching artists in community and community-based arts in health programming: built together, delivered together, rooted in the same neighborhoods.
Explore the Practitioner Academy Join our interest listRedlined communities carry persistent health disparities, chronic stress, and limited access to wellness support that actually reflects who they are.
The teaching artists who have always held space in those same communities, in church halls, living rooms, and community centers, are doing healing work every day without credentials, compensation, or recognition.
Healing in Color exists because the solution to the first crisis lies within the second.
Teaching artists rooted in community are natural practitioners. They carry cultural memory, relational trust, and lived experience that no outside institution can replicate. We prepare and sustain those teaching artists as professionals.
In networking with other teaching artists and arts organizations with arts in health practices, we learned that this same pattern is mirrored in most redlined communities we encountered. This is not one neighborhood's story. It is a national one, and the answer starts locally.
Healing in Color grew from work already happening in Ohio neighborhoods: listening to communities about what they need to heal, and proving what the arts can do when they are placed at the center of that answer.
A workforce development program that prepares teaching artists as arts in health practitioners through the Practitioner Academy.
Healing-centered creative workshops delivered by teaching artists from the community, for the community.
This is not a referral model. The teaching artist is the community, the program belongs to the community, and we serve the community.
Every course is designed so cost and technology never decide who gets to participate.
We center the communities most affected by gaps in wellbeing resources, connecting creative programming to the growing arts in health movement.
We invest in local teaching artists as professionals, so the capacity to lead this work lives, and stays, in the community itself.
The Practitioner Academy is our complete training and verification program preparing teaching artists as arts in health practitioners. It is designed specifically for teaching artists who already bring teaching or facilitation experience and specialized creative skills into the room. The Academy builds on that foundation: giving practitioners the shared language of the work, along with the additional knowledge, skills, and documented competencies to lead creative wellbeing programming as a career. We are preparing to pilot the Academy with our first cohort, the community teaching artists who shaped and delivered Project Shifting Energy.
Behind the scenes, the Academy is built on a structured competency framework with defined learning outcomes and assessments, and practitioners complete a capstone reviewed against a shared rubric. Graduates receive a certificate documenting contact hours of professional development. The exact shape of these elements continues to be refined ahead of publication, so consider this a description of our approach rather than a finalized structure.
The curriculum also brings in specialized training delivered by outside entities we host in a neutral, shared space, alongside our growing engagement with Ohio's social prescribing landscape, so practitioners graduate with both the shared language of the work and connections to the real-world networks it operates within.
The complete practitioner preparation pathway: foundations of arts and wellbeing, facilitation practice, ethics and scope, community partnership, and a capstone project.
A concise introduction to the language, evidence, and practice of arts in health work, designed for arts organizations and community partners exploring how this field fits their mission.
Scenes from our six-week pilot workshop series at the Cleveland Public Library Rice Branch, delivered using the Healing in Color curriculum. Community members and teaching artists explored identity and strength through photography, expressive writing, and holistic wellness practice. Evidence that when communities are given access to intentional, facilitated creative space, healing follows.
Photographs from Project Shifting Energy programming, shared with permission.
"You do not have to stay where you started. You can heal. You can grow. You can change. You can choose a different path."
Darnesha
"I imagine love erases the hurt, but carries forward the lessons, and builds deep, strong, rooted love."
Vanessa
"Finding the good and beauty in spaces by looking up more, both literally and spiritually, keeps me in a positive mind space."
Ericka
Our long-term goal reaches beyond our own programming: we want to help build the infrastructure that lets arts in health work thrive across Ohio, connecting creative practice, community referral networks, and policy. As part of that goal, we are in conversations with statewide organizations working in social prescribing and arts advocacy, and we look forward to sharing more as those collaborations take shape.
Guided journals, artwork, apparel, and gifts designed around creativity and reflection, all carrying the same rainbow tree of life at the heart of our work. When you shop with us, you are not just bringing something beautiful home. You are helping fund practitioner training for teaching artists in community and putting creative wellbeing programming directly into the neighborhoods that need it most.
The World Health Organization's landmark scoping review synthesized evidence from over 900 publications on the role of the arts in improving health and wellbeing (Fancourt & Finn, 2019). More recent peer-reviewed work, including a 2025 systematic review in Nature Medicine and a 2025 analysis of U.S. social prescribing in The Lancet Public Health, continues to build the case for connecting creative programming with community wellbeing. Our full curriculum includes in-text citations and complete APA reference lists throughout.
The field has a national home in the National Organization for Arts in Health (NOAH), which has published a Core Curriculum for Arts in Health Professionals and, in 2025, a report on Advancing Practice in Arts in Health: Artist Workforce Development and Certification, the same territory the Practitioner Academy is built for. NOAH's own foundational research found that arts in health work already spans a wide and growing range of institutional and community settings nationwide.
Ohio is not alone in exploring this path. In Massachusetts, the Mass Cultural Council's social prescription program, the first of its kind in the country, has grown a network of more than 400 cultural organizations and secured contracts with two statewide health insurers to cover arts prescriptions as part of patient treatment plans. In Connecticut, the Office of the Arts partnered with SocialRx and the New Haven Symphony Orchestra to build a statewide social prescribing ecosystem reaching residents across the state. Both point toward the same conclusion driving our work here: state-level infrastructure that connects artists, health systems, and community is possible, and it is already being built.
Fancourt, D., & Finn, S. (2019). What is the evidence on the role of the arts in improving health and well-being? A scoping review (Health Evidence Network Synthesis Report 67). WHO Regional Office for Europe. iris.who.int/handle/10665/329834
National Organization for Arts in Health. (2017). Arts, health, and well-being in America. thenoah.org
Mass Cultural Council. (2025). New data highlights economic benefits of social prescribing. massculturalcouncil.org
A complete reference list accompanies all Healing in Color course materials and reports.
Whether you are a teaching artist interested in the Practitioner Academy, an organization exploring a cohort, or a supporter of arts in health in Ohio, we would love to hear from you. Charitable gifts are received through our fiscal sponsor, a 501(c)(3) public charity.
Connect with us info@healingincolorinst.com Support the work