Frequently Asked Questions

What is the vision & mission of the Oshun Center for Intercultural Healing?

Our MISSION is to operate a high-quality teaching clinic, located inside the Integrative Health Wing of Family Tree Clinic, where we offer affordable therapies for every body and incubation support for integrative cultural healers to expand their practices. We also provide advanced training and mentorship for health care workers, institutions, and schools to integrate cultural therapies, health equity and social entrepreneurship into their training curricula and business practices.

Our long-term VISION is to train and pave the way for integrative cultural healers to become a part of everyday health care, present in every health care center, and for the principles of healing justice and reproductive justice to be present in every treatment room.

What is your organization’s birth story - and who is Oshun?

Oshun is the “goddess of the sweet waters” -- a cultural icon and spiritual guide representing abundance, sweetness, and soft power from the Ifa & Yoruba tradition originally from Nigeria. Today, Oshun is celebrated with sunflowers, honey, and gold across the Black Diaspora, and has even been illustrated by Beyonce in yellow dresses!

Inspired by research that cross-cultural relationship building could have more lasting effects than implicit bias trainings, Founder & Director Ihotu Ali organized a year of experimental interracial conversations and healing justice training with a collective of community healers, birth workers, and physicians in 2021. The name Oshun Center emerged from Ihotu’s Seven Portal Sky curriculum (healing through 7 African spirits and chakras after the murder of George Floyd) and a desire to balance our advocacy with sweetness, abundance, and connection to Black Indigenous healing traditions. At the end of the experimental year, an opportunity arose unexpectedly to open a physical space at Family Tree Clinic! Ihotu Ali and Malia

Burkhart chose to open this clinic together as the Oshun Center, and in the memory and approach of the People’s Movement Center (a longstanding BIPOC and LGBTQ healing space that closed in 2019), as an affordable incubation space for emerging and expanding practitioners of color.

The Oshun Center logo represents the mango tree at the center of “The Palace” – a communal living compound where Ihotu’s grandfather resided as chief of their small village, Ichama, in Nigeria. For generations, and through colonialism and civil war, this mango tree has provided food and shade from the sun, and people would gather under the tree for conversation, sharing food, dancing and masquerades. When Ihotu visited The Palace, she organized games for children under the tree, and watched her grandfather mediate community conflicts there with his Council of Elders. The Oshun Center logo represents African cultural traditions including harmony with the plant world, steady rootedness even through conflict and injustice, and a long history of feminine spirits, leaders and caretakers (regardless of gender) holding our community together, both day and night.

What services do you offer?

We have five practitioners currently at the clinic (click here for bios), all of whom identify as people of color, and two which identify as non-binary or LGBTQ. All have experience working with and warmly welcome people of color and LGBTQ clients. Depending on which practitioner you choose, we offer: somatic massage; reiki and energy work with crystals; craniosacral therapy; cupping, moxa, and gua sha; myofascial bodywork for healing after birth, abortion, painful periods and endometriosis; scar tissue work after gender-affirming surgery; herbal and flower essences support; nutrition and health coaching; self-care and ecosystem planning; curated naps; platicas (deep heart conversations); grief rituals; integrated traditional Native medicines; and adaptations of ceremonial “closing of the bones” using the client’s own family traditions after birth, miscarriage, abortion or loss.

Each session may focus on physical musculoskeletal complaints, emotional, or spiritual concerns, depending on client preferences and practitioner skill. Several of our practitioners offer therapies taught to us by family or teachers who share our cultural lineage. Several of us have also learned greatly from traditions that are not ours!

We do our best to practice cultural appreciation and not cultural appropriation. We engage in team conversations, skill-sharing, and ongoing study with teachers and elders, to hold our integrity in practicing cultural therapies that are not our own, and on clients that do not share our cultures. We encourage clients to bring in family heirlooms, stories, favorite foods, and meaningful symbols from their own cultures, when (like many of us!) they have been disconnected from their own cultural healing traditions.

Who are your clients and how do they hear about you?

As of November 2022, over 80 clients have joined our ongoing wait list for sessions at the Oshun Center clinic, since our opening in July. Roughly 50% of our clients identify as Black, Indigenous, or people of color and 50% as white. 84% of clients use she/her pronouns, 15% use they/them or she/they pronouns, and 1% use he/him pronouns. 10% of clients are either pregnant or recently postpartum. Our most requested therapies include massage, abdominal care, craniosacral therapy, cupping, and reiki (in order of priority). The vast majority of our clients hear about us via word of mouth; from friends, referrals from doulas, physicians, recommendations on Facebook groups, or from Family Tree Clinic. A small portion have booked appointments after reading our feature in the Minnesota Women’s Press, receiving our e-newsletter, or following us on Instagram.

How does your pricing work?

Unfortunately due to insurance restrictions, many Minnesota massage therapists cannot bill health insurance, and we cannot accept insurance at the Oshun Center. Clients are welcome to pay for sessions with a Health Savings Account (HSA/FSA), but all costs are considered out of pocket.

That said, we work hard to make them affordable! All sessions are available on a sliding scale, pay what you can basis. We do not turn anyone away. We also commit to providing a sustainable livelihood for our practitioners, and have done research on sliding scale pricing to find a sustainable model that resembles the principles of U.S. health insurance -- high paying clients subsidize costs for low paying clients. Depending on the practitioner, our sessions are valued at $150 - $250 at full cost, although you can choose to pay any amount: from full cost, down to $1, with the support of the People’s Fund, Sweet Water Alliance sponsorships, and our Community Bodywork Day fundraisers. About 50% of our clients offer to pay full cost for sessions, and 50% utilize our sliding scale and additional funding sources to support their ongoing care.

What is your long-term vision? Will it be financially sustainable?

Our clinic is meant to be a community accessible space for providing integrative cultural care and accessible training and mentorship for integrative cultural healers.

We are still in our first year of piloting and developing the clinic, and our plan by the end of 2023 is to launch a professional membership for advanced level training and mentoring in integrative cultural care & birth work.

This membership will offer continuing education training grounded in anatomy, research, contraindications and drug interactions, as well as ethical business practices, trauma-informed care, and cultural practices and how to avoid cultural appropriation.

 The program will be open to all, and designed especially for:

1.      Licensed health care workers working within their current scope of practice,

2.      Birth workers seeking to offer massage, nutrition, and cultural wellness support to clients,

3.      Parents wishing to learn bodywork for their children or partners, or individuals looking to expand their self-care practices and tools for their own journeys of healing.

The Oshun Center has already worked with several community organizations for training and health equity consulting, including medical health care systems, chiropractic, acupuncture and massage small businesses, collectives of doulas, midwives, the YMCA, and more. We hope that this professional membership will allow many more organizations to train with us across Minnesota and beyond, and will provide a sustainable revenue flow to support the clinic and our growing team in the years to come.

What are the best ways to support or get involved?

If you have the means to join us as a clinic sponsor at $15 or $35 per month, becoming a Sweet Water Alliance member will have the most positive impact for us. Your contributions offer sustainable support for clinic operations through our first year and allows us to focus on building the integrative cultural care program.

But if funds are tight (and we understand!), there are many other ways to plug in. The best FREE ways to support us and learn more include:

·        signing up to join a Clinic Tour

·        joining our e-newsletter for integrative care tips

·        following us on Instagram and resharing our posts

We also welcome being introduced to new people and spaces – feel free to send our website, social media posts or this document itself to friends, colleagues, funders, organizations, even press editors who might like to connect with us. Thank you for your support!