The Healing Gap: Bridging Care, Community, and Evidence
Year 1 (2025-26)
by Lianna Tullis-Robinson
A participatory media platform exploring who gets access to healing, whose practices are validated, and how community voices and research can close the gap.
About This Idea
I am building The Healing Gap, a participatory civic dialogue platform that combines community-based storytelling with research-informed studio conversations to examine disparities in access to and definitions of healing.
Across communities, there is a widening healing gap. Many people lack access to care due to cost, geography, cultural exclusion, or systemic inequities. At the same time, culturally rooted healing practices are often dismissed or marginalized, while commercialized wellness trends proliferate without scrutiny. Research findings remain siloed in academic spaces, and misinformation fills the vacuum where trusted, accessible public dialogue is missing.
The problem is not only unequal access to care, but also fragmented understanding. There are few structured, inclusive spaces where lived experience, cultural and spiritual knowledge, and scientific evidence are examined together in ways that are rigorous, respectful, and accessible to the public. As a result, spiritual practices are often dismissed without examination, while uncritical wellness narratives spread without accountability.
The Healing Gap addresses this by creating a multimedia platform that gathers community voices through pop-up story installations and experiential exploration of diverse healing practices. These field experiences feed into studio-based episodes that synthesize themes, clarify evidence, and facilitate dialogue about access, legitimacy, power, and misinformation in modern healing systems.
This project does not simply produce content; it builds civic literacy around wellbeing. By bridging care, community, and evidence, The Healing Gap invites the public into a shared, informed conversation about who gets to heal and how we can close the distance between story and science.
Where Did This Idea Spark at WMU?
This idea sparked during my doctoral training in Counseling Psychology at Western Michigan University. Through coursework in multicultural counseling, research methods, and liberation focused frameworks, I began examining how access, legitimacy, and power shape healing systems. While developing my dissertation on BIPOC perceptions of psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, I saw how community voices are often excluded from conversations that directly affect them. I launched #OurHealingMatters as a grassroots media initiative to interview community members about their everyday healing practices and collective care, conducting live interviews at local festivals and community events and sharing those stories through digital media. The Healing Gap expands that foundation into a larger civic platform that bridges scholarship and community engagement.
Impact in Kalamazoo
If The Healing Gap succeeds in Kalamazoo, residents gain a welcoming public space to explore how healing is practiced and supported in their own neighborhoods. The project will spotlight local businesses, wellness practitioners, artists, and cultural leaders, bringing audiences into their spaces and directing visibility and income toward community based work. Production will prioritize hiring local videographers, editors, designers, and student interns, keeping creative funding within Kalamazoo. By amplifying community needs and lived experience, the platform strengthens public dialogue and supports shifts toward more equitable, health centered systems. The result is both economic circulation and deeper collective wellbeing rooted in local voices and beyond.
How Investment Helps
Funding makes The Healing Gap real in Kalamazoo by supporting the infrastructure needed to move beyond #OurHealingMatters, which has operated through occasional volunteer based interviews and grassroots media storytelling. While that model proved community interest, it remains limited in scale and sustainability without funding. With investment, I can secure professional equipment, production support, and on camera presentation resources to ensure high quality, accessible storytelling. Funding allows for consistent field and studio episodes while compensating community collaborators fairly. This includes hiring local videographers, editors, designers, and student interns, building a mobile Pop Up Healing Lab for festivals and neighborhood spaces, and supporting marketing to reach broader audiences. The first milestone will be a pilot cycle of two Pop Up Healing Labs and three completed episodes, culminating in a public screening and civic dialogue event to shape a full season.
What I'll Do With the Money
Production and Creative Team – $35,000
Hire local videographers, editors, sound technicians, designers, and provide professional production and on camera presentation support to ensure high quality, accessible storytelling.
Community Engagement and Pop Up Healing Labs – $25,000
Design and build a mobile Healing Lab installation, secure event spaces, compensate community participants when appropriate, and support travel and local activation costs.
Project Leadership and Executive Production – $25,000
Support creative direction, research synthesis, hosting, partnership development, and full project management to ensure consistent delivery and long term sustainability.
Marketing and Distribution – $15,000
Develop branding, promotional materials, digital strategy, and community outreach to expand reach across Kalamazoo and position the platform for growth.
About the Founder
I am a doctoral candidate in Counseling Psychology at Western Michigan University and a trailblazer at heart, among the first in my program to center a dissertation on psychedelic therapy. I am endlessly curious about wellbeing and the many ways communities practice healing. My work explores collectivism as an ethical foundation for care, where healing is not owned but shared.