Organizational meeting to be held next week

A group of Highlands residents who want to make massage, acupuncture, homeopathy, energy work and other techniques available to people who can’t consistently afford them will meet next week to plan three “community holistic healing days.”

The Hudson Valley Healing Project is planning four-hour events at the Beacon Recreation Center for March 12, April 14 and May 14. A team of practitioners will donate their time; medical advisors will be available, as well. Participants will be asked to pay what they can, but no one will be turned away.

An organizational meeting will be held at 6 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 13, also at the Recreation Center, 23 W. Center St., where attendees will have a chance to ask questions and to meet the practitioners.

Mariel Sol Nathan, a former Beacon resident now living in Newburgh, is one of the organizers. She says she is convinced of the efficacy of alternative healing but that many people “need to have a budget to take advantage of these modalities consistently. That can end up being something some people cannot do, and that felt unfair.”

She began assembling a team of volunteers and practitioners last year using  Holistic Health Community, an Ulster County nonprofit, as a model. “It was immensely helpful not to have to reinvent the wheel,” she says. Meeting with the staff at HHC “started to shift my thinking from having just one event to creating an ongoing project.”

Fareground, the nonprofit that maintains Beacon’s Tiny Food Pantries, has stepped in as a sponsor, and, if all goes well, the Healing Project hopes to eventually offer a free, hot meal before or after the sessions.

Behind The Story

Type: News

News: Based on facts, either observed and verified directly by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources.

Simms has covered Beacon for The Current since 2015. He studied journalism at Appalachian State University and has reported for newspapers in North Carolina and Maryland. Location: Beacon. Languages: English. Area of expertise: Beacon politics