Jubilee Healing Farm plants a seed within students, patients and in the ground to heal and grow.
Peer Outdoor Education for Mental Health (POEM) is a training program for students with lived experiences of mental illness or substance use disorder to be state-certified peer support specialists. The program utilizes the 10 acres of land that Jubilee offers as the farm combines a clinical setting and the environment to improve the quality of care that people can receive.
“I just was struck by this dream of being able to provide behavioral health care in a farm-based setting that would be a much more collaborative and integrative experience than health care as usual, and that would build community for people in a way that was healthy and sustainable,” Nora Dennis, Jubilee's founder, said.
As a non-profit organization, the board members and Dennis seek to create the next generation of healers and mentors with POEM starting in 2025.
Heather Kouros is a state-certified peer support specialist, and she works on the farm's clinical side. She struggled with a substance use disorder which can alter the way the brain functions.
Kouros went through many therapies and a 12-step program, and at 36 years old she is doing better. In January, she came across the job listing for a peer support specialist at Jubliee Healing Farm. Excited, she earned the position officially in June after 75 collective hours of training.
“I always tell people it makes sense that you're experiencing what you're experiencing,” Kouros said “Given the life circumstances that you've been through, you couldn't be experiencing anything else. And there's a lot of validation that I wish that I had received when I was younger.”
Similarly, POEM seeks to equip undergraduate, graduate and community college students with the skills to help and heal in whichever job they choose to do. Dennis viewed statistics from UNC which showed that Black and multiracial students lacked mental health care while having higher rates of mental illness on average. So, POEM is specifically open to people of color and Black and Indigenous people to address the disparities and extend care to more people.
The training is not just standard state-certification protocol — POEM will infuse non-western and non-biomedicinal standards with the training. An ancestral healing workshop for example is a practice they already utilize clinically. It involves a type of meditation or inner focus that allows people to connect with loved ones in a way that Dennis said is “deep remembering.”
