About the Cohort
IHEAL is an Indigenous-led learning cohort rooted at Roots Seattle and offered virtually throughout North America. Together we tend plants, songs, and stories — reclaiming knowledge carried by our ancestors and growing it for the generations ahead.
IHEAL exists to bring Indigenous youth back into active, hands-on relationship with their traditional medicines. In circle with elders, herbalists, and plant kin, cohort members remember how to listen to the land, prepare medicines with care, and offer that care back to their families and community.
Who It's For
Indigenous youth and emerging community members ages 13–25 who want hands-on relationship with plant family, song, ceremony, and one another. All cohorts center safety, accessibility, and cultural integrity.
How IHEAL Serves Our Youth
Reconnection to Traditional Medicine
Cohort members learn directly from Indigenous herbalists, elders, and plant kin — rebuilding relationships to the medicines their ancestors have tended for generations.
Active Care in Practice
Youth move from learning into doing: crafting medicines, tending land, offering care to their families and community, and stewarding relationships with plant family.
Paid Cohort Program
IHEAL is a paid program. Youth are compensated for their learning, creative work, and contributions — because Indigenous knowledge and labor deserve to be honored, not extracted.
Entrepreneurship Skills
Cohorts learn product design, pricing, storytelling, packaging, and small-scale sales — building the confidence and skills to grow their own herbal or creative businesses.
First Job & Leadership Pathway
IHEAL is growing into a first-time job experience for many youth: collaboration, project management, mentoring younger cohorts, and running community offerings together.
What Cohort Members Learn
- Plant identification, ecology, and Indigenous land relationships
- Herbal preparation: teas, salves, elixirs
- Song catching and voice work
- Ancestral skills: weaving, stamp carving, regalia
- Land stewardship & food forest building
- Story sharing, public speaking, and creative leadership
Plant Family Books
The Plant Family book series is created by IHEAL youth — from the songs and stories to the illustrations and recordings. Each book is a living teaching, sharing plant relatives with the next generation in language that's playful, reverent, and rooted.
Each book is written, illustrated, and voiced by our youth cohorts.
Every sale funds the next book — a self-sustaining cycle of creation.
Books are offered to schools, learning centers, families, and libraries.
Free sing-along videos live on our YouTube channel so any child can join in.
Youth-Led Wellness & Learning
IHEAL was created in response to the real mental health needs of young people, especially those who have too often been left out of access to care and support. We center youth-led, culturally rooted spaces where young people can build connection, practice healthy coping, and support one another through healing, creativity, and community care.
Local data shows over one-third (36.4%) of King County youth reported experiencing depression symptoms in 2021. Students who identified as transgender (67.3%), something else (67%), questioning (62.9%), and lesbian, gay, and bisexual (60%) were almost twice as likely as the King County average (34.6%) to experience depressive symptoms. Hispanic/Latino (41.0%) and Multiple Race (40.9%) students also had higher-than-average depression rates.
In response to this data, we are focusing our program on serving the following communities and populations:
LGBTQ+ youth, including transgender and questioning young people
Lesbian, gay, and bisexual youth
Hispanic/Latino youth
Multiple Race youth
Indigenous youth and youth of color
Youth impacted by isolation, disconnection, or inequitable access to care
Outcomes
IHEAL centers youth-led projects that advance innovative and culturally relevant mental health work for their communities. Through this, we hope to see overall increased well-being — with success looking like:
- Increased youth leadership capacity, empowerment, and agency
- Youth knowing where and how to access mental health resources when they need them
- Youth having a better understanding of mental health and well-being
- Reduced mental health stigma for youth
- Youth reporting improved mental health and increased support
- Youth reporting increased connectedness
- Youth having increased knowledge and use of healthy coping strategies
Part of Plant Family App
Heartful Rootz is developing the PlantFamily song coloring book and companion app as a youth-led wellness and learning project that supports mental health, cultural connection, and community belonging. Created with youth and community input, the project uses art, music, plants, language, and storytelling to help young people build healthy coping skills, strengthen identity, and learn in a joyful, culturally grounded way. The work is designed to serve youth most impacted by isolation, disconnection, and inequitable access to healing spaces.
Growing With CollabCafe & HeartfulHome
Our upcoming CollabCafe build and HeartfulHome land purchase will give IHEAL a dedicated home base — expanded kitchens, apothecary and pottery studios, gardens, and gathering spaces. This means more hands-on learning, longer residencies, seasonal camps, and year-long apprenticeships, with space to welcome more youth, families, and visiting cohorts into the work.
