About Us
Mission
Therapists at Soul Soil Healing aim to partner with clients in healing the soil where their souls are planted and rooted. We provide trauma-informed, decolonial, ecology-informed healing services to diverse communities in the Baltimore, MD area, especially trans/gender-expansive, queer, and LGBIA+ adolescents, adult individuals, couples/polycules & families. Our therapists are sex positive, kink informed and work with people exploring/practicing ethical non-monogamy. Our psychotherapists provide highly skilled therapeutic care guided by curiosity and nonjudgmental compassion. We hope to partner with clients to co-create spaces where we feel able to breathe, explore, question, and heal. Therapy can include learning skills and practices to improve daily functioning alongside long-term relational care to heal from traumatic experiences, build resilience, and cultivate thriving as members of healthy social ecosystems. Together, we can uncover, design, and live into lasting solutions.
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We are a workers-owned cooperative. This means that we are a democratic workplace, and company wealth, decision-making, and responsibility is evenly distributed amongst all worker-owners. We value the development, health, and wellbeing of each of our therapists and staff alongside valuing the therapeutic work that we do. We value navigating interpersonal conflict compassionately and candidly. We value radical authenticity, acceptance, creativity, and cooperation.
Soul Soil Collective
Soul Soil Healing was founded by Dr. Kris Gebhard and Emily Rizzo in 2023 as part of the Soul Soil Collective. Soul Soil Healing’s values align with Soul Soil Collective’s mission of supporting culturally-competent, evidence-based and ecology-informed holistic healing services including therapy, retreats, and other community programming that invite collaborators to deepen their relationships with and learn from local ecology, land, and the more-than-human world. We work in collaboration with Soul Soil Collective Farm to support access to land held in common for collective land-based healing by individuals/groups who face racist, generational, and classist barriers from access to land stewardship, especially Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, and gender and/or sexual minorities.
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Land acknowledgement and pledge of responsibility
Based on a land acknowledgment statement drafted by a Susquehanna and Shawnee elder for the MSAC Land Acknowledgment Project, as well as information shared by Piscataway Indian Nation tribal consultants with the MSAC Land Acknowledgment Project.
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We acknowledge that the places today known as Baltimore City and Baltimore County, Harford County, and Cecil County exist as the result of duress. In 1652, Susquehannock leaders unwillingly transferred these lands to the English in an unsuccessful effort to stop English settlers encroaching up the Susquehanna River. We acknowledge that these places and their Indigenous inhabitants exist without rigid political borders and boundaries maintained by settlers and settler governments. The Piscataway Indian Nation also has a long history in this area and continues to maintain a relationship with the lands surrounding Baltimore. Along with the Piscataway Conoy Tribe, the Piscataway Indian Nation received recognition by the State of Maryland in 2012.
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We acknowledge the social, physical, spiritual, and kinship relationships this land continues to share with Indigenous nations of the Susquehanna River and Chesapeake Bay; we acknowledge that these relationships have been displaced, damaged, and dispelled by colonists’ insatiable thirst for acquisition and domination. We acknowledge a place out of balance with its true purpose in being. We acknowledge our occupation of Susquehannock and Picataway lands. We acknowledge the continuing presence of Indigenous nations, and the shelter and nourishment that this place continues to provide all Native peoples who live here today. We acknowledge our responsibility to Indigenous nations to repair unhealthy relationships and to steward all life. When Soul Soil Collective is able to buy legal access to land, we will provide material reparations to Native peoples who have been displaced from that land via land tax. We will pursue epistemic and environmental justice -- seeking to center relationally-based and Indigenous knowledge and life ways that have been suppressed through colonial capitalism -- through consensual reparative relationships with local Indigenous organizations and groups.
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