ABOUT Heal AuRt
Heal Aurt is a 501(c)3 non profit organization focussing on healing humanity through Arts, Education, Practical Work & Community Well-Being. Based in collaboration hubs in Los Angeles, CA, Loveland, CO, & Detroit, MI, Heal Aurt empowers 1. Living Art Research 2. Making Culture Accesible through partnerships, classes, workshops 3. Therapeutic Experiences through the arts and collaborations
Originally founded as Circles For A Renewal of Culture, born of the collaborative impulses and individuals of Elderberries Threefold Cafe in Hollywood, the non-profit was founded in 2019 to serve as an umbrella organization for the various initiatives and support networks weaving through the Elderberries community.
Frank Aleph Agrama, Heal Aurt’s co-founder, carries the organization into its new form in collaboration with Zuri Agrama, deepening the focus on artistic impulses and partnerships since the transition from the Elderberries nexus in 2023. We are supported by additional board members, Ari Silberman, Soma Baker and Martin Summer! Thank You
Heal Aurt’s Renewal:
looking back on 2025, looking forward to 2026
By Frank Aleph Agrama, co-founder / president
This past year, Heal Aurt has made the first steps into establishing itself as a renewed impulse. We are with a field of new sprouts after a tough transition in processing our life cycle, as the “expansive artichoke” that was Circles for a Renewal of Culture. We had to turn the fields of our activity, sort and reset, so to sew and tend what was still our true work, given that we no longer followed the visionary collaborative innovations of Dorothy Zold and the plethora of productive pioneering partnerships which gave birth to “Circles” in the first place. This process of distillation gave us many new challenges, which we are still learning through. The turning of this new leaf comes with the task of reestablishing relationships, releasing partnerships we could no longer maintain, and reaching for a new guiding star.
The places we work, the new projects, in many ways are seeds planted through the Elderberries and Circles journey. The renewed essence is now streaming from the name we changed to: “Heal Aurt”. Art is gold, as we learn how to create with the world, and heal creativity itself, through humanness. Art holds the gold, so we took Au, and placed it as a beacon in our healing journey. You will also find in our new logo, the golden radish, which historically was an offering to Apollo. We bring this as a root to the knowledge of Art as sacred, and as a root vegetable in the Earth that inspires, brings health and connects! Thus our work seeks to emphasize a Spirit Conscious – Earth Conscious – Soul Conscious, humanizing modality; building relationships through “the Arts” for creative-communal activation.
For 2025 we had three projects in three places, which stand as sprouts of renewal and deepening. First was supporting the creative healing work of Emergency Trauma Pedagogy Without Borders, at our home base in Los Angeles, after the fires. We co-organized and led therapeutic creative sessions around the city with a large group of Waldorf educators. This was a tragic homecoming for our impulse, but was a fortuitous link with our prior work, that we were grateful to weave relationships and service through. The fire asks the city, in my eyes, “Can you create healing now? Can you find the heart of what everyone came here for? This city of Angels, and take a step closer to living that? This task, of how L.A. can reconnect, integrate and generate a healing creative impact, is the essence of our guiding star over this place. While we don’t foresee formal collaboration with the work of Emergency Trauma Pedagogy Without Borders as a pillar of our task, it gifted us a doorway back into activity with the city in an earnest way, in line with our dreams.
Second, now to Loveland Colorado, for our ongoing partnership with The Cresset Center, a marriage really. On the historic Henry H. Uhrich Farm we hosted our first Art and Music Festival, around the Solstice of Summer, “Love the Sun”. This festival marks the commitment to support this farm’s mission, to become a refuge and sanctuary for agriculture, ecology and the arts. Heal Aurt is working as a co-organizer, facilitator and sponsor of the Love the Sun Festival, in the becoming of the farm as a cultural learning center. We set a firm foundation for this event to both grow and deepen, forming connection with local businesses, schools, creators, crafters, artists and musicians. The infrastructure is there for this festival to serve in growing community around the farm, and connecting people with the Earth, creativity, and each other. We had music from around the world, water play wonders for families, T-shirt painting, food and drink vendors, and a “Love the Sun” nature-co-creative-art-walk with intentions to carry, “What are you re-committing to love?” We look forward to walking this festival forwards with the partners and new possibilities germinating for 2026.
Third, we returned to the consecrated grounds of Detroit, for the Summer programs of the Brightmoor Makers and Sunbridge International Collaborative. This is another vital partnership forged through Elderberries’ “How We Will Forum” over the last decade. Our work in Detroit includes hosting co-creative learning in artistic, craft, and earth-shaping, with the Brightmoor Makers and the Sunbridge Community Healing Park, adjacent to the Maker Space. As a gesture of uplifting and making their work visible, the “forum” gesture has metamorphosed into “Maker Fest”. We support the youth standing in their transformative work, selling their creative empowerment crafts, and growing into hosts and facilitators themselves as we ring this community oriented celebration in the park to life. 2025 was our 2nd year doing Maker Fest, and in doing so, we take steps in how we can grow, what new visions want to emerge, and what questions are guiding the next year’s efforts.
We were honored to partner with the North American Youth Section as well, as several Brightmoor Makers travelled to upstate New York to share their “Shadow Puppet Theater Story” with Dream Awake, and meet 150 other young creative people from around the world at “The Light Between: Questions, Craft, Community” in Harlemville, New York.
There is much to so say about 2026 here as well, essentially in the gesture of deepening, reconnecting, and inviting new possibilities. In terms of deepening, reconnecting, and inviting, Maker Fest 2025 brought forth a Peace Pond to the park, full of plants, fish, stones and solar pumps. Some of the fish were real, and some were painted to decorate the park, and a special school of tiny fish were made with love and gratitude to send to those friends who sent funds to make the Maker Fest 2025 possible, as well as to the panelists of our Community Conversation on “The Spirit of Love”.
Looking towards the coming year, Heal Aurt is carrying three primary impulses with flagstone events to support them. The year begins with the synergistic impulse of Saguaro in Los Angeles. Saguaro is now, the weaving of arts of sound, light, and movement, in support of a story told. It is a story about nature and spirit, the unknown and the renewed. Saguaro is our living – arts – cinema, towards a therapeutically inspired theater. Saguaro is the name of the Sonoran desert’s archetypal cactus, who is the story’s hero and inspiration. We bring this project to life as artistic therapeutic research. We seek to bring artists together in the spirit of discovery, that social arts and environmental – ecological arts amplify and ground the immersive experience, for a theatrical and practical building of holistic community in Los Angeles. Eurythmy is also a leading inspiration for this healing-oriented performance. We look forward to developing the work through winter and sharing at the end of March with the public, with in person workshops around the performances.
We will carry this creative thrust into the Ecological “call to heart” that is Love the Sun: Art and Music Festival 2026. This will be year two of our community-building festival, seeking to empower the agricultural heritage of the front range (Loveland, Johnstown, CO) as land and farming become more dependent on creative forms of advocacy. We see tremendous potential to inspire both local and global practices, as we partner with the Cresset Center and the historic Uhrich Farm, to model how culture can thrive through farm contexts and give life in return to these beautiful learning centers. This festival happens on the summer solstice, honoring the timeless practice of “Loving the Sun” in the name of humanity learning to commit ever again to the gentle steady sure path of the loving heart. We also hope this year we can empower the Anthroposophical artistic community through the Festival, as a gathering point and sharing venue.
From the heights of summer we will move eastward to our ongoing partnership with Detroit’s Brightmoor Makers and the Sunbridge International Collaborative. Together we will do our best to honor the legacy of the Earth Healing Social Artist Johannes Matthiessen. Johannes’s work activated the healing transformative imaginations in practical co-creative way with young people all around the world, including in Brightmoor, Detroit. Heal Aurt will be supporting the Maker’s summer works, and co-hosting the emergent Brightmoor Maker Fest 2026, in tandem with local colleagues, organizations, as well as other visiting co-workers seeking to deepen their practical-social-artistic capacities in service to community healing and relationship. This is the third consecutive Maker Fest in Brightmoor, and as welcome guests since beginning our collaborative visits in 2020, we hope to serve in strengthening local creative connectivity. The Sunbridge Community Healing Park has been our primary focus through out these years, as a place of refuge, reflection, restoration, and rediscovery of wonder. This year’s new work will include stone-sculptural work.
After summer we will weave between the environmental rhythms of nature and spirit back in Colorado, Los Angeles, and hopefully, through Saguaro, onto other cities and states to bring our project into conversation with their creative and environmental questions.
All in all, the work of Heal AuRT seeks to grow in three intersecting means. We want to make cultural experiences accessible for artists and communities by supporting and organizing events between and with artists and communities. We want to do living-artistic research as living artists seeking for healing the arts in an accessible, embodied way; as a path of learning, sharing, deepening. We want to make visible and experiential, the therapeutic capacities of the arts, when they are informed by the healing arts, therapeutic impulses, and support the practical and social approaches and opportunities emerging there-in.
None of this comes into being without the support of our family and friends, who recognize the value of our small sprouts of committed activity. We are lifted into reality by community support. This year’s effectiveness, as a step into becoming, carries questions and uncertainty, but the work is there to do, and we will continue to reach for our guiding stars here on the Earth. Thank You for all your support thus far on the journey, your blessings and attention make “Heal AuRT” real in the world.