Do you want to promote reconciliation, healing and community throughout Canada?
Consider developing a Healing Forest in your community – a forest, garden, or green space – dedicated as a place for healing, learning, sharing, and reflection about Canada’s history and the legacy of Indian residential schools.
Advance Truth and Reconciliation
Healing Forests bring people together to reflect on this country's tragic past, and begin taking steps towards a better future together.
Honour Indigenous victims and survivors
Healing Forests are dedicated to the first inhabitants of the land and their descendants.
Spend time in nature
Getting outdoors is good for your health and rekindles love and connection with the planet that sustains us.
Help heal nature and each other
The planet is in trouble, and so are we. It's time to reconnect with our surroundings and each other.
Rekindle love and respect.
For each other.
For nature.
Forests have a healing, spiritual, calming and nurturing effect on people. The National Healing Forests Initiative has inspired the creation of 18 Healing Forests since 2015, with dozens more proposed Healing Forest projects.
Each Healing Forest looks different. Some are within urban parks and beside schools and churches. Others are on private land and remote natural spaces.
Each community decides for themselves what their Healing Forest will look like and how it will function. The only condition is that the forest is created and used in the spirit of reconciliation, healing, shared understanding and respect.