ABOUT
Get to Know the Motivations behind Nature’s Healing Spaces
How do we stay healthy, connected, and capable while living through a time of rapid change?
Nature’s Healing Spaces follows that question through research, lived experience, practical knowledge, and relationship with the living world.
What I Learned Firsthand About Life Beyond Institutions
I’m Joy Ellsworth.
My careers in artistic direction and nonprofit leadership took me through an eclectic study of culture, wellness, small farming, and regenerative systems. I believe in the power of community-rooted action, but for years, I also believed that making a meaningful difference required a position inside a strong institution.
Then a workplace injury left me unable to continue in the job I had built my life around. Suddenly, I was outside the institutional path I had counted on, wondering, "How can I still make a good impact on the world if I’m not a fancy director?"
During the years that followed, I did what I could to help people with the vision and drive to benefit their own communities.
I worked alongside grassroots changemakers with lifelong earned wisdom about the people in their home group. I learned from their way of carrying important missions with small budgets and limited staff. I witnessed their extraordinary persistence and remarkable ability to make meaningful progress with whatever they had available.
When I saw the promise of their work battling modern isolation, I realized that digital storytelling might build more chances for connection. Nature’s Healing Spaces grew from that realization.
Why We Make These Videos
At the small "mom and pop" nonprofit organization Clement Waters, we believe that concern for the future should lead somewhere useful. Our souls hurt when we see so many people's worry resulting in exhaustion and despair. We believe in a better way to care.
Through Nature’s Healing Spaces, we investigate questions that matter, follow evidence where it leads, learn from people and places carrying useful knowledge, and look for possibilities that can strengthen real life.
The stories we follow move naturally between the personal, communal, societal, and global, because when one thing changes at any one of those levels, the other levels feel the effects too.
Like the layers of a ball of rubber bands, we know how shifts in the core can effect the outside layers just as much as an impact from the outside can change the direction experienced by the inside.
We've met so many people who realize this. The most empowered ones are seeking their own answers about what they can do next. So that's where we begin. By applying what we know about emerging and historic factors to the real world, we focus on bringing low- and no-cost benefits into people's lives.
We welcome those benefits into our bodies, hearts and minds. We welcome those benefits into food gardens, into neighborhoods, into the lives of our young people and elders, and into forests and streams.
We stick with one underlying purpose: To help people feel less alone, to help them prioritize the very important, and to help them recover their capacity to apply their self-chosen acts of care where they'll genuinely make a difference.
Produced by Clement Waters
Nature’s Healing Spaces is an educational media and community-engagement program produced by Clement Waters, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
Clement Waters works for collective wholesome wellbeing by reconnecting people with the many faces of nature to prevent stress, isolation, and food insecurity before they have a chance to become crises.