6th Annual CAM™ & Red Sands Event
Coming Together for Community Grieving & Healing
Dates Leading Up to Our Event
Join us anyway you can! We are here to call-in our survivors, helpers, healers, and community protectors to make this time for you to fill your heart, mind, body, and spirit with good energy.
Kendra Scott Jewelry Fundraiser
Jewelry maker Kendra Scott will donate 20% of sales on any Kendra Scott items purchased with the code GIVEBACK-CVCDQ to Milwaukee-based nonprofit HIR Wellness on November 5 & 6 2022. Additionally, the company invited the HIR Wellness team to create a signature line of custom jewelry that was inspired by the resilience and healing power of the survivors that HIR Wellness serves. To learn more about our jewelry designs and how to order them please visit our Kendra Scott page here.
Time: November 5 + 6, 2022
Location: In-person or online at Kendra Scott
City Wide Red Sands Pouring
Join us in the pouring red sands as part of our 6th Annual CAM™ and Red Sands event. To mark the occasion we ask you to join us in raising awareness, visibility, and social justice around the chronic and systemic impact of MMIWR.
To participate:
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Please reach out to us to arrange a pick up or drop off of a Red Sands packet.
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Once you receive a the red sand packet record yourself (or take a photo) silently pouring the red sand into cracked concrete to symbolize your commitment to raising awareness and not letting Indigenous people fall through the cracks in our systems.
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After you’ve finished, please send video or photos to Jamie Kellicut at JKellicut@HIRWellness.org to be used in a virtual art installation.
Learn more about the Red Sands Project here.
Time: From now until November 12, 2022
Location: Where you choose to make the commitment.
6th Annual CAM™ and Red Sands Event
As a survivor and women-led matriarchal organization we hold space for our communities to gather. We hope you will join us to gather for grieving, honoring, remembering, and healing as a community.
We will have Indigenous speakers, a talking circle, vigil walk with a memorial area of our sisters and relatives who have been taken too soon. There will be a fire going, songs, ceremony, and prayer. We will have our Mental Health Without Borders™ CAMPsite™ team onsite to provide immediate grief and emotional support.
Together we grieve, honor, and heal for our ancestors, people, and our future generations.
Join us in-person or virtual on Facebook LIVE @HIRWellnessInstitute
Time: 1:00 - 4:00 PM CST
Location: Virtual or University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Fire Circle in front of Merrill Hall, 2512 E. Hartford Ave., Milwaukee WI 53211
In partnership with
Countdown to our 2022 6th Annual Event
MANA NOW Fundraiser
Maile's Achievement Nourishing Ambition (MANA) Network of Women (NOW)
Join us for a night of sisterhood and wellness as we raise money for our HIR Wellness Institute’s 2022 MANA NOW Award. Learn more here
Time: 5:00 - 8:00 PM CST
Location: Virtual or Bloom Spa, 719A S 5th St. Milwaukee, WI
In partnership with Bloom Spa
Calling In our Relatives to Heal
At our CAM™ and Red Sands event we focus on addressing the vicarious trauma, secondary trauma, toxic stress, and moral injury that occurs when personal healing intersects community loss and grieving. We are calling you into our Circle of Care™ - it's your time to be supported in community care. We hold this event to be with our relatives, community helpers, and community healers as they stand on the frontlines of MMIWR activism, advocacy, and outreach. If you are not doing well the energy and intention that you bring to your spaces will drain you vs. feed you. This can leave you fatigued, anxious, and unrested. At these events we want to help your wellness so you can be hopeful, inspiring, and innovating for long-lasting change.
We will have Indigenous speakers, a talking circle, vigil walk with a memorial area of our sisters and relatives who have been taken too soon. There will be a fire going, songs, ceremony, and prayer. We will have our Mental Health Without Borders™ CAMPsite™ team onsite to provide immediate grief and emotional support.
We are a survivor and women-led matriarchal organization. We hold space for our communities to gather to grieve, honor, remember, and heal as a community. Creating safe spaces doesn't mean discomfort, dis-ease, or disagreements won't happen. It means learning to work through these feelings with others as we build trust, vulnerability, and reciprocity. Join us and explore ways to heal your inner world. Together we grieve, honor, and heal for our ancestors, people, and our future generations.
"Safety is not the absence of threat, it is the presence of connection"
- Gabor Mate
HIR Story: A Call to Action
Our first CAM™ & Red Sands Missing and Murdered Indigenous Woman and Relatives (MMIWR) event was in 2017 and envisioned by HIR Wellness Founder & CEO Lea S. Denny. Denny recognized the complex loss and grief. She recognized the impacts of MMIWR, suicide, homicide, overdose and their connection to historical trauma. She felt that to heal, not only do we need awareness and advocacy for the victims, we also need a way for our communities to grieve and heal. From this she developed and coined the term Community Activated Medicine™ (CAM™). The heart-work of CAM™ is "Inform to activate healing" and "the people are the medicine".
The CAM™ & Red Sands event was a call-to-action around the epidemic of MMIWR. This event was for collective grieving and community healing. It was Denny's belief that when we come together we can address the individuals’ and the community's mental health. The Red Sands Project is an international creative activism earthwork. The project was created to raise awareness, vulnerability, and social justice action around human trafficking. Bridging the concepts of CAM™ & Red Sands Project together created a space for healing the land and the unseen. Today the CAM™ & Red Sands event has grown into an annual event with large gatherings. Every year our relatives intergenerationally come together to practice CAM™ our social justice healing-informed practices.
"In shifting our language to being trauma informed and healing informed, grounded in my research around Indigenous historical and intergenerational trauma, understanding Persistent Toxic Systems and Environments™ (PTSE™), it was evident that we must change our mental health language to decolonize mental health.