A global dialogue on decolonisation, memory, and regenerative futures.

Global Healing Day is an annual day of reflection, action and connection dedicated to healing across all systems: personal, social, ecological, economic and spiritual. It brings together a decentralised regenerative ecosystem of people and organisations working in synergy to spread global transformation from the inside out. It is not only about healing wounds, but about transforming the conditions that create them.

Starting time: 

• 9:00 am Honolulu, 
• 12 pm Pacific Time
• 1 pm Mexico
• 2:00 pm Bogotá
• 8:00 pm London
• 9:00 pm CEST / SAST
• 7:00 am (Sunday, 26 April), New Zealand

Convened by LCARE Institute in collaboration with Ecocivilisation Movement as part of Global Healing Day 2026

Session Purpose

This session is designed as an international reflective dialogue on healing as a territorial, cultural, relational, and socio-spatial process. It begins from the recognition that trauma is not only carried by individuals or institutions, but also by lands, cities, communities, and territories shaped by dispossession, erasure, violence, fragmentation, and broken relationships with place. Drawing on LCARE’s Soul of the City research approach, the session will explore how storytelling, ritual, memory work, dialogue, Indigenous knowledge, and community-centred practices can contribute to processes of collective repair, reconciliation, and regenerative transformation.  

The intention is not only to exchange ideas, but to create a meeting ground where diverse knowledge traditions and lived experiences can enter into meaningful conversation. The dialogue will invite participants to consider how practices of decolonisation, territorial healing, transformative reparation, and reparative spatial work may be understood and implemented across different cultural, urban, and bioregional contexts. Particular attention will be given to how hidden histories and geo-traumas may be surfaced, how damaged relationships between people and place may be restored, and how communities may reimagine more just, caring, and life-affirming futures.  

Conceptual Orientation

The session is grounded in the understanding that place is not a neutral backdrop to social life, but a living carrier of memory, identity, conflict, belonging, and possibility. It therefore approaches healing as a multidimensional process involving territory, culture, history, embodiment, ecology, and relationship. In line with the LCARE methodology, lived experience and local knowledge are treated not as secondary supplements to formal expertise, but as vital sources of intelligence for regenerative development and deeper forms of urban and territorial sensemaking.  

Indicative Themes for Discussion

The dialogue is expected to engage with the following interconnected themes:

• healing of collective and territorial trauma
• decolonisation and reparative relationships with land and place
• storytelling, ritual, and memory work as practices of repair
• Indigenous and community-based knowledge in healing processes
• socio-spatial injustice, geo-trauma, and territorial repair
• plural epistemologies in the reimagining of cities and communities
• place-based pathways toward reconciliation, belonging, and regeneration

Participants of the session:

The session is intended to bring together a small but diverse international group of contributors from academic, Indigenous, civic, healing, and transdisciplinary research contexts. Potential participants currently being considered include:

• Prof. Catalina Ortiz (Colombia, UK) – is Director of the UCL Urban Laboratory and Professor at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College London. A Colombian urbanist and educator, she is internationally recognised for her work on territorial healing, decolonial urban knowledge, critical urban pedagogy, and knowledge co-production with communities. Her research explores how memory, storytelling, spatial justice, and community-centred practices can help repair the wounds of violence and socio-spatial injustice, and reimagine more just and regenerative relationships with place. 
• Dr Stephanie Mines (Honolulu, Hawaii) – is a neuropsychologist, author, and founder of The TARA Approach for the Resolution of Shock and Trauma. Drawing on more than three decades of work in neuropsychology, embryology-informed trauma research, and healing practice, she has developed an internationally used approach that integrates self-care, nervous system resilience, subtle touch, and trauma resolution. Her work is especially relevant to this dialogue because it brings a deeply embodied understanding of shock, healing, and resilience, while also linking personal recovery with wider collective and planetary processes of regeneration.
• Dr. Arturo Chacón Torres (Mexico City, Mexico) – is biologist, aquatic ecologist, and environmental scholar-practitioner focused on the community based restoration, protection, and regenerative stewardship of natural ecosystems and biocultural territories (Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo). He brings a vital ecological dimension to territorial healing: the understanding that the repair of collective life is inseparable from the recovery of waters, species, landscapes, and the living systems that sustain community, memory, and belonging.
• Nicole Klassen (McGregor, South Africa) – Indigenous healer and systems/family/organisational constellations facilitator working with land, elements, ritual, arts, and ancestral healing; supports people, organisations, and communities to reconnect with body, land, and heritage; host of The Soul Hum podcast.
• Kieran McCarthy (Cork, Ireland) –  is a historian, heritage practitioner, author, and former Lord Mayor of Cork whose work focuses on the cultural memory, historical layers, and lived identity of a place. With a background in Archaeology and Geography and more than 30 published books on Cork and Irish history, he has made a major contribution to public understanding of local heritage through research, writing, and historical walking tours.
• Dr. Wanda Krause (Victoria, Canada) – is Associate Professor and Program Head of Global Leadership at Royal Roads University, Canada. She is a scholar-practitioner whose work spans global leadership, civil society, gender, political transformation, and planetary health. With a PhD in Middle East politics and more than twenty years of international experience, her research has focused on how women, civic actors, and communities contribute to social and political change in challenging and conflict-affected settings. She is the author of Civil Society and Women Activists in the Middle East, a major study of bottom-up democratic agency and women’s activism in Egypt.
• Moderator: Dr. Marina Demchenko (Russia, UK) –  is a researcher of social ecosystems evolution, integral development practitioner, and Research Director of the Living Cities Action Research Ecosystem Institute. With a PhD in Economics and over two decades of experience in public administration, urban transformation, and wellbeing-oriented governance, her work explores how inner human development, culture, values, and relational dynamics shape the wellbeing and regenerative capacity of cities and communities. She is the founder of the INNER KEY methodology and leads LCARE’s Soul of the City research, which uses participatory storytelling and place-based inquiry to surface the deeper cultural, historical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions of territories. 

The gathering will take the form of a global online dialogue with invited contributors. It is envisaged as a reflective and generative conversation rather than a conventional conference panel. The aim is to create sufficient depth for meaningful exchange across disciplines, cultures, and knowledge traditions, while also identifying shared patterns, tensions, and practical implications emerging from the dialogue.  

Research and Publication Outcome

The session will also serve as a research-generating space. Subject to the formal approval of participants, the conversation will be:

• recorded
• transcribed
• developed into a research paper
• considered for inclusion in Soul of the City Book, Volume 2, planned for publication in early 2027

In this way, the session is conceived not only as a one-time exchange, but as part of a longer-term international effort to build a body of knowledge on healing, memory, place, reconciliation, and regenerative transformation.  

Why this session matters

At a time when many societies are facing deep fragmentation, inherited violence, ecological rupture, and crises of belonging, there is an urgent need for approaches that can address not only policy and infrastructure, but also memory, meaning, relationship, and the wounded fabric of place itself. This session seeks to open such a space: one in which different traditions of knowledge and practice can help illuminate pathways toward collective repair and more life-sustaining futures.