“Instead of dying today, I made a new song.”
Those words, spoken by a student featured in the Our Words Heal campaign’s promotional video, set the tone Tuesday morning at ZuCot Gallery, where community leaders, artists, and organizations gathered to launch a public engagement campaign aimed at shifting how Atlanta confronts trauma, violence, and healing.
Our Words Heal Atlanta, a campaign advancing trauma healing and promoting health equity and racial justice, held its official launch event on June 9 at ZuCot Gallery, just days before the FIFA World Cup brings a global spotlight to the city.
“Atlanta is a city with a rich legacy of social change and community leadership,” said Dr. Charles Moore, a physician, professor at Emory University School of Medicine, director of its Urban Health Initiative, and a founder of Strategies for Just Communities, the nonprofit behind the campaign. “This is a city where ordinary people come together to accomplish extraordinary things. It’s a city that helped shape the civil rights movement and demonstrated to the nation the power of collective action, collective courage, and hope.”
The campaign is led by Strategies for Just Communities, a collaborative founded by recognized pioneers in trauma healing, Drs. Ted Corbin, Moore, and John Rich. Originally co-designed by young people and community partners in Philadelphia, the campaign has expanded to Atlanta, with Chicago potentially as its next target city.
Through digital storytelling, social media, community conversations, art, and shared experiences, Our Words Heal seeks to move communities away from silence, stigma, and punishment as responses to trauma and toward understanding, collective action, and healing.
“Our words heal were born from a simple but profound belief that words matter,” Moore said. “The stories we tell about ourselves, our neighbors, and our communities matter. Too often, communities that experience trauma are defined by statistics, deficits, or headlines that focus only on pain and suffering, but that is not the full story. The full story includes resilience. The full story includes creativity. The full story includes love, hope, and healing.”
The launch event was held at ZuCot Gallery, one of Atlanta’s Black-owned art spaces. Onaje Henderson, co-founder at ZuCot, said the partnership was a natural one.
“The idea of being a precedent for young people, and also being a place where people can feel safe and come to enjoy themselves, our goal is to tell our stories through work,” Henderson said. “He’s telling our stories and changing, transforming lives through the work that they do.”
The event featured remarks and healing art from several community organizations, including Gangstas to Growers, Notes for Notes, artist Demetri Burke, and Leroy Ellis.
Burke, whose work was featured as part of the campaign, described his piece “Real Life and Shift” as a meditation on confidence amid adversity, inspired by a gospel song of the same name.
“What this piece wants to communicate is to keep pushing, to keep going on, even when it seems like things won’t work out for you,” Burke said. “How can artwork, how can being creative, cope with that sense of healing, that sense of grounding?”
Abby Henderson, founder of Gangstas to Growers, used her remarks to connect the campaign’s mission to deeper structural realities facing Black communities, calling for solutions that extend beyond individual healing.
“We’re pouring into the young people so they have the tools and the inner strength and power to actually change their condition and teach others how they can change their condition,” Henderson said.
Campaign partners include Benjamin E. Mays High School, Circle of Safety, Compassion Center of Georgia, Mighty Engine, Mothers Against Gang Violence, Notes for Notes, Radical Optimist Collective, and Walk With a Doc, among others.
Moore said he hopes the launch marks the beginning of an ongoing movement.
“I hope that this is just the start of multiple conversations, multiple ways that people come together,” he said. “Collectively coming together to address issues that are important to us, so that we can reduce violence, we can help folks move forward and intervene.”
Dr. Belinda Douglas of the Compassion Center of Georgia, when speaking to attendees, left a charge to those assembled, encapsulating the campaign succinctly.
“Our words heal,” Douglas said. “Let’s dedicate this practice today for those who are in need of these words.”
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