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Whether you’re a caregiver, educator, artist, researcher, or funder—we believe your insight belongs in the room where healing gets designed. If you’re ready to partner, collaborate, or just learn more, we’d love to connect.

Together, we can shape the field—and future—of healing.

Healing By Any Means (HBAM) is the home of Narrative Systems Design—a new field where story becomes infrastructure, healing becomes measurable, and care becomes an engine for economic and systemic transformation.

Through our six initiatives—StoryBank™, LitCanon™, LitIndex™, HEALIT™, the Healing Literary Futures Network (HLFN), and the NSD Impact Studio—we build tools, train leaders, and generate real-time insight to design more just, imaginative, and healing-centered futures.

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The Healing Literacy Framework

In 2019, Keith F. Miller, Jr., observed something remarkable while running creative writing after school programs in Savannah, GA: Students from all backgrounds didn’t just step outside their comfort zones—they learned, led, and thrived with unmistakable joy. Despite this, Keith heard from students and families that school, even for the high-achievers, was a place they survived, not thrived. This led Keith, through his studies in Educational Psychology, to explore why young people felt empowered to learn, lead, and heal in some spaces but not in others.

Through a qualitative research study involving interviews with high schoolers, fellow teaching artists over a year, in addition to examining creative works from youth journals and performances, Keith found that when young people engage in arts-based healing practices with trusted others (peers and adults), they don’t just cope with their struggles—they transform them, becoming vibrant leaders in the process.

Drawing inspiration from the process of rainbow formation—reflection, refraction, and dispersion—and building off of groundbreaking research from scholars like David Kirkland, Gholdy Muhammad, Bettina Love, Bianca Baldridge, and Shawn Ginwright, Keith developed the Healing Literacy Framework, illustrating how arts-based, community programs are vital in supporting young people as they overcome educational trauma, and, in doing so, can result in transformative partnerships in school and beyond that prove healing is possible for everyone.

Enter, HEALIT

In 2019, Keith F. Miller, Jr., observed something remarkable while running creative writing after school programs in Savannah, GA: Students from all backgrounds didn’t just step outside their comfort zones—they learned, led, and thrived with unmistakable joy. Despite this, Keith heard from students and families that school, even for the high-achievers, was a place they survived, not thrived. This led Keith, through his studies in Educational Psychology, to explore why young people felt empowered to learn, lead, and heal in some spaces but not in others.

Through a qualitative research study involving interviews with high schoolers, fellow teaching artists over a year, in addition to examining creative works from youth journals and performances, Keith found that when young people engage in arts-based healing practices with trusted others (peers and adults), they don’t just cope with their struggles—they transform them, becoming vibrant leaders in the process.

Drawing inspiration from the process of rainbow formation—reflection, refraction, and dispersion—and building off of groundbreaking research from scholars like David Kirkland, Gholdy Muhammad, Bettina Love, Bianca Baldridge, and Shawn Ginwright, Keith developed the Healing Literacy Framework, illustrating how arts-based, community programs are vital in supporting young people as they overcome educational trauma, and, in doing so, can result in transformative partnerships in school and beyond that prove healing is possible for everyone.