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HEALIT™

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What Story is this
System Telling?

If you work hard enough and follow the rules, the system will work for you.

In reality, the education system was never built to recognize harm—only performance. Students who struggle are labeled, not listened to. Educators are asked to push outcomes, not pause for care. And when afterschool programs help young people feel safe or seen, it’s seen as extra—not essential. Healing becomes an accident, not a design. HEALIT™ challenges that design—by proving that healing isn’t a bonus. It’s the foundation.

Why Has the System Been Built This Way?

Because a system built to sort and manage never needed to see every student’s brilliance.

Educational trauma is mislabeled as disorder or disinterest. Healing is outsourced, care is unsupported, and those closest to the solution are kept furthest from the system. HEALIT™ changes that. No more leaving healing to chance, we’re designing it into the infrastructure itself. Through tools like the Educational Trauma Scale and Healing Archetypes, we’re reclaiming futures, restoring knowledge, and reimagining ecosystems of care. 

What Are We Building Instead?

A national initiative to name, measure, and transform educational trauma, healing by design.

Through HEALIT™, we are introducing a healing-centered ecosystem that treats care as infrastructure and brilliance—and we’re starting by creating digital tools we’ve always needed with partners across the education ecosystem: the Educational Trauma Scale, Healing Archetypes, and platforms that bridge learners across K-12 schools, OST organizations, and higher education institutions so communities and learners of all ages can benefit, together.  

Our Blueprint in Action:

Here’s how we activate the HEALIT™ vision—through research, campaigns, and tools that center healing as the engine of educational transformation.

Narrative Campaigns on Educational Trauma

Storytelling initiatives that elevate the lived experiences of students, educators, caregivers, and youth workers—naming both the harm and the hope in pursuit of healing-centered education.

Healing Literacy Research Collaboratives

We partner with institutions and lived experts to study healing literacies, building a new field of inquiry that treats story not just as insight—but as intervention, infrastructure, and liberation.

Educational Trauma Scale

A nationally validated tool in development to identify harm, track healing, and guide responsive, healing-centered design across schools and programs.

Healing Archetypes

A strengths-based framework helping learners and educators understand their healing styles—supporting reflection, relational alignment, and more culturally grounded care.

Landscape Review + Field Reframing

A landmark literature review in development redefining “educational trauma” and offering a new framework to shape future research, policy, and investment in healing-centered education.

HEALIT Ecosystem Navigator (Digital Platform)

A digital tool in development to map and connect the full ecosystem surrounding learners in K-12 and post-secondary education, with a particular emphasis on re-engaging adult learners.

A System Designed to Heal

Education systems are built to produce what they prioritize. For too long, that hasn’t been healing. HEALIT™ is changing that—bringing together educators, youth workers, researchers, and communities to build a new foundation: one that treats care as infrastructure and heals by design. 

Build With Us

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.