Issue link: https://www.massageandbodyworkdigital.com/i/841282
A MISSION BORN IN CRISIS The Heart Touch Project is the brainchild of Rolfer and massage therapist Shawnee Isaac Smith, a woman first motivated by seeing her own AIDS-stricken colleague denied therapeutic touch in the throes of his illness in the 1980s. The care she gave to her dying friend when no others would showed her the path she was destined for, and that inspired her in 1986 to open a wellness center that specialized in delivering comforting touch to those aflicted with the disease. It was the height of the epidemic in Southern California, Smith recalls, and medical staff were "going into AIDS patients' rooms wearing spacesuits." Soon, hospices started springing up as a result of the fear toward AIDS patients being treated within the hospitals. "These people were outcasts, even within our own medical system," she says. At the time, people were dying at an alarming rate in the United States and around the world, and health-care practitioners had no idea how the disease was contracted or spread, further fueling the fear. When Smith created The Heart Touch Project nine years later, the nonprofit organization focused solely on individuals with HIV and AIDS. "I wanted to provide touch to those who thought they were untouchable," Smith says. "It was a thought that morphed into an organization." With time, new drug "cocktails" helped HIV- positive patients stave off full-blown AIDS, and survival rates increased exponentially. Hospices were no longer overflowing with AIDS patients, yet The Heart Touch Project had volunteers who still wanted to help. "Our mission had been met in the United States," Smith explains. "The population wasn't needing our services the same way, so our board started looking at other populations that were untouched." As a result, the nonprofit began expanding its efforts beyond AIDS to the elderly, and then eventually hospice patients of all ages. A convergence occurred when Children's Hospital Los Angeles wanted Heart Touch to design a therapeutic massage program for its neonatal and intensive care patients. Smith and her team designed and implemented the program there, and partnered with the hospital on various research projects. Today, The Heart Touch Project brings its expertise to Children's Hospital Los Angeles, Cedars- Sinai Medical Center, Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, and Mattel Children's Hospital UCLA. Still, the full breadth of The Heart Touch Project's potential would not be realized until the nonprofit's efforts began extending beyond its work in the United States. REACHING BEYOND BORDERS The international work of The Heart Touch Project began in 2006 when a group of Thai volunteers asked the organization to help some of their 400,000 AIDS orphans in Thailand. "We went there for two years, and while we were there, amfAR [the Foundation for AIDS Research] contacted us about possibly going to Cambodia," Smith says. "They explained about the stigmatization Cambodia still has with HIV/AIDS and about the orphanage that was taking in these ostracized kids." 66 m a s s a g e & b o d y w o r k j u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 1 7 Shawnee Isaac Smith founded The Heart Touch Project in 1995 to offer touch to "those who thought they were untouchable." Today, the nonprofit works internationally with the same mission, including at the New Hope for Cambodian Children orphanage.