BA and MA in Health Arts and Sciences Programs

Suzanne Richman, MSPH

Program Director, BA and MA in

Health Arts and Sciences Programs

As an inclusive thinker and sensitive perceiver, I conceived and developed the Health Arts and Sciences: Bridging Nature, Culture, and Healing program in 1995 after observing the imaginative work of Goddard learners interested in matters of community health and diverse ways of healing. That early student and faculty work nurtured the vision of Health Arts and Sciences (HAS) and we have since become a vibrant learning community in the years that followed. Learners, including both students and faculty, now explore and assist in strengthening the roots of healing and health on personal, collective, and ecological levels.

 

Always in appreciation of an integral and progressive perspective, I am grateful for the students and faculty members I work among as we aim to create healthy interpersonal and social spaces for our shared work.  We are devoted to an ever deepening commitment to multiple perspectives, from the sacred to the critical.  I love our vision, that personal health, community health, and the health of the natural world are three dimensions of the same whole. Our work is to create sanctuary for the spirit of healing while building diverse structures that support cultures of well-being.

 

Whether exploring comparative healing philosophies--from the spiritual to the indigenous or biomedical--or a particular issue such as global heating or social justice, our students are challenged to gain a contextual awareness regarding the conditions that create health in a particular social and ecological context. They are further guided to strengthen their inner vision, voice, and power so they might create and follow a path with heart as they transform communities and create well-being through their life work and studies.
Whether acting as an advisor or program director, I approach each learner, including faculty members, with a curious appreciation for her or his unique intellectual gifts and creative expression, encouraging both practical and academic study so that scholarship is well grounded in reflection, hands-on experience, and community.

 

Before I became a program director and vision-centered leader I taught at Goddard for well over twenty years. My courses and areas of study included: nutrition; ethnobotany and herbal medicine; community health systems and transformations; women’s health; cross-cultural perspectives in health; social-ecological perspectives on health; and the hand-made world.

 

Ongoing professional hobbies include educational design such as consulting to launch the EcoVersity program for sustainable living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I also facilitated the creation of Goddard’s “Wisdom of the Elders” travel study program in Southern Mexico, and travel study in China. In 2011 I helped launch the “Big Island, Little Planet” travel intensive program in Polynesia.  

 

In my earlier years I taught “Community and Holistic Health” at the Institute for Social Ecology (eight years), consulted for the "Alternative Medicine Task Force" with U.S. Representative Bernard Sanders, and produced audio-visual media on: eco-spiritual renewal (Turtle Island Visions and Soundscape) and the People’s Health and Wellness Clinic in Barre, VT. I was a health educator at the Fort Totten Reservation in North Dakota, the Renz Women’s Prison in central Missouri, and I founded the Community Garden project for low income groups and immigrants in Columbia, Missouri. In one of my fondest memories, I helped sow the seeds for the bioregional movement in North America.
 

The Green Mountain forests in central Vermont have been my home since 1984. In addition to my work at Goddard I currently operate a small scale homestead project called “Community Health and Ecology Network.” My place is crowded with fruit trees and berries, organic gardens, medicinal herbs, flowers, a small vineyard, and I have a medicinal mushroom farmette. My newest installation is a stone meditation garden involving river stones collected throughout Vermont’s watersheds.  I work with federal grants to replant indigenous flora throughout my 18-acre woodland home. I’m inspired these days to study the art of leadership and place-based artistry.  Between Goddard, the homestead and critters, gardens, and mothering a 14 year-old son, life is full.

 

Educational Background: MSPH in Public Health, School of Medicine, University of Missouri; BA in Environmental Studies and Community Health, University of Missouri.

 

 

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