Healing Our Connections, Healing Ourselves
(the HCHO Project) was founded by
Barbara Allys Brandt,

a lifelong social change activist and organizer, as well as an author, educator, public speaker, and energy healer whose work integrates personal, social, cultural, economic, environmental, and spiritual well-being, healing, and transformation. She currently directs HCHO's activities; is completing our keynote publication Healing Our Social Brain: The Neuroscience of Stress, Social Disconnection, and how Personal and Social Healing can restore our Loving Connections; and she offers presentations, workshops, and educational programs about “Social Brain Healing” and “The Neuroscience of Transformative Personal Healing and Social Change” for groups and organizations of all sizes.

Barbara's vision for Transformative Inner-Outer Well-Being and Social Brain Healing was inspired by her extensive experience as an activist in many aspects of personal, social, cultural, economic, environmental, and spiritual change and transformation.

Barbara's experiences in the 1960s Southern civil rights movement are described in her chapter “We weren't the bad guys,” pp. 427-435 in Faith S. Holsaert et al., eds., Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2010). As a graduate student in sociology, she and Gordon Fellman co-authored The Deceived Majority: Politics and Protest in Middle America (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1973), about the differences between working-class and upper-middle class activism.

In the 1970s she founded the urban community gardening program in her new hometown of Somerville, Massachusetts, a working-class city next to Boston; and worked with the national group Environmentalists for Full Employment, which sought to create new jobs through renewable energy technologies. In the 1980s she founded and for six years was Executive Director of the Urban Solar Energy Association, an award-winning grassroots group with hundreds of members, which sponsored volunteer “solar barnraisings” of low-cost solar porches, greenhouses, and air-heating collectors on urban dwellings throughout the Boston area.

In 1988 and 1990 she helped organize “The Other Economic Summit-North America” in Toronto and Houston (two international conferences on the new economics). This inspired her to write Whole Life Economics: Revaluing Daily Life (Philadelphia, PA: New Society Publishers, 1995), about the emergence of a more humane, democratic, feminist, socially and environmentally responsible economics; this book made her an internationally recognized authority on the new economics, and she has given over a hundred presentations about the new economics in the USA, Canada, and Europe.

During the 1990s and 2000s she was a staffperson for the Shorter Work-Time Group and Take Back Your Time, advocating for our right to have more time for personal, family, and community life (see her chapter “An Issue for Everybody,” pp. 12-19 in John de Graaf, ed., Take Back Your Time: Fighting Overwork and Time Poverty in America, San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2003). Since the 1970s Barbara has also taught spiritually-inspired women's dance and founded “The Goddess Dancing” collective, helping her students integrate body, mind, and spirit through dance and movement. She has also studied and practices many types of energy healing.