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On One Year of Co-Creating Sanctuary Together in Our New Quadra Village Home

ByHealth Collective

Heart & Hands, Green Muse Herbs & Otherways Creative at the 2025 Oaklands Queer & Trans Farmers Market

Well, as life does when you’re busy making plans, it happened! Not only have we passed the 1 year mark of our Quadra Village lease – 14 months to be exact – but we also passed our 1st anniversary of reopening in our new collaborative space, in the blink of an eye!!

This is a reflection of the past year from the perspectives of both Heart & Hands and our sister biz, Green Muse Herbs. Taking stock of the time that has just flown by and its respective successes and setbacks helps to inform us in the variety of ways we hope to move forward.

Lastly, we would just like to say on behalf of both Green Muse Herbs and Heart & Hands Health Collective, thank you for co-creating this shared inner city sanctuary with us. We look forward to growing together toward a more caring future in the years to come.

Christina, Anna & the rest of the team at 2612 Quadra St.

On the year past + the year ahead…a few words from Green Muse Herbs

This past year saw us reconnecting with long-standing regulars, meeting more of the Heart & Hands community, and getting to know our new neighbours. It’s been so wonderful being a part of your days… seeing you pick up your groceries from Medhat at the halal butcher next door or Damascus market a little further down… seeing you pop into Camas Infoshop two doors down for a new book or art print for your bedroom wall…seeing you visit the nearby People’s Apothecary garden to sit with a plant friend or pull a few plant oracle cards… seeing you catch a matinee at the Roxy across the street…

…and then seeing you walk into our own shared space for some digestive bitters, a grief support tea, or an infused oil to give your insomniac partner a foot rub before bed. Seeing you post-acu, herbs in hand, leaving our shared space more resourced, more rested than before… makes this deeply satisfying work. 

Anna Jacquet, Practicing Herbalist, Owner/Operator

Here are some of the ways we are working with / learning from the plants; to strengthen our web of care, to redistribute nutrients such as $ + medicine, and to pay holy attention to this moment in time:

  • The increased fees at the border have found us further investing in direct relationships with medicine farmers, devotional gardeners, land stewards, practicing herbalists, + medicine-makers. We sent in larger pre-orders with our farm partners this year than ever before, placed multiple orders with two new farm partners run by longtime practicing herbalists, met with organic vegetable farmers looking to transition to regenerative herb farming, and brought in new herbal remedies handmade by incredibly skilled queer herbalists who also source their herbs directly from the folks who tend to them.
  • Since our apothecary is now overflowing with medicine, specifically fresh herb farm-direct extracts, we are having a sale!! All of our organic dried herb tinctures (any of those amber dropper bottles without a green dot sticker on them) are buy 2, get 1 free. Please, please help us make space for these new extracts by stocking your home medicine cabinets and sending us your friends/enemies/ lovers/coworkers too for 30+% off tinctures!
  • Once we’ve cleared some shelf space and found loving homes for the majority of our remaining organic dried herb tinctures, we will be introducing new house tincture blends, as well as the largest selection of farm-direct alcohol-free remedies this city has likely ever seen!! They will also be adorned in new compostable labels with plant spirit artwork by local artist Taylor Pannell (@always.underwater) featuring another local beloved, ȾOQI / Swamp Lantern / Skunk Cabbage.
  • While on the subject of artwork, we now also carry Taylor’s art prints with plant stickers on the way soon! Check out our art section, above the small press + plant oracle shelf, for works by local plant-loving artists such as Sarah Jim, Taylor Panell, Macabre Beetle, Delicate Realms, and more.
  • This past year also saw us launch our first book club: Layla Feghali’s The Land In Our Bones, explored chapter-by-chapter with host Safiya Hopfe. We also held a workshop on flower essences with Alexis Hennig, the herbalist & medicine-maker behind Wild Water Botanicals. Curious about future plant learning opportunities? Leave your email with us at the counter and we’ll add you to the mailing list.
  • If you are interested in flower essences, but missed the workshop, check out our new flower essence shelf above the hand-rolled incense cones + saining wands! Flower essences can be a subtly powerful, less extractive, safe(r) way to work with plants and we are thrilled to continue making them available.
  • Over the past year we have redistributed three car loads of warm clothing, snacks, + herbal medicines to Qom Qem Coastal Connections and the free herbal clinic organized by Dallas Killian-Arrowood out of the Victoria Cool Aid Society. We’ve also expanded our mutual aid section to include art prints, local poetry, clothing, and more, whilst fundraising for mutual aid initiatives such as Intimate Access, Gaza Mutual Aid Solidarity, the Abortion Support Collective, & the Rematriate Stewardship Project. We’re also selling wzrd. bikes art prints to raise funds for Emma’s gender affirming surgery!

This past year has been a whirlwind at Heart & Hands and we continue to evolve and grow

On July 15th, 2024 we reopened for operations at 2612 Quadra St. following a wild ride of never-ending renos, being jerked around by the City permits department and having our big beautiful windows senselessly smashed. Despite all the stress and chaos it was worth it in the end being able to settle into a culturally diverse and working class neighbourhood, which better aligns with our mission and principles. The Heart & Hands team was chomping at the bit to get back to what we do best – providing accessible, traditional health care for our working class community.

We were also excited to unveil our larger, welcoming, resource-filled third space – a place that is regularly frequented, but is neither entirely a workplace nor a place of leisure, but a unique space in between; a gathering place for working class folks to access various forms of care. Heart & Hands is made up of the attributes and actions that cultivate collective thinking and social change. As a community space it provides respite, eases physical-emotional-spiritual suffering, decreases social isolation, supports intentional rest and is something larger than ourselves.

For the past year we have been fine tuning our systems and policies so our space can run in a manner that is adaptable to a wide variety of needs, maintains public health, and operates efficiently and safely. We have also been gradually and intentionally building a team of queer, radical and inclusive practitioners as well as having a few of our team members move onto other pursuits. Heart & Hands continues to organically evolve to meet the needs of our working class client base and its dedicated practitioners.

Finally, being situated in what we consider to be the most culturally diverse and vibrant neighbourhood in Victoria we have met many new faces and built new community connections. We are excited to have formed new partnerships supporting mutual aid and community care with the Abortion Support Collective, Oaklands Community Centre, Anarchist Network of “Vancouver Island” (ANVI) and Intimate Access. Alongside those burgeoning connections we continue to support Community Food Support Victoria, Camas Books & Infoshop (hey neighbours!) as well as reconnecting with Mothering Touch and Eves of Destruction Roller Derby!

And as always we continue to utilize Community Acupuncture is a tool for social change. Our practice is a way to honor the ancestral roots of barefoot medicine, a cultural bridge between modern and traditional, a thriving example of mutual aid, community care and economic justice in action. Through the way we run our clinic we contribute to the evolving practice of this innovative approach that makes acupuncture accessible and inclusive for many. Heart & Hands also models community care – resisting the North American society ethic of “ME” with a collective culture of “WE,” one shared by many Asian societies. Our tiny social enterprise is committed to upholding this concept. As working class practitioners we know, and have consistently demonstrated that, we are ultimately stronger together. 

Christina Chan, R.Ac. & Jaay (Jade) Kulhawy-Bartlett, R.Ac.

Heart & Hands has our sights set on numerous short and long term goals and how our community can support us:

  • Protecting our fellow immunocompromised community members (including our Clinic Director, Christina) by arriving with your mask for appointments! And of course, if you forget yours, we have medical masks available for $2.

    Masking is a simple, accessible, and effective public health measure that most individuals can participate in. Asking our clients to wear a mask remains the easiest way to protect everyone who walks through our doors. We acknowledge that we do not live in a post-pandemic world and want to model inclusive behaviour because immunocompromised people matter!
  • BOOK IN ADVANCE!! Help us keep our schedules full, which ensures our tiny business can pay the bills and our hardworking practitioners make a living wage. Also that our acupunking team is currently short-staffed, which means our schedule nowadays fills FAST, so plan ahead in order to get the care you need. Or use our wait list mindfully (don’t forget to set your desired time frame…) so we can respond to your appointment requests.
  • SEND US YOUR PEOPLE! Word-of-mouth for a community-based clinic is worth its weight in gold! If you have that person in your life that keeps complaining about their lower back, neck pain, insomnia, painful periods, headaches and/or just really needs support unwinding ’cause it’s so damn stressful right now…this is a simple way you can treat your loved ones to some well-deserved self-care. Take our business cards to places that could benefit from our services, direct folks to our website OR better yet, purchase your loved ones a gift certificate for Community Acupuncture or
    Cupping/Gua Sha!
  • Join our team!! We provide space for like-minded healers! The many ways a Community Acupuncture practice can support and inspire others is contagious. What someone needs is a variety of options to support them along their path to healing and well-being, so we are aiming to build a diverse team of practitioners who complement our busy Community Acupuncture practice. We invite collectively-minded practitioners to join us, who share similar values and politics of inclusion, economic justice and innovation for how we engage and deliver care to our community. If you’d like to join us, READ HERE.

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