7th Annual Spiritual Herbalism Conference
October 5-6, 2024
Our Mission
The annual NYC Spiritual Herbalism Conference, currently entering it’s seventh year, is the preeminent intersectional gathering for herbalism, spirituality, and the global community of healing practitioners.
Addressing the unique challenges of urban environments and our rapidly changing lifestyles, our attendees, guest speakers, and workshop teachers bring first hand experience, knowledge, partnership, and reverence, to the abundance of approaches available to us all when we centralize the brilliance and inherent wisdom of Indigenous, LGBTQIA, BIPOC, and immigrant communities from which we are intertwined.
This Year’s Theme: Thriving Through Transformation
The one constant in our lives over the past few years has been change! Transformational changes have touched all of our lives, leaving us remarkably different than before. While Spirit initiates all changes, some we consciously serve as transformation doulas, and others feel like an uncontrollable force that propels us out of ourselves. Change need not leave us feeling fearful, lost, and without harmony. We are courageous, resilient, and gifted people with long histories of Thriving!
2023 KEYNOTE
Empress Karen M. Rose
Trained in Eastern and Western Herbal Medicine, Master Herbalist, Karen M. Rose created an outlet for her teachings and healing modalities with the opening of Brooklyn-based Sacred Vibes Healing and Sacred Vibes Apothecary in 2009. Her inspiration for this work began as a child in her native home of Guyana, where she was exposed to how African, Caribbean and Latin American traditions profoundly influenced plant medicine and community healing.
The legacy of these lands is the foundation of Karen’s spiritual and healing practice. Karen is dedicated to empowering individuals to make informed decisions not only about their health, but their total lifestyle. She has developed authentic and enlightening materials as well as an extensive line of herbal products, all of which are available through the apothecary, apprenticeship programs, and her bestselling book, The Art & Practice of Spiritual Herbalism, published in February 2022. A strong advocate of community partnerships in healing, she believes that all spiritual traditions offer guidance on the path to finding truth and nourishment for our mind, body, and spirit.
Karen’s accomplishments include several in-house projects such as the Sacred Vibes’ Annual NYC Spiritual Herbalism Conference, Annual Herbal Almanac (2019-2022), the Global Virtual Spiritual Herbalism Apprenticeship Program, and the FREE Summer Community Herbalism Workshops. Karen has been featured in the New York Times, Black Enterprise, Refinery29 and Allure Magazine, Organic Life Magazine, Elle.com and has partnered with brands like BET, and Squarespace.
(photo credit sabriya simon, 2023)
2023 guest speakerS
Omisade Burney-Scott
Omisade Burney-Scott is a seventh-generation Black Southern feminist, storyteller, and social justice advocate. She is also the creator/curator of The Black Girls’ Guide to Surviving Menopause (BGG2SM), a multidisciplinary culture shift project focused on normalizing menopause and aging through the centering of the stories of Black women, transgender and gender-expansive people. BGG2SM's core programs are their Black Girl's Guide to Surviving Menopause podcast, which is a guide to the different stages of menopause, intergenerational storytelling gatherings and annual zine called "Messages from the Menopausal Multiverse”. She has been featured in numerous outlets including Oprah Daily, Forbes, VOGUE, Prevention, The Washington Post and The New York Times.
Omisade attended UNC-Chapel Hill graduating with a BA in Communications Studies in 1989.Over the past 25 years, Omisade’s work has been grounded in social justice movement spaces focused on the liberation of marginalized people, beginning with her own community. She has worked in the nonprofit sector around social justice since 1995 and has been an organizational development and capacity-building consultant for 16 years for nonprofit and philanthropic organizations. She has served on various nonprofit boards, including Fund for Southern Communities, Spirithouse NC, Village of Wisdom, Working Films and The Beautiful Project. She currently serves on the wisdom circle for the Acorn Center for Restoration and Freedom and the board for the National Menopause Foundation.
Omisade currently resides in North Carolina and is the mother of two sons.
Jokotifa Alaye
A life-long student of death and dying. With over 25 years of experience as a death care professional, she felt called to do more than participate in the traditional funeral home model and has created Mourning Space to fill the gaps in education and support that society requires for healthy grieving.
It is Jokotifa’s goal to build a community of empowered grievers that intend to save the world by living well and dying better, and she is passionate about sharing information that might encourage all of us to approach the end of a life and beyond with less fear and more wonder. She is a licensed funeral professional in the state of California and a NEDA certified end-of-life doula with a focus on grief.
She is grateful to call herself an Orisa devotee and lives in Redding, California, under the loving protection of Mt. Shasta.
She can be found online on IG @mourningspace and at www.MourningSpace.com
Sinnamon Love
Sinnamon Love is a visual artist, published writer, community organizer, Black Feminist Pornographer, and Executive Director of the Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) Collective, an organization providing financial assistance and increased access to mental health and wellness resources to Black and Brown sex workers in the legal and criminalized sex trades. For 30 years, Sinnamon has used her lived experiences to create media that shifts narratives around sex work, BDSM, disability, and motherhood.
Love is a fierce advocate for Black Lives Matter, Trans Rights, Sex Workers' Rights, Disability Justice, and Decriminalization of Sex Work & Cannabis. Sinnamon’s philanthropic work stems from lived experience as an unhoused youth in the sex trades and systemic inequities that influenced her work in both legal and criminalized forms of sexual labor.
Sinnamon serves on the Steering Committee of The National Survivor Network, one of the largest network of pro-sex work and pro-Decriminalization anti-trafficking organizations.
Sinnamon identifies as a kinky, pansexual, solo-polyamorous grownup, full-service sex worker, professional Dominatrix, and lifestyle switch. She is a vibe curator, yogi, Hip Hop & House head, writer, cannabis enthusiast, recovering serial monogamist, #naturallygrey, and happily #singleinbrooklyn.
Sinnamon is learning to live with traumatic brain injury in NYC.
You can find out more about Sinnamon at SingleinBrooklyn.com.
Chanel Porchia-Albert
I'm a down to earth likes to laugh revolutionary mother living in Bedford-Stuyvesant Brooklyn. I think it takes an out of the box mindset to decide to challenge the status -quo and the way in which individuals are treated within their reproductive health choices. I'm also a mother of six children all under the age of 9 years old (there's a set of twins) lol.
I have been working within infant and maternal health since 2008 when I founded Ancient Song Doula Services a doula organization focused on bringing full-spectrum doula services and classes to those who are often overlooked within marginalized communities and communities of color in an effort to address the disproportionately high infant and maternal mortality rate among African-American women in NYC and New Jersey.
My work in reproductive health has taken me across the world to Uganda where I have worked as a maternal health strategist and board member of Village Birth International assisting mothers in rural areas, working on advisory boards with Ariadne Labs at Harvard School of Public Health, Colombia University Medical School, and various others. Currently, I serve as a consultant on birth justice and provider engagement with the NY City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and on various independent projects with Ancient Song.
I've attended over 100 + births in various settings such as home birth, hospital, and birthing center in the U.S. and abroad and am a Certified Lactation Counselor for over five years, Certified Full Spectrum Doula, Certified AAP/NRP(neonatal resuscitation), Midwifery Assistant for over 7years, Full Spectrum Doula Trainer, Reproductive Justice & Health Advocate, and speaker on Birth Justice & Health Equity.
My philosophy, in short, is that everyone deserves to have equitable healthcare that addresses their own particular needs in whatever they may be at that particular moment. We have a basic human right to bodily autonomy within our reproductive health choices because of our choices matter.
2023 HOSTS
airlia perez, ASHLIN RANDOLPH, AVORY RAVIWONG, BIANCA EDWARDS, BREANNE DELGADO, CLARE PARKS, corina fadel, JAMEL WEST, Janice kang, Jasmine dickerson, jennifer MOLINA, katherin canton, krystal miller, leah santos, MONIQUE FIELDS, ONA MCGOVERN, STEPHEN LEWIS
