Learn how the past affects the present.
Share our stories with each other.
Don’t avoid the tough parts.
Heal. Grow. Together.
In 2026, we invite you to join us for the following Past Forward + Healing Circles, offering a participatory introductory to Healing History:
Healing History is a collaborative initiative that’s designed to strengthen our communities, workforces, and state by helping Alabamians examine their shared history and get to know each other better. Across race, religion, politics, and all the supposed dividing lines that shouldn’t keep us apart.
We aim to build trust, foster empathy, and grow community through mutually respectful discussions about our shared past, present, and future.
Past Forward is our participatory introduction to AHA’s Healing History initiative. This simulation offers a chance to explore, and reflect upon, our shared history — and consider how decisions made in the past affect our lives, livelihoods, relationships, and communities today. Each simulation is followed by a faciliated Healing Circle that offers participants a chance to reflect and discuss what they’ve learned.
This initiative also offers a longer-term Healing History cohort, which typically runs six-to-eight months long. This cohort approach gives participants a chance to dive deeper, and get to know one another more deeply, through faciliated conversations about their own lives and experiences. Cohort members will also come to better understand their shared past and their shared communities today.
AHA also offers limited Healing History grants for projects that help bring Alabamians together to explore a shared history — and consider how conversation can help heal divides created in our past. For one such example, read about the AHA-funded documentary project, Echoes of the Forks of Cypress.
Our thanks to the Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham for its major gift in support of AHA’s Healing History initiative.
“We're all burdened by our history of racial inequality. It's created a kind of smog that we all breathe in, and it has prevented us from being healthy.”
-Bryan Stevenson, Founder of the Equal Justice Initiative; Alabama Humanities Fellow
Learn how Black and White descendants of Shelby County's Wallace House plantation are coming together to examine their shared past — and build a new future.
The Wallace House is only one partner we're working with statewide. Our goal is to spark conversations that lead to tangible outcomes like:
Below are two ways you can connect with Healing History right now.
Go through our introductory Past Forward experience that brings people together to explore, and reflect upon, a piece of our shared past. Then, go deeper with Healing Circles that allow participants more time to share stories, connect, and learn from one another.
Your support ensures that we reach communities and organizations across Alabama who would benefit from this work.Thank you for helping us bring Alabamians together to listen to each other, and better understand different perspectives on our shared past.
Contact:
Laura Anderson
Director of Partnerships and Outcomes
205.558.3992 | landerson@alabamahumanities.org