Taking It To The Streets: Communities Managing Their Health Care Through Herbal Medicine

Presented by Kerrie Oakes

Students/Members: $10, Non- Members $15

Tuesday, 29 October 2024. Doors open at 6:45pm, presentation starts 7:00pm

Join us as Kerrie Oakes, renowned community herbalists, presents Taking it to the streets: Communities managing their health care through herbal medicine.

Kerrie's presentation is an extension of her work with communities to provide their own herbal medicine practice. She will outline five guiding questions, hints, tips, and examples for developing your own community practice. These are based on information she has gathered through a review of peer-reviewed literature, unpublished reports, social media, community websites, and personal experience. You will have the opportunity to plan how you might work with your own communities to provide herbal medicine to those who would benefit most. This will be an interactive presentation and group discussion and an opportunity to explore a little-examined model of herbal medicine practice putting communities back in control of their own healthcare.

About our speaker: Kerrie Oakes

With a background in community development, and government policy roles, Kerrie Oakes understands the power and potential of transforming local communities through herbal medicine. After training as a herbalist, Kerrie has been involved in developing grassroots, cooperative models of herbal medicine care, ensuring access to these invaluable herbal medicine resources to those who need them most.

Kerrie established the Southeast Queensland chapter of the international Herbalists Without Borders network and served as Coordinator until its closure early in 2024. Kerrie encourages fellow practitioners to engage with and assist communities during crises, using diverse approaches from collecting donations, distribution of herbal products, and organising 'making herbal products' sessions. She has supported communities in Southern Queensland and Northern NSW during floods, bushfires and the pandemic. She also provides support to homeless services, refugees, couch-surfing students, and those living on low incomes.

Kerrie also established the Somerset Community Herb Clinics – now owned by the community-owned Somerset Health Hubs Cooperative, which she established and currently serves as a board member.

Kerrie is a member of the NHAA, Estuary Learning, Indigenous Plants for Health Association, Herbalists Without Borders, and the International Society for Traditional, Complementary and Integrative Medicine Research. She has worked with the World Naturopathic Federation to publish research summarising the evidence for the use of herbal medicine for the prevention, management and recovery from COVID19.

Kerrie is currently undertaking a PhD with the National Centre for Naturopathic Medicine at Southern Cross University. Her doctoral work is focused on developing models of policy integration of community herbalism, to support communities to develop, lead and sustain their own preferred models of herbal and integrative healthcare.