About
Our Own Deep Wells (OODW)

Our Own Deep Wells: Awakening Soulful Practice for Wellness (OODW) is an initiative created by scholar/activist Dori Baker (Spy for Hope LLC) to support young people and the elders who accompany them.

 

In 2022, driven by the lack of mental health resources on college campuses and inspired by Lisa D. Miller’s brain research on the protective factors of spirituality, our founder Dori Baker began assessing the needs of student life professionals supporting the wellbeing of students.

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She created a volunteer team of young, diverse, faith leaders from across religious and spiritual traditions to begin imagining a social enterprise that would work upstream to provide care and support to young adults.

The mission: help young people tap into their own deep wells of wisdom and soulful practices.

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Together, they experimented with diversifying the growing mindfulness movement to be representative of the full range of humanity’s deep wells of life-giving practices. In April 2023, with a seed grant from the Spirituality Mind Body Institute of Columbia University, OODW piloted a 24-hour retreat curriculum to train embedded campus leaders to incorporate healthy soulful practices in a broad range of settings. 

 

We are currently seeking additional funding to support the development of three strategic pathways: 1) web-based curriculum and resources to accompany our in-person retreats; 2) three in-person retreats in 2024, hosted on college campuses based on access to professionals serving young adults in vulnerable populations; and 3) a young adult fellowship to develop a cohort of facilitators/trainers and provide a soulful learning journey.