Senses of Transformation: Seeds, Sounds, and Sights Healing Garden
Team members: Dejr Bostick, Katy Davenport, Tara Eaker, Michelle Gilbert, Anna Mitchell, Norma Jean Suarez, Anthony Tiberia, Chip White
In a world spinning faster than ever, chronic stress has moved from background noise to a defining force in our lives. The American Psychological Association’s 2022 Stress in America survey reports a steady five-year rise in stress, with 75% of people experiencing physical or emotional symptoms. Gallup’s 2023 Global Emotions Report echoes this, showing that half of Americans face significant daily stress – an invisible weight shaping our health and well-being. When the world fractures, our bodies carry the cracks. We learn to treat exhaustion as necessary and hypervigilance as survival. We forget that strength grows from regulation, rest, and the chance to breathe. Though healing is often imagined as a solitary path, it is, at its core, a communal practice. Senses of Transformation: Seeds, Sounds, and Sights Healing Garden embodies that truth by offering space for physical and emotional nourishment, visibility, reflection, connection, and collective healing.
Located on the former Sirrine Elementary School grounds in the Belle Meade community just outside of Greenville, one of the area’s earliest Black communities, the garden stands on land rich with history and resilience. After the school closed in 2005, the campus sat vacant until 2006, when Deloris Pinson, a former Greenville County Schools analyst and mother, reimagined its future. Seeking summer care for her son with special needs, she founded Upstate Circle of Friends (UCF) inside the shuttered building. With community partners, UCF purchased and restored the site, transforming it into a vibrant hub for education, wellness, family, and medical services – an anchor in a neighborhood still facing displacement and gentrification.
This team, with the support of corporate and community partners, will activate all the senses by enhancing the existing healing garden with a waterfall, wind chimes, and edible plants in the spring. Shaq Ellis, a self-taught cultural abstract artist out of Anderson, SC, will create a mural that honors the stories of the past while illuminating the community’s path forward. In late spring 2026, when the garden is complete, the community will gather for an unveiling to honor the hands, histories, and hopes that shaped this healing space and brought it to life.
This garden will represent both beginning and becoming, shaped by those who planted the first seeds of the neighborhood and dreamed of a place they could grow together. Like the gardeners before them, this team will create nourishment, beauty, belonging and a space for healing for people they may never meet, modeling the generosity of community and the belief that what we plant today can bless tomorrow and grow a future rooted in care, connection, and shared purpose.