At Oakland’s Freedom Community Clinic, Culture is Part of ‘Whole-Person Healing’

On a December afternoon at Freedom Community Clinic’s healing center in Fruitvale, a small group of women pluck yellow and orange petals from dried marigold flowers. Marigolds often accentuate Día de los Muertos altars to guide visiting ancestors, but today, the workshop attendees are using them to make soap and toner to support winter skin health.

“Make sure to think of an intention and put it into your soap,” says the workshop leader, Yolanda Velazquez, in Spanish as she stirs in glycerin.

Velazquez is one of the clinic’s promotoras de sanación, health outreach workers 50 years and older who are pillars in the Oakland neighborhood’s Mexican and Central American immigrant communities. The wellness workshops are only one of Freedom Community Clinic’s many services, offered in Fruitvale and at its herbal apothecary just outside downtown Oakland.

“People can receive integrative medicine consultations, community acupuncture, body work, acupressure or energy healing,” says Dr. Bernadette Lim, who’s known to most visitors simply as Bernie. She founded Freedom Community Clinic in 2019, when she was a 24-year-old student in the joint medical program at UCSF and UC Berkeley.

At the two clinics, “you’ll see a youth art gallery. You’ll see danza azteca; you’ll see fire cider medicine-making sessions,” she continues. “So you get to also be included in this community medicine. And that itself is medicinal.”

It’s all part of Lim’s philosophy that healing isn’t just an individual pursuit. She believes our personal healing is vital to healing our communities. As part of that mission, last fall, Lim and her team opened their Ancestral Healing Farm right off Route 24 in Orinda, where they’ll grow some of the free herbs available at the two apothecaries, and host community events that invite people — especially Black, Indigenous and immigrant folks — to reconnect with the land, and themselves.

Lim and her team are skilled at building bridges. They’ve spent years developing a philosophy of whole-person healing that looks beyond treating immediate symptoms, and takes into account the roles of culture, social belonging and social justice in a person’s overall wellness. (To that end, Freedom Community Clinic just announced that in September 2025 it will convene interdisciplinary healers from medical schools, health clinics, Indigenous traditions and other practices with artists, mutual aid organizations and community advocates for a summit called Whole Person Healing to the People.)

“What people really need is this reconnection back to their body and reconnection to this misalignment of their body, mind and spirit, and also in turn, connecting the individual with community,” Lim says.

Reaching people who might mistrust the medical system

Freedom Community Clinic started gaining momentum during the racial justice protests of 2020, when Lim and her team would pop up at parks, street corners and freeway underpasses. These days, they do a lot. In addition to their many free services, they teach workshops for high schoolers and medical students alike. They also provide healing services to violence interrupters, or social workers who help people in the aftermath of shootings.

Lim wants to reach people who might mistrust the mainstream medical system because of their experiences with racism or cultural incompetency. Her family members encountered that firsthand. Her mother, who’s an immigrant from the Philippines, struggled with reproductive health issues.

“She had to undergo procedures of which she didn’t understand the full consequences of them, and couldn’t have children and didn’t have full consent because of that,” Lim says. “And that was very traumatic.”

Lim was inspired to pursue medicine when she saw her mom reconnect to her body through acupuncture, massage and a form of Filipino energy healing called hilot. Eventually, she made her way to UCSF and UC Berkeley, where she got her medical degree in addition to a masters degree in public health.

“I would go to class and then I would actually go to community organizing meetings after,” she says. “So I was mentored by and I met the doctor to the Black Panther Party, Dr. Tolbert Small and a lot of the elders and activists. And they taught me about this history of community organizing in medicine.”

She also learned about the Bay Area’s community of folk healers that many of her professors didn’t recognize.

“And in fact, Western medicine says that a lot of our ancestral healing modalities are not evidence-based,” she adds. “They’re not scientific, they don’t have any basis and they’re just quote, unquote, woo-woo.”

Lim came up with a vision to connect those worlds. It’s not that Freedom Community Clinic rejects Western medicine. If someone comes in with a health issue that needs a pharmaceutical or surgical intervention, Lim has connections to trustworthy providers. But a lot of the ailments people come in with aren’t that straightforward, and can benefit from other forms of care.

“Admittedly Western medicine — its strengths are in physical trauma and infection. Amazing technologies have come through to really help with saving lives in those areas,” Lim says. “However, in a world where a lot of the health conditions are chronic, they’re long-term and they don’t have just the physical symptom root cause, we need other healers.”

Reclaiming one’s roots by connecting with the land

Many of those healers from around the Bay Area gathered in the fall of 2024 at the grand opening harvest festival of Ancestral Healing Farm, just a 10-minute drive from downtown Oakland.

At the farm, I meet Dr. Alexis Cooke, the director of operations. She has a PhD in public health and is also a reiki practitioner and an herbalist.

“Hi, y’all. Welcome,” she says warmly to a group of young women of color. “We’re about to get started down there.”

In a sun hat and rubber boots, she walks me over to the hot house to show me the herbs she and volunteers are growing.

“So here is tulsi, it’s also called holy basil,” she says. “It’s used a lot in adaptogenic herbal formulations, so it’s good for stress relief. People use it a lot for nervousness or things like that.”

Then she points to a shrub called mugwort. “People use [it] a lot for sleep work,” she continues. “If you have issues with sleep or are doing spiritual work, like connecting with ancestors.”

Just beyond the green house, artists and healers set up booths with their offerings. Elizabeth Blancas has a spread of colorful portraits of Indigenous women and queer people surrounded by healing plants.

“I have specifically chosen sage, ruta and romero — or rue and rosemary,” she says. “Those are culturally important to me and also actually to a lot of Indigenous people of the North. A lot of their healing properties are really for cleansing.”

Blancas designed the farm’s banner, which welcomes visitors with the affirmation “Healing Is Justice.” She got involved after going through a six-month apprenticeship program, where she studied reiki, herbalism, CPR and mental health first aid. For her, the opportunity to connect with ancestral healing practices feels deeply personal. Her family hails from Michoacán, Mexico, home of the Purépecha people.

“I’m very grateful that my family migrated here — I’m first-generation — but that has also caused a really huge divide for my connection to the land,” she says, “just due to colonization and assimilation.”

Blancas says it’s been powerful to have an intentional space to come together with likeminded people of other cultures and generations. “It’s one thing for me to be making medicine on my own, but it’s another thing to be learning alongside other people and being able to make it collectively,” she says. “Especially with the intention for social justice and liberation.”

No matter what culture they come from, everyone I meet at Freedom Community Clinic has a similar story — of returning to roots that were once severed by painful histories.

“I think seeing other people’s commitment to connecting to their ancestral background has inspired me for sure,” says farm volunteer Qiyamah Nasir. “A lot of cultures keep their cultural practices. But a lot of times with African Americans, it’s like we don’t know where we are from. We know Africa, but Africa is a huge continent. So it has really inspired me to really dig deep.”

And that’s part of Dr. Bernie Lim’s mission — to create a space where people of different backgrounds can support each other and learn from each other on their individual healing journeys.

“Healing can be a joyful experience,” Lim says. “It can be a community experience for so many people to realize that reconnecting back to oneself doesn’t have to be a lonely endeavor. It can be one that can be done in connection with other people.”

And that, Lim says, is medicine.

Freedom Community Clinic’s locations in Fruitvale and West Oakland, in addition to its Ancestral Healing Farm in Orinda, will reopen for public programming on Mar. 3, 2025.

In September 2025, they’ll convene interdisciplinary healers from medical schools, health clinics, Indigenous traditions and more with artists, mutual aid organizations and community advocates for a summit called Whole Person Healing to the People.

Follow Freedom Community Clinic on Instagram for event updates.