Support Frontline Healthcare Workers Dealing with Stress & Compassion Fatigue

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We need you to help the helpers!

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For 25 years, The Heart Touch Project has trained volunteers, medical staff, and massage therapists to offer compassionate, supportive touch to patients. People suffering from life-limiting illness and end of life issues desperately need human contact.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically changed our reality. Forced physical separation has resulted in vast numbers of people suffering the negative effects of anxiety, compassion fatigue and often depression.

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Many of these people are the very ones shouldering the biggest burden right now - - frontline healthcare workers tending to the sick and dying!

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Heart Touch has mobilized staff, volunteers and resources to respond to the needs of our community. Many people are at home, overwhelmed and afraid of this new unseen threat, perhaps grieving lost loved ones. When we emerge from this isolation, Heart Touch Project will be ready to deploy caring, well-trained massage therapists. People who understand that illness changes the way that we interact and that gentle touch provides great benefits to ill and isolated patients.

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And those massage therapists are getting right back to work—on the very people who are working so hard with the sick right now. EMTs, nurses, doctors, CNAs, and custodial staff are putting their lives on the line right now to care for others, and there are massage therapists waiting to care for them. By preparing now, these therapists will be ready to offer safe, effective massage therapy that’s adjusted to minimize the chance of spreading COVID-19.

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But as a small non-profit, we need your financial help to adapt.  Since we must socially distance, like the rest of society, we cannot currently conduct our trainings to healthcare workers and massage therapists, or provide those life-affirming physical touch therapies to individuals in need.

We are adjusting our curriculum to prepare for the future when our big-hearted volunteers can once again touch others with care, compassion and confidence.While we stay safer-at-home, we are preparing online courses for massage therapists to adapt to this new reality.

 

Your donation to Heart Touch today will provide funding for:

• development of online massage training, targeted to the specific needs of healthcare workers during this pandemic, that will prepare massage therapists to provide caring, compassionate touch to those on the frontlines, as soon as it is safe to touch;

• recruitment and education of massage therapists who will be the first to break the barrier of societies' new views on "safe" touch.

 

PLEASE GIVE TODAY TO THE HEART TOUCH EMERGENCY RESPONSE!

Any amount is greatly appreciated. Here’s where your money will go:

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$ 50 - covers supplies for one massage therapist to provide massage services to 5 frontline health workers

$ 100 - supports massage therapists to offer two frontline health workers an hour-long massage.

$ 250 - provides a matching scholarship ­­(through the Fred and June MacMurray Foundation­­) that will educate and train massage therapists to provide mindful, therapeutic massage to frontline health workers.

$ 500 - provides a full scholarship for a therapist to receive specialized training to work with frontline health workers in a COVID-19 environment. This COVID-19 specialty therapist will provide massage services to 3-4 frontline health workers every weekday for 16 weeks.