“Let’s talk about unleashing the power of people to heal themselves and build community; you don’t do one without the other,” said Atum Azzahir, executive director of the Cultural Wellness Center, in an April 18 interview.
Azzahir speaks from the depths of lived experience. Born three generations removed from the enslavement of her ancestors, she has spent her life resisting the structural forces that disconnect communities from their cultural inheritance.
Her personal journey — shaped by the brutality of the Jim Crow South, the urgency of the Civil Rights Movement, the momentum of the feminist wave, and the call of spiritual and cultural reclamation — has become a compass guiding her life’s work rebuilding the health and identity of African and Indigenous communities through cultural grounding.
Now a prominent community leader, Azzahir is best known for founding the Cultural Wellness Center in 1996, a Minneapolis-based organization that places culture at the center of community and public health. Its philosophy is simple yet profound: Disconnection from culture is the root of many social and health disparities. Restoration of cultural knowledge, then, is the foundation for healing.
“The belief that sickness and disease are the direct result of the absence of community and culture is at the heart of our work,” Azzahir said.
The Cultural Wellness Center’s work focuses on closing the gap in persistent disparities such as poverty, infant mortality, and chronic illness — issues that continue to disproportionately affect Black and Indigenous communities despite decades of interventions centered around access to health care and education.
For Azzahir, the disconnect lies not in a lack of programming, but in a lack of power to define health, power to shape community, and power to recover from historical trauma in a way that affirms identity.
“We need to build a personality that is culturally self-aware, grounded and anchored in the purpose of restoring health and wholeness,” she said. “Without that, no policy or program can fully take root.”
Through initiatives supported in part by the Medica Foundation, the center helps people of African and Indigenous heritage rediscover cultural practices, reclaim ancestral knowledge, and develop leadership rooted in community-based traditions. The approach is holistic, intergenerational, and deeply spiritual. It centers elders, teachers, and kinship networks as crucial agents of both healing and transformation.
This work, which Azzahir calls “cultural knowledge production,” includes facilitating rites of passage programs, storytelling circles, community mapping, health initiatives, and research rooted in ancestral ways of knowing. Through these efforts, the center doesn’t just provide services — it creates a cultural infrastructure that redefines what it means to be healthy and whole.
Much of Azzahir’s insight stems from her own upbringing in a small sharecropping town outside Greenwood, Mississippi.
“As I look back, we didn’t have a ‘good’ life, we had a ‘pure’ life,” she said. “The horrific didn’t seem so horrible at the time. Things were just the way they were.”
Her father, a tall man with a joyful disposition, told stories with his hand gently placed on her head — an act that, at the time, felt like tenderness but now registers to her as something far more intentional.
“He was protecting my spirit,” Azzahir said. “Now that I have studied my culture, I know that he was transmitting things to me, and receiving some, too. That was healing.”
In contrast, her mother — who worked as a domestic and could neither read nor write — carried a pistol and a fierce resolve not to be mistreated. The townspeople called her a “pistol-packing woman,” a label that served as both a warning and a badge of honor.
“She refused to be disrespected,” Azzahir said. “Her ferocity may have frightened people, but it also kept us safe. My father worried that she’d get us in trouble, but the white folks stayed away.”
This dual inheritance of gentleness and fire shaped Azzahir’s own organizing style — anchored in love, driven by clarity, and sharpened by memory. “A father’s love is worth your weight in gold,” she said. “We are rich. We will recover. And we shall win.”
While Azzahir’s work began at the grassroots level, its reach has extended into policy and institutional change. The Cultural Wellness Center now serves as a trusted voice in conversations around public health, education, and economic development. It challenges agencies and organizations to reconsider what they value as knowledge and who they recognize as experts.
“Our communities are not void of answers,” Azzahir said. “They’re just often not asked the right questions — or given the opportunity to lead.”
In a city like Minneapolis, where racial disparities are among the most severe in the country, the Center’s work offers a model for what community-led solutions can look like. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, interest in culturally grounded healing practices surged. The Cultural Wellness Center responded by expanding its offerings and supporting other grassroots organizations through mentorship and collaboration.
The center’s programs emphasize wellness as both a personal and collective responsibility. Participants don’t just receive services — they learn to be stewards of their own health and advocates for their community’s future. Whether through traditional food practices, intergenerational dialogue, or ancestral research, the center fosters belonging and self-determination.
Looking ahead, Azzahir hopes to expand the reach of the Cultural Wellness Center and cement its role as a national authority on cultural approaches to wellness. But she also knows that true change happens slowly — through stories, through relationships, and through a renewed sense of purpose.
“When decision-makers understand that investing in community-led cultural knowledge is an investment in lasting change,” she said, “the payoff to our economy and quality of life will be enormous.”
Her vision is rooted in the belief that when people know who they are, where they come from, and why they matter, they can create the conditions for their own thriving. And when one community thrives, it elevates everyone.
“The story of the Cultural Wellness Center,” Azzahir said, “is the story of retaining and reproducing a personality that knows how to heal, build and lead — not in spite of history, but because of it.”
Isabel Chanslor is a consultation specialist in the nonprofit sector and the chief program officer of the Neighborhood Development Center (NDC).