A new way to care for care partners

Heart Tank is a new initiative to help improve dementia care. We aim to bring new perspectives, new questions and new practices to the field. We offer experiential workshops that elevate dementia care and enable care partners to share their challenges and joys. By creating a container that invites vulnerability and courageous candor—a “heart tank” rather than a “think tank”—we allow care partners to feel fully seen.

Our team brings expertise from the fields of the arts, brain health, workplace culture, somatics, education and creative aging.

We help care partners recognize the profoundly important work they do, and how it can be a path to our deepest wholeness as human beings. We also foster bonds of friendship and community among professional and family care partners—people who often are distant from each other and sometimes view each other as adversaries.

Read more about the first Heart Tank gathering.

The Heart Tank Team

Temple Crocker is an interdisciplinary artist, somatic practitioner and arts educator who lives in Winston-Salem. She is a certified teacher of the Alexander Technique, and facilitator of TimeSlips, a collective storytelling method created for people living with dementia.

Rowena Richie is an Atlantic Fellow for Equity in Brain Health, co-founder of For You performance group, core artist on For You’s Artists & Elders project and a certified senior fitness instructor.

Ed Frauenheim is former director of research and content at consulting firm Great Place to Work, co-author of Reinventing Masculinity: The Liberating Power of Compassion and Connection and co-author of several Fortune stories about the Best Workplaces in Aging Services.

Rotating regional experts: Whenever we produce Heart Tank we try to bring in a local expert working in dementia care or a related field to add their insights. We are committed to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility and seek experts who have different cultural backgrounds and lived experiences than we do.

We are motivated by building community, so we can experience the relief and joy of doing things together.

If you are with a senior living organization and you’re curious about bringing a Heart Tank experience to your community, learn more here.

To get in touch with us about Heart Tank, email: rowena.richie@gbhi.org

About Heart Tank Workshops

Heart Tank workshops are customized events that employ somatic techniques, facilitated discussions and creative practices.

At a Heart Tank:

• We will shore each other up to do the rugged and sacred work of dementia care and advocacy.
• We will attempt to uncover what gets in the way of creating a community, a neighborhood, a city, a world where people living with dementia and those who care for them are seen, valued and welcomed.
• We will nurture a vision where caregivers receive the support they need to do the compassionate and creative work of dementia care-partnering.
• We will make space for the frustration, loss and grief that accompany the dementia journey as well as the love, intimacy, wonder and hope that nourish our spirits along the way.