This grantee profile is part of our EMS assessment report, “Our Stories, Our Commonwealth.” Read the executive summary or the full report for more information about Expand Massachusetts Stories. You can also visit our web page highlighting key information from our assessment.
Dr. Karen Craddock, an applied psychologist and co-founder of The Wellness Collaborative Inc. in Roxbury, has been thinking about the power of story for essentially her whole life. A four-generation Roxbury native, Karen grew up on Warwick Street in the same historic row house that her father was raised in. There, and in the same community spaces documented by local artist Alan Rohan Crite, Karen was immersed in stories about the community from her parents, aunts, uncles, and other elder relatives. As a psychologist, she’s investigated the role that story can play in how we make sense of ourselves and our social, cultural, and geographic contexts. “Storytelling is essential to our well-being, our vibrancy. It’s the first thing we carry in the world. It’s how we make meaning of life,” she says.
“It signaled that Mass Humanities’ commitment to equity was genuine.”
In her Wellness Collaborative co-founders, Drs. Jeanette Callahan and Robin Reed, a pediatrician and an internist respectively, Karen found like-minded collaborators with whom she’s built a nimble organization that seeks to intentionally “situate well-being in the full arc of the human experience.” They work in deliberately interdisciplinary ways to foster a grassroots health and wellness ecosystem across Greater Boston’s historically Black neighborhoods, providing holistic and culturally responsive programming that’s been designed in partnership with community members.
As a Visiting Scholar at the Wellesley Centers for Women, Karen has had a unique opportunity to knit together her personal story as a Black and Indigenous woman with her work to build community around health and well-being at the Wellness Collaborative. As she shared her narrative research on Black-Indigenous women and engaged with colleagues in her consultative work across higher ed, she came to see that while “there are all of these stories, literally histories, that are alive and living within our elder population” the young adults she encountered, “felt very disconnected from those histories and that was showing up for them in their personal lives.” Karen began to imagine what it might look like to pull the elders and the young people in her community together to share their respective wisdom and experience.
In 2024, Karen submitted an application to Expand Massachusetts Stories to support a “wellness-through-storytelling” project to pair Roxbury elders and young adults to share their stories with each other; the story-telling exchanges would also be recorded as a way of documenting the process while preserving the stories. In EMS, she saw an initiative that embodied many of the same values and
