Heart Touch™ was founded as a means of training massage therapists to serve AIDS patients to help alleviate some of their isolation and suffering. In the early 1990s, a close friend of Shawnee Isaac Smith, Heart Touch™'s Founder, was rapidly dying of AIDS and found that no one was willing to touch him.  To help him and the thousands of others in his predicament, Shawnee started The Heart Touch™ Project from her own home where she invited and educated therapists about AIDS and the role of massage in caring for the sick and dying.

Early on Heart Touch™ had overwhelming obstacles to overcome, not least among them prejudice about AIDS and its victims, and the standard prohibition in typical massage training against massaging the ill. Soon, however Heart Touch™ volunteers were massaging men and women with AIDS whose disease had progressed to the point that they could no longer walk.

In collaboration with medical and educational experts, Shawnee created a training based on compassionate touch. Compassionate Touch is a gentle and emotionally-nurturing form of massage that remains highly responsive to the patient’s medical and psychological needs. Heart Touch™ remains especially sensitive to the complex needs of individuals receiving massage as they prepare to pass on.

While we still serve the end-stage AIDS population that was our original clientele, we have expanded to serve individuals with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) and Cancer, and continue to outreach to populations that can benefit from our services.