Healing the Deal
It’s been two years since Dr. Nora Wilson Dennis ’97 fulfilled the vision that she literally dreamt up: starting her own farm-based mental health practice.
Story by Brooks Dareff | Photography by Kate Auger, Digital Content Specialist & Photographer
West of Durham, in rural Orange County, walk in mid-March through Jubilee Healing Farm with Dr. Nora Wilson Dennis ’97, and you visualize what’s coming. “Right now, it’s definitely in winter mode,” says the founder and CEO of the farm, which opened to clients in June 2024. “But it’s going to be beautiful.”
Over here, the herb and flower area. And nearby, by the dirt road leading into the 10-acre farm — mostly ragweed when Dennis, a Duke-trained psychiatrist and DA alumna, bought it in 2023 — the “food forest.” There, fig, pear, elderberry and apple trees will be ringed by plant guilds, or micro-ecosystems of plants that collectively support the fruiting trees. The guilds will comprise pollinator favorites like milkweed, salvia and red clover; nitrogen‑providing dynamic accumulators such as comfrey and nasturtium; pest deterrents like marigold, chives and garlic; and moisture-holding ground covers including strawberries and creeping raspberries.
On Sept. 19, 2022, Dennis awoke from a dream with a vivid sense of her future that she shared with her husband: farm-based therapy that would serve patients needing an intensive outpatient program. Dennis had seen in her more than 10 years in the field that traditional clinical settings were falling short. “I don’t think hospitals really make people better. I think they stabilize them,” she says. “And I think it’s hard, if you’re really unwell, to get better going to therapy [just] once a week.”
That Dennis realized her vision sets her apart, says fellow psychiatrist Dr. Jane Gagliardi of Duke Medicine: “She has the rare combination of idealism and pragmatism and envisions and accomplishes audacious goals.”
Today, Dennis and her staff treat clients with conditions including PTSD, anxiety, mood, schizoaffective, bipolar and substance abuse disorders, schizophrenia, depression, alcoholism, grief and loss, suicidal ideation, behavioral addictions and chemical dependencies.
Clients in the intensive outpatient program typically attend for 12 weeks, four half-days per week. Communal farm practices — among them cooking, yoga (which Dennis used to teach), herbalism, art and music therapy — pair with insurance-supported medication management and outpatient psychotherapy.
The farm program is sustained by grants, volunteers, a sliding scale of out-of-pocket payments, and collaborators. While clients’ progress is iteratively tracked and documented, insurance companies and Medicaid do not cover therapies whose efficacy isn’t backed by expensive third-party clinical studies.
A farm focus is on making connections to the self, to the earth and to the community. “This program changed the way I view mental health,” reads a client testimonial on the Jubilee website. “If you are trying to heal, healing among others is the best way to do so. I am stronger and more balanced than I’ve ever been.”
Clients’ self-connection includes, for example, self-knowledge, self-trust and self-compassion; honoring grief, pain and one’s journey; appreciating and caring for the body; understanding and seeking to regulate emotions; realizing meaning and purpose; knowing one’s values; and holding a vision for the future.
Jubilee understands its connection to the earth as one of stewardship, as did Jubilee’s forebears who preceded colonization, the Indigenous peoples who are acknowledged and whose names are spoken with reverence at the farm: the Eno, Shakori, Occaneechi, Sissipahaw, Saponi, Lumbee and Tuscarora. And the care that stewardship requires becomes a source of healing for clients.
Individual clients discover which farm practices are most therapeutic. One young man found calm from his anxiety and intrusive thoughts by holding one of the farm’s two rabbits. “And I was like, ‘This is a person who actually needs an emotional support animal,’” Dennis says. “‘I’m seeing the power of this animal for him to stay settled and calm.’”
Weeks focus on themes, like visioning, nothing is wasted and the challenge of letting go — which Dennis models and knows personally.
That Dennis awoke ready to let go on the morning of that 2022 dream was because of what she first experienced as crushing failure. Denied a promotion to a vice presidency at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, where she was then lead medical director for behavioral health and health equity, she says: “I was heartbroken. I was really heartbroken.”
Upon reflection, that initially unnerving devastation tracked, as her academic and professional career projected internally as an unending stepladder of ascending accomplishments.
Strong academics and some beloved teachers illuminated her years at Durham Academy, from third to 10th grades. Yet, socially, it was a “really hard” and “painful” time for Dennis. An intellectual leader and well-liked by many — she was voted president of her sophomore class — Dennis was also sometimes ostracized and excluded from parties. She was one of few Black students in the school at a time when cliques were commonplace: “It’s unfathomable, I think to people now, what it was like at DA.”
With DA as the foundation, Dennis “had no academic problems” at the N.C. School of Science and Mathematics in 11th and 12th grades; at UNC-Chapel Hill, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in anthropology and environmental science, and master’s degree in public health; or at Duke for medical school.
Dennis’ Blue Cross heartbreak spurred soul searching about what she really wanted to do and what she could offer the world. She realized, as her CEO knew, that she lacked not just the experience but also, tellingly, the philosophical inclination for the job: ensuring the organization makes money. “And so that led me to be open to receive information,” Dennis says. “Because I think if it had been six months earlier and I had had a dream about starting Jubilee, I wouldn’t have done it. And I wouldn’t have had the bravery to follow it.”
Fortifying that bravery was an obligation Dennis felt to her ancestors — Black women denied the semblance of her opportunity — which she described in a 2025 presentation at UNC’s School of Social Work: “One of the things that came to my mind was, ‘I am the first woman in I don’t know how many generations who can do what she wants with her time. ... I can leave one job and start a business and, like, how dare I not? ... All these grandmothers would be like, What is wrong with you, right? I think you’re free, you know?’”
Dennis also has her eye on future generations. Says the School of Social Work’s Karon Johnson: “Nora supports the professional growth of emerging practitioners, offering internships and practicum training that allow students to learn about interventions that move beyond traditional talk therapy.”
That training includes a free support specialist program for college students. POEM (Peer Outdoor Education for Mental Health), as the website states, aims to train and support a generation of Black community healers to address the disparity in mental health that is causing BIPOC students to leave their education at a higher rate than other groups.
As this spring neared, clients gleaned last year’s “giving garden,” which now lies fallow, adjacent to an emerging bed where, with the help of local farmer Howard Allen, this year’s crops will soon be planted and, Dennis hopes, yield double the local donations.
Clients glean lessons from nature, like composting, which teaches that nothing is wasted — that emotional pain, for example, can feed personal growth. The farm’s blueberries teach planning, patience and building a foundation; they’ll bear fruit for the first time after three years of cultivation that encouraged root systems to grow by trimming the bushes’ flowers.
Connection to nature is a daily lesson in observation that feeds one of the farm practices: the wonder walk. Dennis defined it in her UNC talk: “It’s almost like you put on these wonder glasses and you notice things you’ve never noticed before.”
Dennis models this as she interrupts the mid-March tour to carefully remove a tiny spider as it moves from the visitor’s hair to his cheek — before he is even aware of it — then sets it back down to the earth, demonstrating in one gesture her gentleness, her ever-present attentiveness and her intimate connection to the myriad minutiae of the natural world. “And so, a little tiny spider,” Dennis says. “There he is. He was so tiny you almost couldn’t feel him.”