We challenged the stigma around HIV and touch by designing and building, from scratch, a 7,000 square-foot spa on one of Toronto’s busiest street corners. We then invited passersby to relax their fear and receive a rejuvenating massage from our HIV-positive Healers.

Healing House builds off last year’s campaign for Casey House in which we built a pop-up restaurant and staffed it with HIV-positive chefs. Although the campaign was incredibly successful at smashing HIV stigma, the primary learning was clear: we had missed an opportunity to facilitate direct contact between the HIV-positive chefs and the restaurant’s patrons. This played heavily into the brief for this year’s work.

To dispel the myth around HIV and touch, we created the world’s first HIV-positive spa, Healing House, and staffed it with 18 HIV-positive volunteers (Healers) who were trained by the registered massage therapist for major league baseball team, The Toronto Blue Jays. Our Healers would prove that, far from being dangerous, their soothing touch could in fact be healing.

We conducted a poll and found that 51% of North Americans won’t touch someone with HIV. Even worse, 95 million people in North America still believe they can contract HIV from touch. It’s easy to hold prejudice like this from a distance, but what about when you’re sitting face-to-face with someone who has HIV? Or when you’re sharing skin-to-skin touch with them? We wanted to facilitate this direct contact to promote compassion and understanding.

We designed a 7,000 square-foot spa on one of Toronto’s busiest street corners and invited the public to relax their fear. For greater impact, our HIV-positive Healers created a package for prominent journalists: a bottle of essential oil handmade by the Healers themselves and an invitation for a free massage. Everything about Healing House was designed to be media friendly. The walls were adorned with facts and bold statements about HIV ignorance. Over the course of three days, our Healers delivered hundreds of healing massages, soothed aching muscles, and changed more than a few minds.

Healing House was on every major Canadian TV network for three straight days, generating over 120 broadcast pieces, 540 stories globally, and a media value of 11 million dollars. Some of Canada’s foremost news anchors even received their massages live on camera, which helped boost awareness: 66% of Canadians reported seeing or hearing our Healers talk about HIV stigma. 77% of people who came to Healing House said it changed their perception HIV+ people, and 85% said they felt more compassion. In social, we generated more conversation about HIV stigma in Canada in three days than in all of 2018.