Guides + manuals
Herbalista Manuals
We have written guides and manuals for all of our community programming in order to help other herbalists and community workers looking to serve in their neck of the woods.
Our dream with these guides and manuals is to support the craft of community herbalism and help us continue our traditions in healthcare. These guidelines are not intended for large commercial enterprises.
We invite you to read, share, print, and adapt the materials you find here in the interest of community health, so long as you do so under our Creative Commons licensing terms (see the bottom of page for more details).
Please respect our labor and respect the Commons!
How it all began! In the winter of 2012, as she dreamed up the Herb Bus project, Lorna wrote the very first Herbalista Manual in order to share our method of providing community care. It has gone through many revisions since, changing as our work grew and evolved. The edition here was last updated in 2014.
The Herb Bus Service Manual is a glimpse into how our free mobile herb clinic was organized. It served as the training curriculum for our apprentices and volunteers and also hopefully helps other herbalists wishing to offer this type of care in their community.
The manual contains information on:
- how we set-up and service a station
- how we stock and maintain the apothecary, including detailed packing lists
- examples of the forms we use: intake forms, dispensary forms, etc.
- safety and sanitation concerns
- and other herbalistic details
We hope you find a little bit of inspiration in its pages. Viva la Herb Bus!
The Herb Cart has been through many evolutions, starting as a mobile first aid station in 2015, growing into a continuous care clinic, and now, most recently, as a community resource to be checked-out to run all sorts of pop-up adventures around Atlanta.
We share two versions of our manuals here.
Herb Cart Service Manual C.E. (Current Edition)
- Our most recent edition, we wrote this version after adjusting to the demands of the pandemic. We transitioned from custom compounding to pre-formulated compounds, allowing us to see more people in a quicker fashion and to reduce cross contamination.
- This edition also has sections about fundraising, insurance and legal concerns.
Herb Cart Service Manual B.C. (Before Corona)
- This earlier edition was written in 2020, just before the pandemic hit. At that time, the Cart offered custom compounding for each visitor. Note the detailed dispensary section as well as the packing lists for the tincture kits with an array of individual herbal extracts.
After building the Herb Bus and Herb Carts in Atlanta, together with other herbalists in Dublin, Ireland, we decided to try the Herbalista model of care across the pond. This time utilizing a Bike!
The Dublin Herb Bike is a mini-mobile herbal wellness station that sets-up at soup kitchens, shelters, community centers, and other places where there is need. This project is a chance to support our community, and also an important learning experience for herbalists and advanced herb students wishing to improve their clinical skills.
The Herb Bike Manual is a guide to our services and is the training curriculum for Herb Bike volunteers. Establishing basic protocols can provide some stability in the delicate and often unpredictable world of mobile healthcare. These pages contain information regarding how we set-up and service and is lovingly a “work in progress”. As our practices evolve we will update this manual accordingly.
This simple First Aid Guide includes some basic first aid principles as well as a detailed herbal reparatory. Please visit our Herbal First Aid Project Page for more information.
Herbalista First Aid ManualEach year the SouthEast Women’s Herbal Conference sets up camp at Lake
Eden outside of Black Mountain, NC. Over 1000+ women and children attend this 3 day event in the early fall. Our first aid station is tasked with providing earth-based care for this temporary village. All of our services and remedies are offered free. For many, a visit to our clinic facilitated their first healing experience with herbal medicine, illuminating the vital link between true health and nature.
Establishing some basic protocols provides us with some sense of stability and calm, vital touchstones when serving in the delicate and often unpredictable sphere of health care. The following pages contain information regarding how we stock and staff the clinic, including some of the forms we use. It is lovingly a work in progress, and as we continue to serve, we evolve our practices and will update this manual that was first compiled back in 2012.
A special thanks to the Appalachian School for Holistic Herbalism (ASHH), Red Moon Herbs and Traditional Medicinals for supporting the clinic all these years.
Here we share our 2014 Edition of the SEWHC First Aid Station Manual. If you are looking for more detailed information on First Aid, please visit the Herbal First Aid project page.
Herbalista’s Fire Cider Brigade is a team of volunteers who make and distribute gallons of Fire Cider each month to provide wellness support for our friends on the street in and around Atlanta, GA.
Though we had been offering Fire Cider Making Workshops for many years, the Atlanta Fire Cider Brigade officially came together in 2020, during the pandemic, as a way to support those living on the streets. The Herbalista crew was joined by community members who had trained with us over they years but attended our Solidarity Medicine Making Workshops to creating many, many gallons of Fire Cider each month.
Due to the constraints of COVID, folks were making and bottling the Fire Cider in their homes and dropping it to HQ. We distributed the bottles in HerbCare Packs via the Mercy Community Soup Kitchen, the South Bend Commons, Atlanta Jail Support and other initiatives. Eventually, in 2022, we were able to once again work together as a team to make the Fire Cider. To learn more, please visit the Fire Cider Brigade project page.
Fire Cider Brigade Service HandbookWe started Herbalista’s Grow a Row Program in 2015 to help build Atlanta’s Herbal Infrastructure, offering agro-education and herbalistic opportunity, sowing the seeds for a more resilient city.
We welcome farmers, schools, and individuals, offering online resources and in-person opportunities at the Learning Garden to help folks grow, harvest, process, preserve and share herbs. For more detailed information about the program, please visit the Grow a Row Project Page.
Herbal medicine can truly be a medicine by and for the people. Now more than ever we need to roll up our sleeves and provide herbal support in our communities. HerbCare Packs and HerbCare Stations are an easy way to distribute simple and safe remedies in the community.
Here we share two guides: one for making HerbCare Packs, and the other for Creating an HerbCare Station. For more detailed information and additional resources, please see the HerbCare Packs and HerbCare Stations project pages.
Creating an HerbCare Station GuideWhen we offer to care for someone’s feet, we are taking their ability to navigate the world into our very hands. Our feet lead us to food, water, shelter, and work. They are our contact with the earth and our means of escaping danger. They both inform and reflect our experience as we walk, run, skip, stumble, tiptoe, stroll, sprint, limp, and dance our way through life.
In my experience as a foot worker, I take that responsibility seriously. Through these manuals, I hope to help folks better understand how to offer the hardworking feet of our friends on the street, the comfort and care they deserve. For more information on Herbal Foot Care, please see the Foot Care project page.
Here we share two guides.
The first is the 2012 Edition of the Harriet Tubman Foot Care Manual with some updates in 2015.
And this one is a guide prepared more recently with a deeper focus on specific complaints. For more detailed information and additional resources, please see the Herbal Foot Care project page.
Filled with practical resources and protocols for the community herbalist and folks in general, this guide was started in March of 2020 and has been continually updated ever since.
It covers a range of topics such as basic COVID information; sanitation concerns (including how to make your own hand sanitizer); personal prevention; community living prevention; dealing with stress and anxiety; cold-care kitchen medicine; basic home care for mild illness; recuperation; clinical and apothecary concerns; and oh so much more.
Recently we have also added a section on Long Covid.
Let’s keep each other safe and healthy!
Creative Commons Licensing
Respect the Commons!
Herbalista’s work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This license is also known as “CC by 4.0”. Here is a human-readable summary of (and not a substitute for) the actual license cut and was pasted from the CC by 4.0 website. Please go to their website for more information.
You are free to:
- Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
- Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material or any purpose, even commercially.
(The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Under the following terms:
- Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
- ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.
- No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.
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