Gina E. Miranda Samuels Awarded Healing Illinois Grant for Statewide Racial Healing Initiative

Gina E. Miranda Samuels, PhD, Professor at the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice and Faculty Director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture (CSRPC), has received a Healing Illinois grant from the Field Foundation and the Illinois Department of Human Services for the project Roots Unbound: Stories of Removal, Identity, and Return.

The Healing Illinois program supports initiatives that advance racial healing across the state. This year’s competition received 695 applications, with 193 projects selected for funding. Roots Unbound is among just 25 projects awarded statewide initiative funding, underscoring its significance and reach.

Roots Unbound is an all–adoptee of color–led initiative centered on adopted and fostered adults with histories of displacement from their families of origin—a population rarely addressed collectively in post-placement services or racial healing efforts. Through narrative workshops, creative practice labs, and a public arts showcase, the project advances restorative storytelling while building a living archival record of adoptee and foster alumni experiences.

The initiative is developed in collaboration with Professor Samuels’s Black Adoption Project and is housed through her faculty directorship at CSRPC. It is produced in partnership with Gabriel Gutierrez, an adult adoptee and founder of MoFundamentals, the only adoptee- and foster youth–led hip hop dance program in the United States. MoFundamentals uses trauma-informed, resiliency-centered street dance and arts practices to support healing, storytelling, and collective care within foster and adoptee communities.

Both Professor Samuels and Gutierrez were adopted through the Cook County Department of Children and Family Services, grounding the collaboration in shared lived experience alongside scholarly, artistic, and community expertise.

The award recognizes CSRPC’s leadership in community-engaged, arts-based approaches to racial healing and affirms the importance of centering lived expertise, narrative justice, and archival repair in race scholarship and cultural practice.