Odigo Wellness

Written By Marie Campos

Community-Centered Health and Wellness

 

In October 2024, community members gathered at 3115 Hennepin Ave S. to celebrate the grand opening of Odigo Wellness, a collectively owned wellness center focused on integrative care.

Odigo Wellness is an integrative space where community members can receive trauma-informed care. Services range from non-force chiropractic with Dr. Brenna and highly individualized naturopathic medicine with Dr. Q. to cost-effective, multilingual offerings like community acupuncture and community reiki. Odigo is multilingual and able to connect with clients looking for bodywork in Spanish, French, and Wolof.

Their mission is to support community members and providers alike, which means finding creative ways to balance the difficult line between affordability for clients and sustainability for the providers doing the work. Two examples of this are their community acupuncture and community Reiki, both offered with sliding-scale payment and clients sharing space.

The Lake Street Council is proud to be an early supporter of the project through a $10,000 pre-development grant and a $25,000 acquisition loan, supporting them in purchasing the building for their practice.

Nada de eso hubiera sido possible sin el gran apoyo de nuestra comunidad. //

Absolutely none of this would have been possible, without the tremendous support of our community

  • Marakah Mancini de León, PhD, Director of Cooperative Strategy, Co-Owner of Odigo Wellness

After the building was purchased, the Lake Street Council continued to support ODIGO through an Exterior Improvement Grant for signage and one-on-one marketing technical assistance for public relations efforts around their grand opening. In addition to support from the Lake Street Council, Odigo Wellness collaborated with many local partners to build this community space, including The City of Minneapolis, Elevate Hennepin, Hortensia Law, NewPublica, NewPrensa, JLLB Media, artist Andrés Guzman, and so many more. 

Below is an interview with Marakah Mancini de León, PhD, Director of Cooperative Strategy, Co-Owner of Odigo Wellness

How has Odigo Wellness been doing since the Grand Opening in October?

Ever since our grand opening in October, amazing people have been coming out of the woodwork to say they want to be a part of Odigo Wellness. We welcome more of that! Since all of our rooms are shared space, we still have plenty of time available for lease, and can’t wait to see the ways the circle will continue to expand in the new year!

Tell us about some of the Odigo Wellness team.

We started with four initial co-owners, from different backgrounds and walks of life. My wife, Tato León Mancini, is one of our co-owners and is our rock. She keeps the building in beautiful shape for clients and practitioners and supports us all in everything we do. But as soon as we closed on the building, other incredible practitioners started stepping up and driving different pieces of the work. We now have a sweet little team of staff and volunteers, who make the magic happen. In fact, one of the people who’s done the most to make our work accessible…wasn’t even a practitioner until this fall! Guadalupe González and her wife have been involved in tenants’ rights work in Uptown for several years, and now she’s bringing her community organizing skills to Odigo. Guadalupe is also a natural healer – having discovered her own natural healing power at the age of 11. Now that she’s certified in reiki, she’s able to serve the community!

What does it mean to you to do community work and provide care to marginalized communities? 

Most of the providers at Odigo Wellness are members of communities that have historically been marginalized. Our building is BIPOC-, queer-, immigrant and women-owned, so when we are working to support members of our communities, our clients’ experiences resonate with our own lived experience.

We’re also trying to be as practical as possible about ways to sustain the work for the long haul. I’ve been supporting worker-owned cooperatives since 2017. One of the lessons I learned from working closely with the Third Root Community Health Center in Brooklyn was that it’s key for organizations like ours to own our space, whenever possible. Buying our building was a huge leap of faith and a very heavy lift—but we feel strongly about the level of agency it gives us.

What do you love most about working in wellness and health?

When I first started massage school, part-time while continuing my union organizing work, I thought that it was just a hobby. By the time I did a clinic rotation at Pathways—in the building that would later become Odigo Wellness—I got the honor of seeing a client take her first deep breath in a year and a half…and I was hooked.

Since then, my clients and I have shared countless life-changing experiences, and I’ve continued to expand my own wheelhouse. Most recently, I added Somatic Experiencing to my offerings, and was able to recruit two colleagues from my Somatic Experiencing cohort to join me at Odigo. Like many of our modalities, this one is rooted in science and highly effective at healing trauma, yet often surprises me along the way. That’s what keeps me coming back to the work, day after day: the results, and the discoveries we get to make together.

 

In the future, Odigo’s goal is to expand and include more practitioners as collective owners. As well as expand their multilingual offerings. For now, they’re doing what they know they can do which is to provide high quality, integrated care by practitioners who are reflective of the community they serve. 

 
Marie Campos
Next

COPAL