About Me

Cultivating Connection for Collective Healing

Kenneth D. Smith, Ph.D.
I’m a population health economist, systems thinker, and engaged researcher.

My work supports community-based organizations, cross‑sector coalitions, and national nonprofit organizations committed to change management, collective impact, and transformative systems change.

I focus on improving physical and mental wellness and sustaining substance use recovery by strengthening relationships, aligning systems, and supporting communities in building durable pathways to healing and resilience.

This work has led me to explore how connection itself—felt, practiced, and embodied—can become a foundation for collective healing.

A Global Movement of Embodied Connection

The Wisdom of Touch is a global movement dedicated to cultivating connection as a pathway to collective healing. Through touch, movement, and shared presence, we invite embodied practices that strengthen relationships, restore trust, and support individual and communal wellbeing. WOT brings people together in ways that honor lived experience, cultural lineage, and the quiet intelligence that emerges when bodies meet in safety and care.

The Wisdom of Touch brings together five interwoven frameworks that orient us toward embodied knowing, relational coherence, and the quiet intelligence that emerges through movement, rhythm, and connection.

Enactivism

Knowing through participation
We understand mind, body, and world as inseparable—each arising through relationship and action. From an enactive perspective, meaning is not stored inside us or imposed from outside, but brought forth through lived experience. In The Wisdom of Touch, understanding emerges through movement, sensation, and encounter, as knowing unfolds in the act of relating.

Systems Thinking

Seeing patterns, not parts

Systems thinking invites us to look beyond isolated elements to the dynamic relationships that give rise to behavior, health, and culture. Rather than asking what is wrong with an individual, we ask how patterns organize across bodies, relationships, communities, and environments. The Wisdom of Touch works at this relational level, cultivating conditions for coherence, feedback, and mutual regulation to emerge over time.

Polyvagal Theory

Listening to the nervous system’s story

Polyvagal Theory offers a language for understanding how safety, connection, and threat are embodied through the nervous system. It reminds us that behavior is often a physiological response to perceived conditions, not a personal failure. In The Wisdom of Touch, this perspective supports touch and movement practices that invite regulation, trust, and social engagement.

African Diaspora Performance Cosmology

Movement as memory and meaning

We work within African Diasporic Performance Cosmology, where movement is memory, rhythm is relationship, and embodied ritual restores connection between self, community, ancestors, and the sacred. In partnership with Baba Obediah Wright, we are co‑creating a curriculum that carries this living lineage into contemporary somatic practice.

Laban Movement Analysis

A lens for naming what movement already knows

Within The Wisdom of Touch, Laban Movement Analysis serves as an interpretive lens, helping us notice and name the subtle choreography already alive within African diasporic movement practices: the rhythms of approach and retreat, the textures of trust and containment, and the shared phrasing through which presence becomes collective.

Why Partner With Me?

I partner with organizations and coalitions seeking durable, systems‑level change in health, wellness, and recovery. My work integrates academic rigor, lived experience, and embodied practice to strengthen collaboration, align strategy with values, and cultivate the relational trust that sustains impact. Together, we develop grounded, scalable approaches that support transformation across individuals, organizations, and communities.

Explore a Partnership