Built on love, driven by loss, powered by purpose.
Hemi's Holistic Healing House exists because the women who need recovery the most have nowhere to go. We're building the place that should have existed years ago.
Meet Our Founder
Dhorea Ramanula
Dhorea watched it happen over and over. Women showing up at emergency rooms, cycling through shelters, getting turned away from recovery programs because there was no bed, no program, no space designed for them. Indigenous women. Women of colour. LGBTQ+ women. Women without children. The system wasn't built for them.
So she built something herself.
In 2022, Dhorea founded Hemi's Healing Centre and named it after her mother, Hemangini — a woman who survived decades of addiction and found her way to sobriety. Hemi's House is her legacy: a sacred space for the women the system continues to overlook.
Dhorea is Métis and a Woman of Colour. She serves as UBCO's Community Engagement Facilitator, is the former President of BC's Black Women In Excellence, and co-founded National Suicide Awareness Day in 2004. She sits on multiple community boards across the Okanagan.
She didn't start Hemi's because it was a good idea. She started it because women are dying while they wait.
Why Hemi's House Needs to Exist
The Okanagan has 10 addiction and mental health recovery facilities that serve men.
It has 3 that serve women.
It has zero that serve LGBTQ+ women, women without children, or self-identifying individuals.
Every month, 120 to 300 women are on a waitlist for a recovery bed in our region. Every night, 11 to 18 more are waiting just for a place to sleep safely.
These aren't numbers. They're mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends waiting for care that doesn't exist yet.
OUR VALUES
What We Stand For
Radical Inclusion
We are the only recovery program in the Okanagan that explicitly serves all self-identifying women, 2SLGBTQ+ individuals, Indigenous women, women of colour, and women living with disabilities. If you need help, you belong here.
Whole-Person Healing
Addiction doesn't start in the body. It starts in pain, trauma, and disconnection. Our programs treat the root — through art therapy, yoga, reiki, Indigenous healing practices, and bio-resonance therapy — not just the symptom.
Cultural Safety
We don't offer one-size-fits-all care. Indigenous healing practices, culturally informed programming, and deep respect for each woman's identity, background, and lived experience are built into everything we do.
Non Punitive Healing
Healing doesn't happen in fear. Our environment is compassionate and non-judgmental. We don't punish setbacks. We meet women where they are and walk forward together.
Empowerment, Not Dependence
We walk alongside women — not in front of, not behind. Every woman sets her own path. We give her the tools, the support, and the space to reclaim her life on her terms.
Community Beyond Our Walls
No one heals alone. We build circles of support, connection, and belonging that reach past Hemi's House into the neighbourhoods, families, and relationships where recovery actually lives.
This sacred space is for warriors.
Hemi's House was built for the women who fight every day — against addiction, against a system that wasn't designed for them, against the silence that says their pain doesn't matter.
We see you. You are not alone. And with your help, neither is she.