Healing with Nature: Salud Verde and the Plant-Based Healthcare Initiative
Mónica Berger González launched Salud Verde to address a critical gap in Central America: the lack of universal health coverage for rural and Indigenous communities. Her solution lies in the healing potential of Maya herbal medicine. A medical anthropologist and Central America Leadership Initiative Fellow, Mónica is addressing the healthcare crisis by scaling up safe, evidence-based applications of Maya ethnomedicine. Her work uplifts Indigenous expertise, regenerates critical ecosystems, and creates pathways for economic inclusion in communities long excluded from formal healthcare systems.
We need to bring a little cultural humility to health messaging and collaborate with traditional systems that have more leverage in communities. Social science is prepared to create these bridges between knowledge systems
Salud Verde is already making a measurable impact. The organization has catalogued over 600 traditional remedies, preserved more than 65 endangered medicinal plant species, and reforested 50 hectares of Indigenous land with over 12,000 seedlings. In partnership with Maya herbalists and Elders across 35 communities, Mónica and her team are advancing research into treatments for chronic and infectious diseases, while also generating green jobs for rural families—especially Indigenous women. They are now developing Guatemala’s first comprehensive, publicly accessible medicinal plant database and laying the groundwork for the Mesoamerican Institute for Indigenous Ethnomedicine.
What makes Mónica’s approach distinctive is her deep, long-standing collaboration with Indigenous communities and her commitment to mutual respect between traditional and scientific ways of knowing. Salud Verde’s intercultural, transdisciplinary model is not just preserving traditional medicine—it is activating it as a scalable solution to public health, ecological, and economic challenges. With support from the McNulty Foundation’s Catalyst Fund, Mónica is poised to expand this transformative work and continue redefining what equitable, culturally relevant healthcare can look like in Central America and beyond.
Conducting research of local medicinal plants
Woman sharing local knowledge with researchers