A healing-centric, liberatory leadership model that invests in BIPOC movement leaders impacting the Colorado ecosystem. Welcome to our quarterly publication, TRANSPiRE!

Photo by Chris F

“Rest is not some cute little luxury item you grant yourself as an extra treat after you’ve worked like a machine and are not burnt out. Rest is our path to liberation. A portal for healing. A human right.” – Tricia Hersey, Nap Ministry

Beloved,

In modern, western capitalist culture, the year’s first quarter is a time of busyness. It’s the time for new year’s resolutions, the start of legislative sessions and brand new budgets for the fiscal year. But this pressure to ramp up our energy is at odds with the rhythms of the earth and our bodies, which are calling for slowness and hibernation. Days are still short, the lakes are still frozen, and seeds are still dormant under the cold surface of the soil. In the spirit of realigning our culture to the season, I invite you into this reflection on rest.

Last year I had the privilege of taking my first extended break from both movement organizing and nonprofit work since 2005. The last 20 years have been filled with intense, passionate work, but also many rounds of burn-out and sacrificed personal dreams. Throughout most of this time, I struggled to accept that I needed a break. Growing up as the eldest daughter of immigrants, my sense of worth, value, and responsibility has been deeply tied to work. This is amplified in the movement world, which promotes a culture of martyrdom. Many of us who come from communities of color operate unconsciously from a place of “survivor’s guilt,” and feel we must pay for any opportunities, privileges – or simply being alive – with this sacrifice.

We made a commitment to change this culture in our ecosystem – which means we made a commitment to start the change in ourselves.

When the women of color co-founders of TLC came together, we noticed that there was almost a negative competition around who took the least time off. It was considered a badge of honor to never take a vacation, let alone a day off – unless you landed in the hospital and literally could not physically work. We made a commitment to change this culture in our ecosystem – which means we made a commitment to start the change in ourselves.  After years of encouraging my peers in the ecosystem to take their vacations and enact sabbatical policies in their organizations, I had to take a hard look in the mirror and call myself into greater alignment between what I was preaching vs. practicing. 

I am still processing the lessons and gifts of my four-month sabbatical. I was tempted to fill my days with travel, classes, and activities, but instead challenged myself to simply “do” less and “be” more. I leaned into slow starts to the day, unstructured time, less instant communication, fewer to-do lists.

This allowed me to care for my body, spirit, and relationships in profound ways. It gave me the space to get to know myself again, as a whole human being on this earth, and less attached to the identity of executive director, community leader or good worker. It was vulnerable to lean into trust, receive care from the team, and practice interdependence. It was both humbling and empowering to know that while I was missed, the work continued in a beautiful way without me.

As I transitioned back to my role at TLC, I have been confronted with the divisions of the world and tensions within our communities. The embodied practice of rest has allowed me to meet these challenges with a bit more grace, curiosity, and neutrality than I would have been able to access before. It has convinced me on a cellular level that rest truly is a critical tool in both our resistance to oppression and creation of liberation.

In that spirit, TLC will continue to lovingly call in ourselves and our BIPOC leader peers to claim rest as one of our most fundamental birthrights of living on this planet.

With deep gratitude for the TLC team and governing circle for supporting my sabbatical journey,

Neha Mahajan, Co-Founder & Co-Executive Director, TLC


Updates this Quarter

TLC is a Pathway

2024 Wealth Reclamation Summit photo by URBN Brands

TLC defines wealth reclamation as “the process of rehabilitating privately controlled wealth to restore and nurture community health and vitality.” – WRAP

On December 9th, 2024, we held our second annual Wealth Reclamation Summit bringing together over 140 BIPOC leaders in the Colorado ecosystem to build a collective vision for our communities. 

We believe that BIPOC leaders have a unique role in 1) reclaiming wealth that was extracted by colonialism, slavery and exploitation, 2) generating wealth in ways that creates a just economy, and 3) stewarding wealth in alignment with our values and towards our vision of the future.  

“We were talking about wealth reclamation, resilience and supporting BIPOC businesses and entrepreneurs and our own organizations and creating our own network of institutions and organizations that will help circulate resources, knowledge and power within our own interconnected relationships.” – Cohort 3 Fellow

We made space to dream our wildest dreams and inspire each other with stories of dreams coming true.  Refusing to give into the reality of discrimination and exclusion facing citizens returning from prison, Second Chance Center shared their amazing journey of building housing for their community from scratch. YAASPA shared an equally inspiring story of fighting to take over an Aurora public elementary school that was closed by the district and repurposing it for BIPOC youth programming. Justice for the People Legal Center shared a long fought win after supporting immigrant mobile home owners in Westwood, Denver to purchase their park, preventing displacement, gentrification and higher cost of living. These are just a few examples of the brilliant ideas – dreams, in progress and realized – that we exchanged together.

TLC is also a founding member of ShopBIPOC, who organized a vibrant vendor fair for local BIPOC entrepreneurs and contractors to connect with BIPOC nonprofit leaders to facilitate our vision of keeping wealth in our communities. From learning the nuts and bolts of acquiring capital to visioning a collective retreat center for multiple organizations, the wealth summit was alive with energy and hope. Thank you to all who attended and a special shout out to our partners: 

The Colorado Health Foundation

Center for Community Wealth Building 

Black Resilience in Colorado (BRIC) Fund

Denver’s Department of Economic Development and Opportunity

Graduate Spotlight: Roberto Meza

We caught up with Roberto Meza, Co-founder and Farmer at Emerald Gardens and 2022 TLC Graduate, Cohort 3, to get a glimpse of his TLC story.

Image courtesy of Roberto Meza

Roberto: My experience in TLC was profound. It was very healing, in ways that I never thought I needed. Oftentimes as leaders we feel that healing is our own individual endeavor – if we recognize that there is healing to be done in ourselves. TLC showed us what collective healing can do, when there is a group of people that are invested in your healing. There is a sense of connection, solidarity, encouragement, and bravery in that healing. TLC created a circle to hold space for all of our emotions that we were working through and provided a level of protection so we could work through them. That was the most powerful experience – to be held by other leaders in ways that I could feel safe and comfortable to be vulnerable in front of them. As a result, I reimagined my relationship to vulnerability, from a mindset of wholeness and strength. Our culture hasn’t been as cognizant that vulnerability can be a source of strength, resilience, integration and holistic understanding of ourselves.

Roberto: When you are aware of your own harm, it is a responsibility to heal it so that you don’t continue harming others. It’s so easy to perpetuate the harmful behaviors we have experienced and learned, even if we are not aware of it. It is a constant practice though; that’s why I think that healing is never done. Healing is a way of being and a way of life. As leaders, we can really work more effectively and on a deeper level than what’s stated in our organizations’ mission statements if we are actively working on ourselves.  TLC impacts communities beyond the individuals in our cohorts as we heal the ways we engage with our work, with our staff and with other people we meet in the community. Training ourselves to listen more deeply is how we are able to connect more meaningfully, especially in situations where anxiety or fear surface. For instance, I try to really listen to my team beyond what they are immediately saying and see what unmet needs are there. In my prior experiences, I would be triggered and respond accordingly, often trying to defend myself. Now, I am much more open and compassionate, curious about what people are really trying to say. It’s easier to fight back than it is to self regulate and slow down. Healing makes that possible.

Roberto: The role TLC plays is to model relationships that are so necessary, not only now but also as the world goes through different transitions and transformations. It models an experience that we can share with future generations of leaders and communities. TLC is such a unique organization, it fosters a culture and an environment where leaders can talk about the things that really don’t get talked about in other leadership programs. It offers a container where we deepen the relationship with the individual, with the collective, but also across time – relationship to our past, our present, our future. A container where we can exchange ideas and learn from each other, engaging with trauma, history, changes in our political climate, with our aspirational visions, with the joy that we want to cultivate. It is organic and complex. TLC is inventing new ways of cultivating our spiritual and material solidarity and giving leaders the opportunity to go through our own transformations. TLC is doing the work that very few organizations are able to do, and very few can do, because it requires that everyone in the organization and throughout the TLC Network remains committed to learning the skills and dedicating the resources for. Every iteration, every cohort, comes to provide even more resources as TLC continues to evolve and strengthen while it cultivates a metaphorical space. It will be exciting and important to also have a physical space that is uniquely TLC.


Who We Are Matters

Updates from the TLC Network

Top L-R: Angelica, Tania
Bottom L-R: Beatriz, Ash

The CHJL Cohort Graduates!

A contingency of TLCers completed a 9-month training with our partners at Coaching for Healing Justice and Liberation (CHJL) to become coaches! TLC graduates from Cohort 4, Ash Ferguson, Angelica Prisciliano and Beatriz Soto, along with TLC Program Manager, Tania Soto Valenzuela deepened their skills in healing-centric and liberation oriented coaching to be able to support peers in the movement – across both personal and professional realms. They join TLC’s Co-Founders & Co-EDs as certified coaches / CHJL alumna in providing key support to TLC Network leaders. We are excited to add on to this capacity within the Colorado ecosystem. Thank you to everyone who contributed towards the TLC Capacity Building Fund and in turn helped to increase coaching capacity in the Colorado ecosystem. Congratulations CHJL graduates!


Invest in Another World is Possible Fund

As individuals, what role can we play to help grow resistance movements? We owe it to ourselves and each other to do everything within possibility to nourish, grow and sustain networks of community care and support. Today, we offer you an opportunity to direct your abundance towards the Another World is Possible Fund, a collaboration between TLC and Chinook Fund, which is reopening in April 2025 to funnel rapid response funds to organizations impacted by political repression and funding cuts. We have each other and we will continue to support one another, even through the most hostile conditions. Give now. Give generously.

Donate to AWIP Fund


What we are Pondering

Our team is in reflection mode and distilling gems from various articles, books, podcasts, and more. We humbly offer some of the thought provoking pieces that are captivating our minds, hearts and spirits.

What It Takes to Heal

by Prentis Hemphill

Renowned healing justice activist and writer, Prentis Hemphill, author of the national bestseller book What it Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change The World, is one of the most prominent voices in the trauma conversation. This book offers a groundbreaking new way to heal on a personal and a collective level.


ShopBIPOC: Bridging the Gap in Colorado’s Business Landscape

By Karen Bartlett

“People have a real appetite for buying from local small businesses right now, but they can be hard to identify and find,” says Yessica Holguin, Executive Director of the Center for Community Wealth Building, one of ShopBIPOC’s founding organizations. “We care about closing the racial wealth gap and lifting entrepreneurs of color. We created ShopBIPOC to connect local BIPOC owned small businesses with a wider market.


Defunding Dissent

by Will Alden

Whatever abuse may await social justice organizations under the incoming Trump administration and its Republican allies in Congress, nonprofit officials I spoke with felt they’d had a taste of Trump-style bullying already. “Any foundation that is cutting off funding because of Palestine is basically behaving in a Trumpian way themselves,” said Saqib Bhatti, the executive director of the Action Center on Race and the Economy, a Chicago-based racial justice and corporate accountability organization. Many feel that the abandonment by progressive funders has left them more vulnerable to new threats from the right like the “nonprofit killer” bill.


Leadership & Race: A Call to Each Other

by Leadership Learning Community

Leadership Learning Community (LLC) believes that leadership is a site of transformation. For over 20 years, we have gathered leaders, researched leadership, and learned with leaders through collaboration, networks, and race equity. In 2019, as we shifted to a women of color-led organization, we began focusing on inviting leaders, particularly those from historically excluded communities such as Black, Indigenous, immigrant, people of color, LGBTQIA+, and people with disabilities, to live out the compelling vision of liberation – one which seeks power, joy, and thriving for all people.


Check out Masala y Maiz on Netflix’s Chef’s Table

In its latest season, Chef’s Table visits its first MICHELIN Bib Gourmand globally: Mexico City’s Masala y MaízFrom launching the People’s Kitchen Collective in Oakland to opening Masala y Maiz in Mexico City, be inspired by the leadership story of Chefs Norma Listman and Saquib Keval. Follow their journey to nurture global south solidarity through their incredible fusion flavors and deep commitment to social justice values.


Until Next Time

Thank you for receiving this quarterly offering, we look forward to returning to your Inbox before the end of the year with more news, announcements, and wisdom.