A healing-centric, liberatory leadership model that invests in BIPOC movement leaders impacting the Colorado ecosystem. Welcome to our quarterly publication, TRANSPiRE!
Image credit: Artwork inspired by TLC Cohort 4 and illustrated by Téyo Saree Abraham
Beloved,
When we founded TLC in 2017, we were in the early years of Trump’s presidency and reacting to attack after attack on our various communities. We knew we needed a critical intervention to support, sustain and transform BIPOC leadership for our movements.
We could not anticipate what was to come – didn’t fully understand that TLC would be even more important today – on the eve of the 2024 election – than it was back then. The steady increase of multiple crises and extreme events (or polycrisis), accompanied by polarizing narratives and the rise of authoritarianism across the globe, is leading to life-and-death conditions for greater numbers of our communities and a daily assault on all of our psyches. We are witnessing extreme right-wing forces in multiple religions weaponize identity and trauma to run their agendas of greed, violence and power. From book bans and the dismantling of “DEI,” to the de-platforming and defunding of those speaking out about Palestine, we are facing authoritarian repression and restrictions on our freedoms. In response, we are experiencing (or stuffing down) so many difficult emotions: grief, despair, paralysis, numbness, anger, isolation and alienation.
Nurturing deep relationships and solidarity that can withstand conflict and the forces trying to divide us, will ultimately be the most important survival strategy in the days to come.
In this context, we have discovered that TLC’s work is more important than we initially realized. Creating a safe and vulnerable container to collectively learn from and metabolize these difficult emotions (without being attacked or judged) is essential to our ability to get unstuck and take action. Nurturing deep relationships and solidarity that can withstand conflict and the forces trying to divide us, will ultimately be the most important survival strategy in the days to come. Practicing healthy interdependence and reciprocity is also foundational for the mutual aid that we are already relying on as institutions continue to attack or fail us. We know that cultivating deep self-awareness and relationship with our intuition and our body is required for clarity and clarity through challenging conditions. Decolonizing ourselves from the internalized messages that we were all socialized into will ensure that we don’t replicate the very oppressions that we are fighting against. And learning how to embody rest, care, joy, and creativity is absolutely vital to our ability to be truly resilient and have the inspiration to create a more beautiful future.
With each TLC cohort, we keep learning the lesson that this is not “fluffy stuff” or a “distraction” from our systemic change and justice efforts. In fact, these are the essential ingredients of the multi-racial feminist democracy that has yet to be fully actualized and is increasingly at peril. The world needs visionary progressives from all walks of life to come together and protect the earth, each other and life itself. If diverse BIPOC from different backgrounds, spiritualities/faiths, intersecting identities, geographies and experiences of racism in Colorado can come together and experience a taste of belonging in a loving and accountable community, even if it is for a moment, we know that we have the seeds of hope for a world where the best of our humanity thrives.
We are so grateful to all of you – our TLC family, fellows, supporters, allies, co-founders – who continue to believe in this experiment of radical love and leadership. We hope that we are doing justice to the TLC vision, and are always open to your feedback and guidance on how to best steward this precious collective resource.
With Love,
TLC Team
Updates this Quarter
TLC is a Pathway
TLC Cohort 4 graduation photo by Fatberry Photos
How do we leave behind the present realities of compounded oppressive forces and legacies of harm while we actively build a different world? This we know to be true, TLC is a pathway to the future.
Look no further than the 2023-2024 TLC Fellowship, Cohort 4: 22 BIPOC powerhouses who completed the program in June and are actively embracing a healing-centric, liberatory leadership as they collectively push for change. Cohort 4 fellows joined the growing and thriving TLC Network of 82 BIPOC leaders from 60 organizations addressing a multitude of social justice issues.
To date, four generations of fellows have experienced the TLC journey, including executive leadership and senior management leaders of movement organizations, entrepreneurs who have launched their own businesses, and leaders who ran for and either held or are currently serving in public office in our state. The transformation they bring to our state continues to reverberate.
“I am feeling called to enter the social justice space in a more intentional way. I’m no longer interested in competing or fighting; instead, I want to build safe spaces where we can shift our focus from merely surviving to truly thriving. I want to help people heal their personal challenges and open themselves up to the opportunity to co-create in authentic partnership. This approach can foster a more collaborative and supportive ecosystem, where genuine connections and shared goals lead to more impactful and sustainable social justice efforts.” – Cohort 4 Fellow
BIPOC leaders within the Colorado social justice ecosystem who complete the year-long TLC Fellowship increase their ability to organize around and win systemic change; vision and experiment with alternatives to existing systems; and build thriving, resilient communities. We do this by providing: (a) holistic and culturally relevant leadership development, (b) resources and direct experiences around trauma-informed care, restoration, and healing, (c) training around decolonial, liberatory, and re-indigenizing frameworks for our work, and (d) a powerful peer network and community that fosters support, safety, belonging, and experimentation. TLC’s vision is to create an interdependent, collective leadership space that weaves together BIPOC leaders, organizations, and movements to create liberatory interventions in our state ecosystem.
It has become clear to us that spaces that cultivate deep healing and transformation to help leaders move through this shadow work and rise to the leadership that this moment demands are both required and missing. TLC formed as a place where BIPOC leaders could address the consequences of these challenges that typically get pushed aside to the shadows of our day-to-day work (trauma, burnout, ego, conflict, abuse, systemic inequities) until they explode – fracturing leaders, organizations, and even whole communities with the fallout. We created the TLC fellowship to fill this void and create a bridge that BIPOC leaders could move through from existing conditions into the future we are dreaming of and fighting for.
Graduate Spotlight: Ash Ferguson
We caught up with Ash Ferguson, Co-Executive Director at Soul 2 Soul Sisters and a 2023-2024 TLC Fellowship graduate, to get a glimpse of her TLC story.
Image courtesy of Ash Ferguson
Ash: The experience in its totality was really transformative for me as a leader. Despite not knowing anyone within the group, I feel like I left with family. TLC cultivated an intimate space and a safer container for fellows to see each other as humans – in our growth and in our struggle. Personal and collective experiences took place and we were able to hold each other in vulnerable ways that were deeply healing.
Ash: I am the type of person that’s like, “don’t talk about it, be about it.” For me, being authentic in my work and in my life means offering something to the world that is an embodied practice. Through TLC, learning about conflict resolution and how to sit in circle together invited a different type of healing. For instance, I was able to connect with little Ash through breath work, and reuniting with my child self and parts of myself that I became separated from and that was only possible within the TLC container. I am so grateful for the healing that was possible in the community space we created, and to be able to take that back into my work space as I offer healing space for others.
As a Black person in this world, there are so many systems that keep us disembodied, systems that show us that being tired and pushing beyond our limits is the way to lead. Making sure that I have my healing practices, that I am taking excellent care of myself is how I ensure I have the capacity to show up every day to the work. Being affirmed by TLC in this was very healing. I refuse to do the work the way my mom and my grandma were taught, that you work your body, your mind, your spirit to the bone. Instead, I cultivate spaces for myself and my staff to care well for ourselves and be cared for. How do we do the work from a place of wellness, from a place of overflow? That’s the world I want am building.
Ash: TLC needs to be the metronome and set the pace and the tone for how we are doing the work within the ecosystem. If BIPOC leaders and organizations can start from a place of skills, resources and tools like the ones TLC provides, the work would be more sustainable and less people would leave the movement.There would be more moments to pause, moments of slow down and collective breaths in order to be strategic. I think about how I can take this foundation into my work, how can I enhance the models of wellness, cohesion and relationships? So that we are more than just the work, we are human focused.
Who We Are Matters
Updates from the TLC Network
Increasing Capacity in the Colorado Ecosystem
Because of limited options within our Colorado ecosystem, we often engage with out-of-state talent for our leadership coaching needs – most notably when we are prioritizing BIPOC professionals. Well, that’s all about to change. Healing-centric and liberation oriented coaching by BIPOC professionals is coming to Colorado and on the hands of our beautiful TLC community who is getting prep’d to resource the local ecosystem. A contingency of TLCers is currently training with our partners at Coaching for Healing Justice and Liberation through a 9-month long journey. TLC graduates from Cohort 4, Ash Ferguson, Angelica Prisciliano and Beatriz Soto, along with TLC Program Manager, Tania Soto Valenzuela are honing skills to support peers in the movement – across both personal and professional realms – with a healing justice lens. It is worth noting that TLC’s Co-Founders & Co-EDs are certified coaches / CHJL alumna and have been providing key support to TLC Network leaders. We are excited to add on to this capacity within the Colorado ecosystem!
Investing in Us and Each Other
As a founding partner, we continue to bolster the local entrepreneurial infrastructure by investing in ShopBIPOC.com, an initiative stewarded by the Center for Community Wealth Building (an organization led by TLC graduate Yessica Holguin). Since its launch in 2023, this platform is helping to promote and support over 634 Colorado-based BIPOC-owned businesses. We invite everyone in our orbit to consider investing in Colorado entrepreneurs of color by supporting ShopBIPOC!
Weaving Tight Collaborations
At the root of collaboration is interdependence, and TLC is intentional about the generative ways in which we foster webs of support for this critical work. Our partners bring expertise in a number of areas, including ancestral healing practices, body-centered (somatic) practices, liberatory leadership, coaching, trauma-informed care, transformative justice and generative conflict skills, decolonization and reindigenization practices, and much more. This year, our national collaborators included: Leadership Learning Community/ Liberatory Leadership Community of Practice, Black Organizing for Leadership Development, Coaching for Healing, Justice and Liberation, Standing In Our Power, Center on Worker Innovation @ Rutgers University, Regenerate from Within, Wealth Reclamation Academy of Practitioners, Agua y Sangre Healing, Richael Faithful, and Gaia C Paxia Consulting. Local partners in 2024 included: Candice Rose Valenzuela, Claudia Barfoot Medicina Tierra, Resilient Futures, Wise Moon Wellness, Alchemy Medicine Clinic, Apprentice of Peace, Empathy Grown, Urban Sanctuary, Empower Black Project, Intune Wellness and Satya Yoga Cooperative.
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.
The Call of Leadership Now: BIPOC Leaders in a Syndemic Era
by Neha Mahajan and Felicia Griffin
We are living through a syndemic—a time of multiple crises causing seismic economic, political, environmental, technological, and social shifts, which are long from being settled.1 Black, Indigenous, people of color, and Global South communities are at the frontlines and faultlines of these changes that are reshaping the world. Institutions, hierarchies, and forms of leadership rooted in Western colonial ideology are failing, being renegotiated, and getting deconstructed—even in the face of intense backlash.
A Community Creates Denver’s First Resident-Owned Mobile Home Park
By Andrea Chiriboga-Flor (TLC graduate)
It took two years, but in the Westwood neighborhood of Denver, an 80-family community of mobile homes is on track to become the first resident-owned manufactured housing park in Denver. While resident-owned communities are on the rise across the country, Colorado is also home to some of the biggest, most predatory corporate park landlords in the country, such as Yes! Communities, Ascentia, and RV Horizons-Impact Communities, the last of which was featured in a segment by John Oliver for their inhumane practices.
Two Weeks in, I Already Wanted to Quit: Challenges Faced by a Queer Black Woman in Nonprofit Leadership
by Nadine Bridges (TLC graduate)
As a queer Black woman in leadership—often the first—I want to emphasize the loneliness that has marked my journey to becoming the executive director of an LGBTQ+ organization in the nonprofit sector.
I have been gaslighted, discounted, and undermined at every junction of my career. I found that if I stayed the course, was successful, and did not outshine or question my White progressive counterparts, then I was okay—but as soon as I began to speak up about inequities occurring in my workplace, then suddenly I did not have emotional intelligence, or was taking things too personally, or somehow not only did leadership feel bothered by my “attitude” but also (phantom) staff felt the same. (Staff members were never named, leading to my paranoia vis-à-vis coworkers I once thought I could trust.)
Invest in TLC and Strengthen the Colorado Social Justice Ecosystem
Amidst the challenges we all witness and experience, we ground in the present with courage and community. We are grateful for the many donors, funders, supporters who invest in TLC and the future we dream of, and hold these investments with great care. Our commitment to a thriving future and a bold vision grows with every gift – today, we welcome yours. Please consider becoming a sustainer with TLC and invest long term with us!
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.