Ongoing Initiatives

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Past Offerings

CHL’s work is rooted in a commitment to deep listening and to what emerges from that listening. To meet the challenges of our times, sometimes we need an oasis, sometimes we need a journey, and sometimes we need a laboratory. 

CHL works to create nourishing initiatives that foster joy, ease and rest. We also explore ways that we can reshape cultural understandings and act for change in our world. We continue to forge new partnerships as we move forward into what is possible.

Current Initiatives

Honoring the diversity of our Blackness:

Black Women’s Nourishment Retreats 

Black women so often must live in emergency response mode. Support for our rest is very rare. Black women frequently experience a blend of intersectional oppressions and erasure. 

Black women need spaces to come together, listen to each other deeply, support and affirm each other, celebrate, heal and nourish ourselves. At our Black women’s nourishment retreats, we offer open spaces in which Black women can heal, talk, play, move, reflect, learn from each other, rest, be in nature, and dream. 

In 2023, CHL offered two four-day Black Women’s Nourishment Retreats—one at Commonweal in Bolinas, CA, and one at the Whidbey Institute on Whidbey Island, WA. Almost 50 women gathered for these journeys of deep rest and healing. Our community of sisters and siblings explored the fundamental reality that our healing and our liberation are never separate. 

These were gatherings thick with kindness and generosity, mutual grace, and honoring the diversity of our Blackness. We talked, laughed and rested. We oiled each other’s hair. We meditated and dreamed. We played and sang. We grieved and released. 

Women said:

  • I was praying for something like this and then the invitation came and I knew I had to come.

  • I am here and I trust that someone in this room knows and understands.

  • The retreat breathed new life into me, and every day since I feel reenergized, more open, optimistic, and more connected with myself. Perhaps most nourishing was the love and acceptance I receive from the care team and participants. I did not realize how isolated and in need of community I was. 

The momentum of our Black Women’s retreats is growing. It is flowing in divine time, and there is much more to come.

Three Black Men:

A Journey into the Magical Otherwise

In 2023 the Center for Healing and Liberation brought together three visionary Black leaders—Resmaa Menakem, Bayo Akomolafe and Orland Bishop—for the first time. These men saw the possibility of uniting to investigate the urgent questions of our time. As we reckon with the legacies of historical harms, the normative murder of Black and Brown bodies, climate change, and surging global inequities, how might we respond in ways we have not yet imagined?  

To dream our futures into being, we need emancipatory spaces of healing, exploration and discovery. In 2023, the Three Black Men project traced the Transatlantic slave route in reverse, with public events on each man’s home continent (in the US, Brazil and Ghana).

This project convened community gatherings in which these leaders guided collective inquiry into liberation in our world. The Three Black Men sense into emergent possibilities that speak to what we need now, triangulating toward a synthesis of new forms, new magic, and new directions. 

Under the weight of oppression and westernization, Blackness is widely framed as negative and evil—leading over and over to grievous harm. This project celebrates Blackness. As we cultivate healing, we know that we are not separate from this Earth, and our liberation-birthright is here.

Along with the reflections and teachings of the three men, the joyful Black-centering gatherings incorporate art, song, dance, rituals of deep care, inquiry practices and small-group conversations. Our explorations in Los Angeles, at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center, were potent and far-reaching. A Black men’s gathering served 60 people, while an open-to-everyone gathering served 125 in-person and 600 livestream participants. 

One emergent focus was Black men’s tenderness and need for nourishing connection that honors their aliveness. This is a revolutionary conversation on a theme invisible in public discourse. Our LA partner Aaron Johnson (of the Chronically UnderTouched Project) will continue to meet with Black men from the gathering, exploring tenderness and healing touch.

In Salvador, Brazil, our Black men’s gathering hosted approximately 70 participants while 250 joined our open-to-everyone gathering, plus other small convenings. Honoring Black women is a bright thread in this work. Our Brazilian partners spoke of their grief and frustration over the high level of violence against Black bodies, especially Black women, in Salvador. Men and women spoke of their commitment to peace, unity, women’s rights and women’s well-being. Many ideas for projects arose, which will be led by Brazilians.     

In Salvador, our team was spiritually anchored by a historic Candomblé temple—Ilé Àṣẹ Ìyá Nasò Ọka, or CasaBranca—led by three Black women elders, and founded in the 1800s by three free African women. It was clear that the ocean-deep resilience of these Afro-Brazilian communities is sustained by the deep remembering held by these practitioners. This fed into our evolving sense of how cultural containers can carry multigenerational medicine. 

In December 2023, the Three Black Men journey traveled to Accra, Ghana for a profound encounter with the African homeland. Our group of travelers connected with Ghanaian community members and ritual practitioners of African spirituality for this part of the journey. Our time in Ghana included touring the Dubois Center, which evoked deep reflection about Black visionaries. The stunning Asenema waterfall invited cleansing and renewal, with traditional priests leading libations. The group explored the medicinal resources of the land and, at a Vodou shrine, learned from the shrine priest about African spiritual technologies and practices—tools given by our ancestors.

A wrenching and powerful experience in the center of the journey was a ritual ceremony at the Cape Coast slave dungeons, the departure point of so many abducted Africans. After ceremonial washing of our feet, hands and faces, we wore white and walked barefoot through the streets of Cape Coast to the dungeons. There each of us entered into our own unique experience, grieving, praying, visioning, reflecting and connecting with the ancestors.  

As we integrated the raw intensity of this encounter over the following days, our journey was balanced and leavened with drumming, dancing, hugs, delicious Ghanaian food, many rich conversations in community gatherings with Resmaa, Bayo and Orland, and opportunities to both digest the experience and touch joy. 

As the impact of this three-continent journey ripples out across many communities, a documentary film about the Three Black Men journey is now in production.  

Learn more about the project and documentary film at:

2021-2022 Initiatives

  • In 2022, CHL held a leadership role in implementing the Racial Healing Initiative (RHI) to foster racial healing and systemic change in retreat centers around the nation. Retreat centers can be refuges of healing, renewal and discovery, but most are historically white-led with majority-white participants. The RHI initiative works to help structures mature beyond nominal inclusion so that BIPOC people can experience full and authentic belonging on an energetic level, and wholeheartedly engage in rest, renewal and exploration in retreat center settings.

    RHI is a project held in partnership with Commonweal, the Fetzer Institute, and the Retreat Center Collaboration (RCC). It is funded through a Kellogg Foundation grant. In 2022, guided by CHL, the RHI team delivered trainings in six retreat centers and offered racial healing community calls and workshops for RCC members, overall serving an estimated 300+ people. The multi-year initiative is being developed in phases and could ultimately be scaled to reach thousands of people. In 2023, after helping to successfully establish this initiative, CHL stepped back from direct RHI involvement while continuing to offer our strongest support.

  • In 2022, CHL partnered with Cristina Orbe, Lisa Smith and Milicent Johnson of the Octavia Fund, to launch nourishment retreats for Black women. The first four-day retreat was held at Commonweal in March 2022.

  • In October 2022, we coordinated a panel discussion called Building a Global Anti-racist Movement, with proceeds benefiting The Social Justice Agency in South Africa and CHL. Anti-racism movements around the world operate in different cultures and contexts, yet there is fundamental common ground in the work of liberation. We brought together an international panel of racial justice leaders to ask: Living in this body, this place, this moment, how do we cultivate healing and resilience, meet the immense challenges of our time, and grow the anti-racist movement locally and globally? Facilitated by CHL Director Victoria Santos, panelists included leading voices in the profound conversation around racial justice in our time and for future generations: Resmaa Menakem, Nova Reid, Dr. Robin DiAngelo, Leticia Nieto, Esther A. Armah, and Edwin Cleophas.

  • In partnership with the BIPOC ED Coalition of Washington State, we led a group of Black changemakers in an ongoing multi-month Consciousness Lab series with author and healer Orland Bishop.

  • We also supported two Black women who are antiracist changemakers in taking much-needed sabbaticals for renewal, rest and reconnection with their vision.

  • In February 2021, CHL hosted an online gathering with friend of Commonweal Orland Bishop, author of The Seventh Shrine: Meditations on the African Spiritual Journey. This gathering was for Black folks exploring a collective vision of healing and transformation, asking what that looks like for Black people in the US at this time. This gathering invited participants to reflect deeply on what is possible for Black Americans in today’s world as our time relates to MLK’s prophecy of the mountaintop.

  • October 2021. CHL facilitated this panel discussion with racial justice leaders Resmaa Menakem, Nova Reid, Leticia Nieto, Robin DiAngelo, Edwin Cleophas. While the institutionalization of white supremacy originated in the U.S., it now circulates globally. The Black Lives Matter movement also originated in the U.S. but galvanized antiracism movements worldwide. This panel addressed the similarities and the differences across cultures and countries, the challenges and opportunities of this particular moment, and how we might move forward at the local and global levels. Our panel of international racial justice leaders offered a deep and multifaceted reflection on where we were at that time and how we can advance healing and cultural transformation.