Our Initiatives
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Three Black Men
Wellness & Healing
Community Gatherings & Explorations
Partnerships & Capacity-Building
The Center For Healing and Liberation’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.
Center For Healing and Liberation’s 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.
a three-continent exploration of healing
About The Journey
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 united to 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 each other and this Earth, and our liberation-birthright is here.
The journey…from Los Angeles to Salvador to Accra
Our June 2023 events, held at the beautiful Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in Los Angeles, were potent explorations of healing and possibility. The program included a Black men’s gathering and an open-to-everyone gathering.
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.
In Salvador, Brazil, we also held a Black men’s gathering along with 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 ongoing projects arose, which will be led by Brazilians. For example, community leader Tiago Azeviche of Salvador, Bahia (who also went on participate in the Ghana journey) is leading ongoing gatherings of Black men to explore healing and liberatory practices.
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. We saw this as well in a Quilombo community we visited, (Quilombos took shape as groups of enslaved Africans escaped to form free communities in remote forests and mountains. These settlements actively resisted slavery and preserved African traditions, passing them through the generations.)
Arrival in Accra, Ghana
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.
Reflection
Looking back at the Ghana experience, Victoria reflects that, “Ghana was very much about connecting those of us who traveled from far and wide with the people in Ghana who joined our journey. There is healing in this reconnection. And this journey is also about the earth and the future. How do we collectively deepen our connection to magic, our communities, our strategies, and our resilience, to create a thriving future here on this sacred earth?”
The Documentary Film
From the beginning of this project, we envisioned creating a film to share our journey with the world. Filmmaker Sienna McLean LoGreco, Director of Photography Tony Hardmon, and their team joined us on all three continents, gathering compelling footage of this unique journey, and the documentary film is almost complete.
Why this film now?
This is a vital story to tell at this moment. The film offers a vision of healing which deconstructs narrow conceptions of Blackness in order to uncover the beauty, wholeness and vibrancy that live underneath those projections. Deeply seeing these men and the communities, we more clearly see ourselves and how we might move toward collective healing as we open new paths forward.
Impact Campaign
We invite you to join our impact campaign, sharing the film as a catalyst for change and an invitation to action.
We are working to screen the film at venues ranging from film festivals to community gatherings, and then to use it as a catalyst and jumping-off point, inspiring people to enter into new conversations and shared action, as cultural changemakers working together to make our world better, more just and freer.
Join this wave of healing. Support powerful storytelling and the spread of these inspirational stories so thousands can experience their transformative impact. This is your time to invest in our collective liberation.
A Place to Rest: Black Women’s Nourishment Retreats
Black women so often must live in emergency response mode, facing a blend of intersectional oppressions and erasure. Extreme stress and exhaustion are common and, in this culture, support for our rest is very rare. Black women need spaces to come together in mutual support to celebrate and nourish our spirits.
We began offering Black women’s nourishment retreats in 2022 and have continued to regularly host these retreats since then. Through this initiative, CHL guides retreats in natural settings in which Black women can heal, listen deeply to each other and ourselves, move, reflect, rest and dream.
To launch this program, CHL partnered with Cristina Orbe, Lisa Smith and Milicent Johnson of the Octavia Fund, for our first four-day retreat at Commonweal.
Since then, at retreats at Commonweal in Bolinas, CA, and the Whidbey Institute on Whidbey Island, WA, groups of Black women have blossomed in community as we spent time in meditation, group conversation, songs and shared witnessing. Retreatants napped, hiked, danced and enjoyed delicious food. We also engaged in rituals to honor our ancestors, our elders, the youth, future generations and the land.
In the words of one retreatant: “Just feeling held in the presence of so many incredible Black women was such deep medicine.”
Another retreatant shared, “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.”
In 2023, we 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, played and sang. We grieved and released.
The momentum of our Black Women’s retreats is growing. It is flowing in divine time, and there is much more to come.
March 2025 in Ghana. Black women’s Cleanse, Rest & Reset Retreat.
As part of our Black women’s retreat offerings, we have been forging new connections in the US and internationally as part of a global community—centering people of Africa and the African diaspora who seek to combine spiritual exploration, social activism and community/cultural changemaking.
When we brought Black women from the US to Ghana in 2023 for our Three Black Men journey, it planted a seed of possibility. This led to an international expansion of our Black women’s retreats, and in March 2025, Victoria Santos led our first Black Women’s Cleanse, Rest & Reset Retreat in Ghana, working closely with our partner in Accra, The Art Concept.
This was a new and potent iteration of our ongoing Black women’s nourishment retreats, serving a group equally composed of Black women from the US and Black women from Ghana.
This approach affirms the unity of sisters of both Africa and the African diaspora, and creates new possibilities for healing. This retreat offered participants deep rest along with physical, emotional and spiritual healing practices that are rooted in traditional African ways of cleansing and cultivating wellness.
After the retreat, one participant reflected: “I couldn’t have received this guidance anywhere else. I was/am seen, validated and freed because of this experience. Thank you.”
Another said, “Amazing team, amazing support, there aren’t enough words to describe the power of this experience.”
And a third retreatant shared, “I have been searching for something that could help me to find joy and relinquish the pain of guilt and grief. I was not sure if the retreat was that ‘something’ when I said yes, but it definitely helped me find it.”
August 2025: Gathering for Spaceholders for Black Women
Our most recent Black women’s retreat, delivered in August 2025 at the Whidbey Institute in collaboration with our partner, the Kalliopeia Foundation, had a special focus on serving Black women spaceholders.
This retreat expanded upon previous CHL offerings of Black women’s nourishment retreats and healing journeys. We approached it as a first-of-its-kind for us, and a potential model for future gatherings.
This retreat offered light activity programming within a very spacious schedule. Hearkening back to the words of one of our first retreatants in 2022, we wanted to offer “structured unstructuredness”. There was plenty of flexible time for retreatants to be together, care for and support each other.
Between breakfast and lunch, we offered programming. After lunch, retreatants could receive massages, engage in energy healing in the sanctuary, offer a talk, or take a walk on the beach, in some cases with their children who were included in the retreat. It was beautiful to see the joy and healing brought by the children, as well as to see how smoothly families could be woven into the fabric of the retreat.
Orland Bishop: A Message of Our Time
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.
Consciousness Lab
In partnership with the BIPOC ED Coalition of Washington State, CHL led a group of Black change makers in an ongoing multi-month Consciousness Lab series with author and healer Orland Bishop.
Sabbatical Support
We supported two Black women who are anti-racist change makers in taking much-needed sabbaticals for renewal, rest and reconnection with their vision.
Racial Healing Initiative
In 2022, The Center For Healing and Liberation 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 the Center For Healing and Liberation, 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 was developed in phases and could ultimately be scaled to reach thousands of people. In 2023, after helping to successfully establish this initiative, the Center For Healing and Liberation stepped back from direct RHI involvement while continuing to offer our strongest support.
