Our Initiatives
-2.png)
Three Black Men
Wellness & Healing
Community Engagement
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.
The Center works to foster joy, ease, and rest, and reshape cultural understandings. 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.
Three Black Men Documentary Film
Now a feature documentary film, Three Black Men, takes audiences on the journey with us. The film is directed and produced by Sienna McLean LoGreco, edited by Charles Little II, A.C.E., and executive produced by Victoria Santos. Viewers join the three men as they face the pain and promise of our world, and uncover the thread that connects ancestral power, contemporary justice movements, and not-yet-imagined futures.
To bring the medicine that this film carries to the world, we will be screening it at film festivals, convenings, and gatherings, in conjunction with a community Engagement Initiative. Scroll to Screenings at https://www.threeblackmen.com to see film festival dates and locations.
View the film trailer here: Three Black Men trailer
Community Engagement Initiative
As we screen the Three Black Men film at venues ranging from film festivals to community gatherings, we are building on the Three Black Men project’s multi-year momentum. Our Community Engagement Initiative is intended to nourish, connect and inspire people committed to cultural change. It’s about embracing a liberated Blackness, healing racialized trauma, and realizing collective liberation. To support this exploration, we combine film screenings, presentations, community conversations, and ritual and wellness practices.
This includes connecting with local curators to convene community gatherings in 10 cities around the U.S. Through screenings and gatherings, we work to strengthen relationships and alliances among diverse groups — women and men, youth and elders, communities of many cultures, and people of wide-ranging backgrounds.
By honoring diverse perspectives and ancestral wisdom, this Initiative seeks to inspire collective dreaming, healing, and changemaking.
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.
In 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 have napped, hiked, danced, and enjoyed delicious food. We have 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 keeps 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—centering people of Africa and the African diaspora who seek to combine spiritual exploration, social activism and community/cultural changemaking.
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 served a group equally composed of Black women from the US and Black women from Ghana.
Our approach affirmed the unity of sisters from both Africa and the African diaspora, offering participants deep rest along with physical, emotional and spiritual healing practices 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.”
August 2025: Gathering for Spaceholders for Black Women
Another recent Black women’s retreat was offered in August 2025 at the Whidbey Institute in collaboration with our partner, the Kalliopeia Foundation. With a special focus on serving Black women spaceholders, this retreat expanded upon previous CHL offerings, and we approached it as a potential model for future gatherings.
This retreat offered light activity programming within a very spacious schedule. 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.
UPCOMING. The Oasis Cohort: Healing, Rest, Transformation, and the Cultivation of Joy.
An oasis supports life. In a harsh landscape, an oasis is a refuge, a place of green leaves and cool water where travelers can drink deep to replenish their spirits and the cells of their bodies. It is a gathering place for rest and renewal. Within the wide circle of an often cruel, dehumanizing and extractive society, we need smaller circles that restore us.
In 2027, the Oasis cohort will offer deep nourishment and renewal for Black women who are beacons for our communities. Oasis will be a 10-month cohort for 15 Black women leaders who are dedicated to service and who hold space for others to heal, grow, learn, access resources, and thrive. These are powerful women who bring immense benefit to many people across a wide range of cultures, geographies, and lived realities. Oasis will be a circle of healing, rest, discovery, sisterhood, and community. The cohort has been formed in 2026, so we can’t accept new inquiries for this program cycle.
Community Engagement
Seattle Town Hall Conversation
We launched the Community Engagement phase of the Three Black Men project with a public conversation at Town Hall Seattle in October 2025 called Healing, Liberation, and the Journey of Three Black Men. Resmaa Menakem, Orland Bishop, and Bayo Akomolafe, along with Victoria Santos and Sienna McLean LoGreco, shared reflections and insights from the three-continent journey. Over 460 people joined us for a curated film preview of Three Black Men, followed by a rich conversation that explored embodied healing, collective memory, and Black futures. One attendee described the film excerpt as “gorgeous, supple, intimate” and said, “I feel excited for what this work of spirit and art will activate in the world.” (photos: Michael B. Maine)
Day of Embodied Liberation
The Seattle Town Hall follow-up event was an immersive daylong called A Day of Embodied Liberation. It was curated especially for those committed to healing, justice, and liberation—healers, activists, artists, space holders, community leaders, and those carrying the weight of ancestral memory and generational care. Approximately 70 people took part. This was a gathering of kin, a collective pause in which we could tend to our nervous systems, honor our lineages, confront inherited trauma, and envision new portals to liberation beyond supremacy, speed, and survival. In one participant’s words, “People were hungry for slowness.” The day included somatic practices, music, courageous conversation, collective ritual, co-creating a community altar, and restorative practices.
Three Black Men Project Ripples in Brazil: Uplifting Black Masculinities, Opposing Violence against Women
Growing from connections made during our Brazil journey, in 2025-26 CHL supported creative changemaking led by Black men in Brazil, aimed at reducing violence against women, transforming traditional gender roles, and exploring the theme of Positive Masculinities—cherishing the humanity of Black men and Black women, and caring for our precious Earth. Activist Tiago Azeviche and creative Bira Azevedo guided activities including “Days of Positive Masculinity”. At these community gatherings, adult men and youth explored ancestral heritage, health and well-being, men’s identities, yoga, and dialogue among Black men of different ages and backgrounds.
Our Green World: Brazil Environmental Protection and Education
Also in 2025-26, CHL supported our Brazilian partner, the Imargem Association, in their establishment of a rural center where children and adults can connect with nature, learn about caring for the environment, and explore growing plants. The establishment of this center, in the words of Mauro Sergio Neri da Silva, Imargem Association’s Institutional Director, “is a milestone that reaffirms our shared commitment to preserving the ecosystem and strengthening environmental education for present and future generations.” Imargem’s motto is ”Arte, Meio Ambiente e Convivência” (Art, the Environment, and Co-Existence). Learn about Imargem here: www.imargem.art.br
