our journey
The seeds for Soulshine have long been planted. In 2017, we began to nurture them to see what could grow.
In 2017 I was over a decade in to working with folks locally and nationally in efforts to create organizational change in community-serving nonprofits. Working to help organizations be more community-driven and community-accountable highlighted the prevalence of poorly developed services and legacies of organizational trauma within most organizations. Services were often mismatched and inaccessible to communities, while staff and organizations were stuck in cycles that embodied the exact habits of harm that organizations sought to change in communities.
In this collaborative work, we saw how mainstream organizations were often inadequate in providing care to folks in marginalized communities, exploitive of staff, and were painfully tied to funding and systems that corrupted their ability to do good and just work that reflected the needs of communities. Ultimately, these organizations were built on habits of white supremacy— rooted in capitalism, scarcity-oriented, hierarchical, and paternalistic. These foundations created an artificial division between healing and social change work. Helping and healing efforts were depoliticized, community-driven change was inhibited, and accountability often nonexistent, allowing harmful behaviors to be perpetuated with little recourse. Frequently these organizations had brilliant and caring staff and valuable missions, but practices were centered on principles and carried out with methods that perpetuated harm. They moved faster than the speed of trust in communities— or ignored specific communities altogether. And they suffered from decades of unresolved organizational trauma that resulted in high rates of mistrust, staff exploitation, and burnout.
After many years of working to change these approaches from inside mainstream movement-work, we started dreaming with others also deeply invested movement-work about what building something else might look like. We sat with elders, teachers, community members, and survivors. We listened, read, meditated, shared food, and planned. Soulshine’s vision and methods are a divestment from mainstream movement efforts that often focus on healing and justice in the context of working within formal systems and centering top-down authority. Instead, we rooted in a longstanding vision that we knew to be true in our bones— a vision where healing and change work couldn’t possibly exist without each other— a vision where we’re all teachers and we’re all students. The intrinsic connection between healing and social justice has a long history in BIPOC and queer communities that have been leading the way in social change efforts. We look to those who have come before us as teachers and respect and value the work that guides us and offers accountability.
Where we’ve been & where we’re headed
We’ve learned and reaffirmed much over the last few years, including—
common barriers to receiving care and support,
the harm done through pathologizing, othering, depoliticizing, centering whiteness, and over-valuing individualism
where systems and practitioners have missed the mark in understanding and supporting the wide-ranging needs people have to heal and be well,
where organizations harm communities and staff alike when rooted in habits of white supremacy.
We've learned about the incredible wisdom in communities and the need for ways to better center and respect this wisdom. And time and time again, we’ve affirmed the healing power of connection--of being seen, being heard, and being valued.
The focus of the first two years of Soulshine was to center and learn about the experiences of folks in our communities. So, we started by listening. More specifically, we created intentional and supportive community spaces for folks who have been impacted by trauma to share about their healing experiences and their struggles. We also created spaces for practitioners and community leaders to gather and engage in dialogue about their involvement in and questions about healing and social change work. From these listening circles, we continued to learn about what’s most needed and most lacking in organized community care. Based on these conversations, we established four main pillars of Soulshine’s work over the next two years.
Check out the questions that help guide our work.
Current Pillars
1) Continued community listening circles
2) RAD! mentorship program for women & non-binary folks
3) Capacity-building and development for organizations, organizers, practitioners & community members looking to root their work in anti-oppression and trauma-informed frameworks