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The Work

What We Do

"Our future not only as women, girls, and gender expansive people of color, but as a human species must be resourced by the best of our human capacities. We believe that individual and collective embodiment of creativity, imagination, joy, awe, and wonder is needed to make the huge leap beyond where we currently find ourselves in human history."

~Founder & Executive Director, Ratasha Elise 

​Chocolate Soul Revival supports women, girls, and gender expansive people of color in moving through individual and collective grief, trauma, and oppression, into clarity, power, and action. Inside of healing justice, our focus areas include emotional justice, somatic trauma healing, deconstructing internalized oppression, liberatory skill building, and strategizing for collective decolonization. Our healing centered organizing work encompasses racial justice, gender justice, reproductive justice, and economic justice. In addition to individuals and groups, we also work directly with activist organizations in shifting from a burnout and harm replicating culture, into one of emotional safety, nourishment and long term sustainability. We also support the transformation of activism culture into one that holds healing justice at the center, rather than as an aside. We seek to stop the replication of trauma and harm throughout our communities, and therefore also offer organizational consulting support. 

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​​Our ongoing work takes the form of 1 on 1 sessions, small group circles, workshops, and multi-day intensives. Through a decolonial Black queer feminist lens, we are committed to centering the experiences and voices of those most marginalized amongst us; Black trans and cis women, gender non-binary, LGBTQIA+, persons living with disability, youth, and working class folks. Many in our communities are several of these things all at once, and therefore deeply impacted by intersecting systems of oppression.

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As local, national, and global crises continue to intensify, all of our bodies are having to process and contend with excessive levels of stress and unrest. We’ve learned that reclaiming full access to experiential states of being like awe, wonder, and delight has become more necessary than ever before. These too are human rights. They help us defy the despair and blind urgency that seeks to pull us in. Creativity and imagination are vital muscles that need to be regularly exercised. All of these are powerful tools when we bring them into our political, advocacy work, and organizing spaces. There is so much more internal resourcing available when we are able to ground and embody our connection to the awe and wonder of the natural world and the cosmos. This too adds to our collective power, on a much deeper level. Human bodies have the amazing capacity to address trauma, and co-create healthier, more just, equitable, and joyful ways of being, supported by the re-wiring of the nervous system. We’ve incorporated research on the science behind this. And we’re continuing forward with arts-infused healing justice experiences that center not only our safety, liberation, and wellness, but also the power that comes from a deeply embodied remembering of all that we are and can be.

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The Work: About

"Healing is understood as the ability to change your perspective– to change hopelessness to courage, and self-hatred to love for oneself and one’s community, as a means to transform injury and harm into optimal health and well-being.

Healing-centered organizing is a process to increase collective power, blending a health and wellness approach with a traditional organizing approach. The principles of healing centered organizing are:

  • Healing is in response to the needs of the community

  • Healing is political

  • Healing and organizing intersect

  • Healing is found in culture and spirituality"

~ From Iris Garcia, in Akonadi Foundation's "Building a Case for Healing Justice"

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