Every practice grows within an ecology.

Mentors:
Those who guided this work directly through: teaching, correction, and care, within community.

  • Hiro Boga

  • Queen Tuya Nu

  • Fiona Arrigo

  • Hollie + Robert Holden

  • Rev Iyanla Vanzant

  • Kelly Diels

  • Danielle Cohen

  • Staci Jordan Shelton

  • Africa Brooke

  • Virginia Rosenberg

  • Heather Lindemenn

  • Desiree Adaway

  • Youmna Tarazi

  • Susan Frybort

  • Dr. Rocio Rosales Meza

  • Andrew Harvey + Mirabai Starr

Regenerative Communities:

The spaces that honour that which is forming.

  • Dr. Bayo Akomolafe

    (I serve as an Elder within Mbari & We Will Dance with Mountains)

  • Keri + Jon Shinn

    (Member, Life Liberated)

  • Thomas Mansfield

    (Practitioner, Cards for Life)

Collaborators:

Those I created alongside.

  • Kristin Farr Castello

  • Alana Levandoski

  • Rachael Skyring

  • Megan Hayne

  • Trudy Titilayo

Ancestors:

Writers, leaders, and freedom-seekers whose words are in my bloodstream and shape how I be.

  • Mwalimu Julius Nyerere

  • Archbishop Desmond Tutu

  • Nina Simone

  • Howard Thurman

  • Zora Neale Hurston

  • Chinua Achebe

  • Ama Ata Aidoo

  • Maya Angelou

  • bell hooks

  • Audre Lorde

  • James Baldwin

  • Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o

  • Bibi na Babu

Current voices:

Keep me learning, questioning and imagining in more spacious ways.

  • Layla F Saad

  • adrienne maree brown

  • Toi-Marie Smith

  • Prentis Hemphill

  • Alexis Pauline Gumbs

  • Ruha Benjamin

    Elders:

    teaching through rooting, being, standing, and moving.

  • Rose

  • Weeping Willow

  • Baobab

  • Wind

Some offered direct guidance.

Some challenged my assumptions.

All of them live in this work.

I remember Yolanda’s power in my bones, in my tears, and in my chest’s trembling response to her words to me one weekend on a bus in Switzerland. The words arrived gently, unassuming but memorable, like rain in the desert:

“You did good.”

That’s all.

I wasn’t seeking affirmation. But something about the way she said those words rang with the vibrancy of an elderly prestige, like she knew things ordinary ways of knowing couldn’t appreciate. And none other than Yolanda herself offered a conceptual way to hold the moment when she spoke about a “prior generosity”.

Yolanda knows the music that gave birth to music.

She is wise, and that is rare.

Báyò Akómoláfé Ph.D.

Author, Teacher, Speaker