For this edition of Emerging Rhizomes, I invited my dear friend and colleague Trish Adobea Tchume.
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Trish is a first generation Ghanaian-American and serves as Senior Director of Leadership Research and Practice for the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation. In this role, Trish collaborates with other organizations to explore, define, and support leadership and organizational approaches that prefigure a world where all of us can thrive. She is a Brooklynite, a proud auntie, a beach stan, and devotes her volunteer time to cool organizations like the Central Brooklyn Food Coop and to the boards of Change Elemental and the New York Foundation.

I was excited to open this space for Trish to share some of her powerful insights about the idea of Liberated Zones and the work she has done to support Women of Color in leadership with the framework she co-penned, Calling In and Up: A Leadership Pedagogy for Women of Color Organizers. I am honored to hold space for her words with this newsletter, and I invite you to explore more of the resources she's shared at the end of this piece.

As always, we invite you to continue the discussion, share this with your networks, and find the ways you can get involved with this work.

There are moments in the kitchen where I’ll know something that I didn’t know I knew.

Like how to make something savory without adding more salt. Or how to make a gravy without any lumps. Or that soup doesn’t start with any added water. I know not to add water.

Often in the middle of doing this thing that I didn’t know I knew, my hand will move in a certain way and I’ll remember that I saw my mother do this - that that’s how I know. She never ‘taught’ me, never turned to me and said, “Try garlic before you add salt.” I just saw her making good things and I learned the steps to making good things.

In March of 2017, I sat listening in on a Vision for Black Lives conference call. This was a series of calls hosted by the Movement for Black Lives that took the coalition’s policy platform and brought it to life with speakers who had experience in each of the focus areas. That particular call was about building economic power: What would it look like for Black people to have control of their own means of production and reap the benefits of that production?

Folks on the call spoke both tactically and structurally: This is how you set up worker cooperatives, this is how you unionize, this is how you make sure workers have stronger rights. But one of the speakers on the call, though, was a gentleman by the name of Ed Whitfield. At the time, he ran an organization called the Southern Reparations Loan Fund and he spoke very little about the specific model for his organization. Instead he talked about various moments over the past several months where he saw what it might look like if we got free.

Basically, Mr. Whitfield was talking about his time in the kitchen. He talked about a workshop in Detroit where he met a group of young men who were learning music production so they could own all of the pieces of the art they produced. He talked about an area of land that a group in Mississippi was developing on which people could live and work in community. He referred to these spaces as liberated zones and talked about how important it was to see them, create more of them, and use them as reenergizing, reorienting spaces to practice being free.

The comment stood out to me because it sounded like the solution to something I’d been struggling with deeply: Why in so many of our movement spaces were people making the same oppressive choices we were experiencing out in the wider world? For example, why in this meeting space where we could do whatever we wanted would we revert to patriarchal behaviors where conversation relies on who is most empowered to speak at the moment? Or classist behavior where those with the most formal education make the big decisions and everyone else can only comment and come along? In places where we can do whatever we want, why choose what limits us?

So I got curious about how this idea of visiting “liberated zones” could help us choose something different. I had no idea what that would mean or look like so I timidly invited others to explore this question with me during an ‘unconference’/open space time at Change Elemental’s Confluence gathering that summer. To my surprise, almost 20 people joined me in a room for hours as we imagined and played our way into how to encourage more experiences like Mr. Whitfield described.

Since then, creating liberated zones has become a core part of my practice as an organizer, facilitator, and leadership development practitioner. While for me this concept was inspired by Mr. Whitfield, as I began to build a practice around it, I realized that so many revered teachers and organizers from Ella Baker to Paulo Friere to Octavia Butler and George Lakey had engaged this tool. In the curriculum, Calling In and Up, which my dearest colleagues and I developed in 2021 to capture some of our learnings from years of facilitating leadership cultivation spaces for women of color, we talk about it this way:

In the Women of Color leadership development spaces I’ve helped design - particularly Community Change’s women’s fellowship and Power 50 programs - co-creating a Liberated Zone meant inviting in a set of rituals, cultural aesthetics, and program elements that helped untether the women from their limiting beliefs once they entered in, and encouraged them to step into their strategic imagination.

These practices can also extend to the organizational setting. In some of my work spaces, this has meant focusing only on the behaviors and approaches of my team - creating and holding our own standards for success, affirmation, joy, and trust - then piquing the curiosity of the rest of the organization by modeling whole, new, more joyful possibilities.

Here are some lessons learned from both of these settings about what goes into co-creating a liberated zone and what this can mean for our movements:

Deep time spent creating and reengaging with community commitments

Community commitments are often bullet points we gather from the group at the beginning of a meeting or retreat and paste up on a wall, hoping that they will keep us safe from conflict. When co-creating a liberated zone, we develop community commitments through a process adapted from BYP100 that asks participants to really consider and name what safety, transparency, trust, validation, affirmation, accountability, and joy feel like and look like in action. These descriptions form the basis for our community commitments. We then open up our shared spaces (retreats in the case of leadership programs or staff meetings in the case of organizational teams) by assessing our fidelity to our commitments since last we met. (See Creating the Container from the Calling In and Up curriculum)

We commit to the process/not to the agenda

Tammy Alsaada, of the women’s fellowship for people impacted by incarceration and the immigration detention system, reminded us that often time is used as a form of social control, particularly in our incarceration system and in spaces where poor people and people of color are at the margins. While we respect the labor of those who have come prepared to lead conversations and give space for all to participate, our first commitment is always to “the conversation that only these people in this room can have.” For a facilitation team, that means being very clear about essential outcomes for the day or an overall retreat and conveying that clearly to the cohort to engage them as partners in adjusting the agenda to meet shared goals. (See Heart of the Heart in the Program Reflection & Reimagination section of the Calling In and Up curriculum.)

Shared analysis about what disorganizes us

As we build our commitments we learn together about the culture and systems harming us, disorganizing us, and keeping us from living into our commitments. Namely we talk about the impact of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism on our lives and our work. We also discuss the ways that we have internalized the culture stemming from these systems and how this can show up in our space even if white people, men, and money are not physically present.

Spiritual & Cultural Practices

Frequently, we are asked to show up fully prepared to think and strategize about a more just world while our cultural knowledge and spiritual practices based in love and justice are left outside. We adorn our spaces with fabrics, images, music, plants, books, art, and activities to remind us to draw on the many forms of indigenous and cultural wisdom available to us.

Somatic practices that bring us back to our bodies

We recognize that there are multiple ways of knowing and that many of us have learned to disassociate from the wisdom in our bodies. Under the leadership of healing justice practitioners like Viveka Chen (who works with Power 50) and Holiday Simmons (who works closely with the women’s fellowship) we tapped into practices rooted in Generative Somatics, Tai Chi, yoga and other ancient teachings to learn how to both physically and mentally return to center. (Some of these practices can be found in Women of Color Centering & Healing Practices toolkit from the Calling In and Up curriculum.)

Cultivating and spending time in liberated zones is a critical practice for countering experiences of distraction, chaos, disorientation, and despair increasingly brought on by popular culture for so many of us. These liberated zones are our kitchens - the spaces where we can learn and absorb into our bodies and consciousness the vital practices for living into a more just world.

Some of the liberated zones where Trish contributes her time:

• ​The Liberatory Leadership Partnership​
• ​Central Brooklyn Food Coop​
• ​Change Elemental (Governance Team Member)​

Additional tools for cultivating liberated zones:

• ​Calling In and Up: A Leadership Pedagogy for Women of Color Organizers​
• ​Intelligent Mischief
• ​Wild Dreams Blog​
• ​Alexis Pauline Gumbs' Brilliance Remastered blog​

"We do not become fully human until we give ourselves to each other in love.” - bell hooks

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