RETREAT.
The Omowale Project has begun our planning phase. Over the next several months we will grow from its current form as a small program offered remotely, into a fully resourced Forward center (because we are not in retreat) offering a wide range of healing spaces, resources, tools, and guidance. Ultimately, our work will build and expand the internal and collective capacity of our leaders and organizations to heal, allowing them to imagine and create restorative and generative responses to their own needs and the needs of our communities.
The inclination to promote and fund Black leadership is not new, but it has remained overwhelmingly focused on organizational capacity-building and leadership development without acknowledging the need for serious investment in the health and wellbeing of those whose trauma has driven their compulsion to build a better world. Understanding this reality means that we have a responsibility to honor the need for rest, active nurturing practices, expanded opportunities for the expression of joy and the time and space to imagine a truly liberated future. This type of investment can no longer be piecemeal or an afterthought to movement-building - it must be core and foundational.
At the Forward center, offerings will change, expand and evolve over time and will respond to the ever changing needs of those we serve.
