Centering Restorative Principles for BIPOC Leaders in Nonprofits

“As I reflect on the lessons from New Seneca Village, one of the things that really stands out to me is that my body…is home. My body tells me when I’m feeling unsafe or when it’s time to rest. [This experience] has turned me inside out and I feel like I’m becoming more of who I’m meant to be.”

This reflection from Kayla Tolentino, a philanthropic and health equity advocate and a participant in the restorative leadership residency at New Seneca Village is something we hear across our work in movement and social justice spaces: leaders often feel disconnected from their own inner wisdom.

Particularly for BIPOC women and gender-expansive people, sustaining leadership is about more than professional identity and capacity. It is about ensuring that they are aligned with their own spirit and values—that they are practicing trusting their intuition and integrating their insights in ways that activate their leadership.

Across this backdrop, the recent trend of sabbaticals and rest experiences is encouraging. Restoration, including the core element of rest, is crucial to ensuring that leaders reconnect to the baseline of their own nervous systems and recover from the stress-induced exhaustion prevalent in nonprofit spaces.

However, we know that while time away from the workplace and from our professional identities is essential, it is not sufficient to fully restore leaders engaged in the relentless work of addressing systemic injustice. Our world is moving at a pace of increased urgency, complexity, and consequence—to respond requires thinking about and practicing leadership differently.

Prioritizing Restoration as a Power Building Strategy

The origins for New Seneca Village began in 2013. I was working for the City of Oakland and meeting young, vibrant leaders with new and exciting ideas. And yet, there were limited opportunities for them to step into leadership and implement their inspired ideas to benefit the community.

Undoubtedly, barriers having to do with race, gender, and age played a role. But I also noticed that many established leaders in my office had resigned themselves to a pragmatic, incrementalist way of moving forward. When faced with new ideas from energized people in the field: they often replied, “We’ve tried it already. It didn’t work. Forget about it.”

There had to be a better way. I was energized by the ideas of artist residencies, which recognize that artists require a creative, reflective space to birth works of art—novels, dance, sculpture, poetry, and more—that deeply impact society.

The idea of bringing people to a place where they could be in community across experiences, and practice restoration together thrilled me. I was curious about how these types of intentional experiences, grounded in collective and abundant resources, could surface new ways to embody leadership.

New Seneca Village was born from this inspiration. As I spoke with other BIPOC leaders, I heard similar stories from other cities and communities of interpersonal and organizational disconnect amid the weight of systemic challenges often stemming from structural racism, classism, and patriarchy.

Together, we named the need for a supportive community to reclaim our agency, to share stories of the limiting beliefs we face in the workplace, and then prioritize our own imaginations as we asked: What is the story I want to tell with my life? What is my vision for the work that I do? How can I enact my vision in alignment with my values? Who am I connecting with and listening to when I am calling in new ways of being and new places to be?

Leadership is defined broadly: we are all leaders, regardless of title, position, or trade.

Centered on experiential collective circles that culminate in nature-based residencies centered on relational and liberatory practice, New Seneca Village formed to provide an intentional space for BIPOC women and gender-expansive leaders and healers to ask and begin to answer these kinds of questions.

The leaders and healers that co-create with New Seneca Village span multiple fields, sectors, and modalities but share experiences of being othered, including facing entrenched resistance to their agency and ideas, and the spiritual and physical burnout of those experiences. As we collectively explore the “what” and “how” of leadership, residents pose new inquiries—to ourselves, to one another, and to our broader ecosystems—including the following:

1. How do we challenge, expand, and/or reimagine existing practices related to leadership, particularly in nonprofit and movement spaces?
2. How can we ensure that the creativity, reflection, and visioning that emerges from a restorative space like a residency or sabbatical carries back over into daily life?
3. How do we expand generative practices while divesting from those that are deadening to our leadership and our visions?

Reclaiming Self-Determined Leadership

Nonprofit leaders of all races and genders often recreate the same precarious environments and harmful impacts they are trying to interrupt in the broader culture. This may mean recreating power imbalances and rewarding organizational loyalty rather than incentivizing curiosity or leaning into restorative processes.

At New Seneca Village, leadership is defined broadly: we are all leaders, regardless of title, position, or trade. While few receive the opportunity to be selected as leaders within the work hierarchy, all people can connect deeply with the purpose, values, and intention that drives their leadership.

The Village is interested in how leaders and healers access expansive resources, including time and space to reflect and engage in pattern recognition that reveals aspects of their own leadership. Such intentional practices can create new paths forward that are distinct from those defined by daily tasks, job descriptions, and current work expectations.

We know that people must be centered and grounded to contribute fully to their work in organizations, communities, or systems. During their residency journey, residents engage in reflective exercises about their leadership beyond their professional positions—where they draw energy and how they can intentionally transform their leadership across different dimensions of their lives.

For example, some residents have recognized that their personal health is directly related to the health of the organization they founded. Others have crystalized what they need to balance work expectations and their wellbeing.

Restorative Practices as a Source of Daily Leadership

A restorative journey isn’t contained within a week, of course. It’s an ongoing practice. Residents returning to their nonprofits face the very real tension of integrating back into the day-to-day of work within our capitalist and productivity-focused culture.

That’s why support continues beyond the residency through Village gatherings and other collective spaces where alumni can be in conversation around ways they are bringing an expansive view of their leadership in life and work into their daily lives.

Achieving systemic transformation in the social change sector requires a paradigm shift in how people think about leadership and support leaders.

Post-residency, leaders find themselves dedicating more energy to clarifying communication with their teams and more consistently holding boundaries that allow them to care for work and themselves, among other shifts in their leadership.

As Dr. Teresa Lau, a California-based chiropractor and healer observed post-residency. “There was a moment at a meal where there were people talking around me…and the experience for me was of awareness. Of community, of fullness, of other people connecting in a space of restedness.…It feels [now] like there is an expansiveness to how I’m thinking about my work and how I’m moving through challenges.”

Three Central Practices

Of course, restorative space alone cannot address the fundamental power and resource imbalances that create the conditions of limited imagination facing leaders in the first place. We have identified three areas ripe for collective transformation:

1. Prioritize vision over incremental change: Funders and institutions often tell BIPOC women and gender-expansive leaders that their approaches are too risky, too complex. Yet, multimillion-dollar investments are made all the time into enormously risky long-term financial wealth building tools and speculative technologies. At New Seneca Village, individual-level visioning connects to a broader vision for transformational change. The Village supports leaders to nourish their own leadership while dreaming into an expansive collective future.
2. Transform extractive funding practices: Anemic, conditional, and noncommittal funding causes nonprofit overwork and burnout. These funding approaches prevent many organizations from having time and resources to envision adaptive and creative responses in their community work. Minimal time for reflection and integration blocks leaders from accessing their own imagination—a resource that is crucial to interrupting the oppressive visions of dominant culture that make the work necessary in the first place. Creating a philanthropic ecosystem that centers reflective and expansive insight-building is critical. Advocating for this shift is itself a key part of restorative practice work.
3. Center care: Accounting for mental, physical, energetic, and spiritual health is critical for being in relationship with others and for building trust. While societal and funding conditions disincentivize relational tending in most workplaces, centering care enables leaders to bring more abundant thinking, freedom, and ease to their work—essential characteristics necessary for a more liberatory future.

Achieving systemic transformation in the social change sector requires a paradigm shift in how people think about leadership and support leaders. Creating the conditions for more time and space, more reflection and integration, and yes, participation in comprehensive restoration experiences, is imperative. These foundational approaches can shift us out of scarcity and control and into the generosity and abundance that we desire for all communities.