22 Feb, 2023

Self Care Corner: Prioritize Your Lightest Weight

By |2023-02-21T18:37:16-05:00February 22nd, 2023|Categories: Self & Community Care|Tags: , , , |0 Comments


“What’s the lightest weight we can carry now?”

This question was asked by a client during one of our project check-ins at the height of COVID-19. The client, like many organizations, experienced drastic shifts in their programming. Namely, deciding which programs and strategies were flexible enough to pivot to a virtual space while figuring out work from home setups for staff.

Figuring out what was “essential” and what wasn’t impacted staff’s capacity to support program participants, many whom support communities heavily impacted by COVID-19. 

We discussed how they make decisions under normal circumstances. As they’re nimble, what’s normal for them is operating with the assumption that anything can occur to undermine how they support program participants.

The client had to make quick programmatic decisions. If their programming could no longer operate as intended, they must answer:

  • What can we learn from this?
  • How can we pivot what’s deemed as essential?
  • What qualifies as “non-essential”?
  • How can a “non-essential” program become more essential in the future?

This process combines program design with evaluative thinking. Evaluative thinking requires routinely questioning what’s happening as it’s happening. Sometimes when this happens, we disregard the above questions and instead answer:

“What’s the lightest weight we can carry?”

Resiliency is like a muscle. We build it by starting with the lightest weight. When we’re able to handle the lightest weight with proper form, we progress to a heavier weight.

While the client example focuses on programs and services, this question can also be asked in our personal lives.

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9 Mar, 2022

Self Care Corner: Representation Burnout

By |2023-09-28T14:57:45-04:00March 9th, 2022|Categories: Self & Community Care|Tags: , , , , , |0 Comments


I’ve been putting off writing this blog post for nearly 2 years. Mostly because it’s complicated to talk about.

Representation burnout.

I first came across this term via Shine’s article “Why We Need to Talk About – and Recognize – Representation Burnout” by Martha Tesema.

The article was posted a year before George Floyd was murdered in May 2020. The day after his murder, I facilitated a partnership meeting for a client organization. I joined the Zoom meeting several minutes early with the partnership co-leads, after spending the day looking at news coverage of George’s murder.

I admitted to them that I wasn’t fully present, yet I still wanted to fully show up. I also admitted it at the start of the meeting with the partners.

In Nonprofit Quarterly article “The Hidden Cost of DEI Work –And What to Do About It,” , co-author Tiloma Jayasinghe asks questions that perfectly sums up how I often feel:

What if I, the professional facilitator, break down in tears in front of a full Zoom room of clients because this work, and the stakes if it fails, feels like I am letting BIPOC people down and ruining this small opening for workplace liberation?

How am I supposed to cope with race equity work when another Black trans woman was murdered today, and/or last night another Asian elder was hit and painfully injured on the Lower East Side of New York City, and/or how many hundreds of Black people have been murdered since brother George Floyd took his last breath? Where is the outrage for them?

When and how do I just pause and stop so that I can rest, recharge, so that I can be on this journey for the long haul?

“The Hidden Cost of DEI Work–And What to Do About It” by Andrea J. Rogers and Tiloma Jayasinghe (Nonprofit Quarterly, 2021)

When people see me, they see a Black woman, because we’re visual. Getting to know me, you’ll discover that I’m a Black cisgender heterosexual woman. Going deeper, you’ll discover that I’m a Black cisgender heterosexual woman, from the south, an identical twin, has a bachelors degree from a HBCU and a masters degree from an Ivy League, became motherless at age 17, grew up in Christianity, full time self employed for 6 years, a New York City transplant for 11 years, now resides in Washington, DC, and so on.

Like you, I have multiple identities and lived experiences. Also like you, the identity that gets the most prominence largely depends on the space I walk into.

And sometimes, these identities are the only reasons we’re allowed into spaces in the first place.

How do we deal with this?

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16 Oct, 2020

Self Care Corner: The “Well Done” List

By |2021-08-19T20:57:53-04:00October 16th, 2020|Categories: Self & Community Care|Tags: |0 Comments


My day-to-day didn’t change much, if at all, when the current pandemic began. As the months passed, my mental health and self-esteem slowly declined. Much of it, outside of the psychological impact of dealing with a virus that still has many unknowns and sheltering in place, was due to my own expectation to continue to perform optimally.

I had a laundry list of tasks to complete and tried to show up to my work as though a pandemic and racial injustices weren’t occurring, even when my clients asked for grace as they pivoted to support their staff and program participants.

While I still have many items on my to-do list, most of these items aren’t tackled on a normal day. As we’re still in the middle of a pandemic, I’m lucky if I’m able to knock out 1-2 high-level items. The more items I crossed off my list, the more accomplished I felt…but most of these items didn’t move me towards my bigger goals in any significant way.

Several years ago, I came across the concept of a “well done” list. I tucked the concept away and thought about it the other day as I looked at my ever-growing to-do list.

What’s a “well done” list? Similar to a to-do list, it’s a list of tasks. Instead of focusing on the number of items you cross off your to-do list, a “well done” list acknowledges the quality of what gets done.

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14 Feb, 2020

Self Care Corner: Your Friendships Are Just As Important As Your Relationships

By |2021-08-19T20:48:04-04:00February 14th, 2020|Categories: Self & Community Care|Tags: , |0 Comments

On the eve of my 30th birthday, I met a few friends at a hookah lounge on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York.

At one point during the evening, one friend asked everyone to go around and share how they came into my life and one thing they’ve always appreciated about me.

I had friends there from my grad school program, feminist and other activist/social justice spaces, classmates from Spelman College, and friends I made from my pole dance classes.

As everyone took their turn sharing how they’d met me and what they appreciated about me, I realized how much I’d compartmentalized friendships. It had been rare for me to have my friends mixed in this way.

I also realized how uncomfortable I felt. Not only because I’ve always felt awkward hearing people speak positively about me, but also because I couldn’t remember the last time I’d mentioned to any of them how much they meant to me.

Intuitively, we know that our friends care about us. We also know which friends are always up to have fun and which ones we can count on in times of need. But how often do we tell our friends how much they mean to us?

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13 Jun, 2019

Self Care Corner: Staying Friends with Your Ex (?)

By |2021-08-19T20:39:20-04:00June 13th, 2019|Categories: Self & Community Care|Tags: |0 Comments

If being friends with your ex is affecting your ability to move forward, read on.

Nothing brings about a flood of emotions like our exes.

On a website and blog that focuses on workshops, research and evaluation, and program sustainability, why am I blogging about relationships?

Well, I promised myself I’d blog more about self care in 2019. More specifically, how we think about self care within the context of our relationships. This is something I want to explore, given that it’s something that we all face at some point in our lives.

I’m happy to say that the people I’ve had romantic relationships with are good people, and I’m at a place in my life now where I can identify the purpose each one had in my life and the life lessons I learned at those moments in time. I can think about the good times I’ve had with them and wish them all well. But are we friends to the point that I’d consider them part of my inner circle? Not really.

When identifying your “breathe” supports, one question to ask yourself is “Do you feel that the people you’ve chosen as your ‘breathe’ supports are sufficient or do you need to expand your circle of support?” For some, a former romantic partner might be part of that support system.

I never thought about being friends with an ex until I experienced my first heartache, about a year after graduating from college. He asked if we could remain friends, and I agreed. My rationale: I wanted to get him back and thought the best way to do it was to show him I could be a good friend.

I remember attending a party with him about a month after we broke up, and it was one of the most awkward experiences of my life. Not only did I feel uncomfortable, he and I barely spoke and when we did it felt forced. Plus, the people at the party were confused as to why we arrived at this party together in the first place. (It’s funny now, but at the time it wasn’t). Every communication I had with him was awkward and didn’t feel good. Even months and years later, most interactions with him felt forced and disingenuous. 

I had to be honest about why I’d attempted something that in the end, didn’t make me feel good. First off, trying to get an ex back by being friends with them doesn’t work. I also thought about how I physically felt when interacting with my ex (shallow breathing, quickening heartbeat) and how I felt emotionally (defeated, and a loser).

So one day, I gave myself permission to stop trying to be friends with him because I needed to find some relief. This didn’t include an announcement that I would no longer be contacting him or blocking him from contacting me. I just slowly lessened communication with him. When I checked in with myself, I felt better physically, and not so much like a loser. But I had a nagging thought: He’s a good guy. We technically didn’t end on bad terms, so what gives?

If we’re honest with ourselves, not all romantic relationships are supposed to last, and not all relationships end on bad terms. But does this mean we have to remain friends with our exes?

I realized that I shouldn’t force myself to continue doing something I didn’t want to do, even if my intentions for wanting to remain friends weren’t exactly pure in the beginning. Plus, it was preventing me from moving on with my life. 

If you find yourself contemplating whether to remain friends with an ex and it’s impacting how you take care of yourself, ask these questions:

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