HEARTH: a liberation lab

Hearth: a liberation lab is a cohort program for Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) community members devoted to collective liberation in the Northeast.

Our year-long program is an incubator and practice space where liberatory thinking, play, experimentation, and healing somatic practice get to unravel, breathe, and be in reciprocally nourishing relationships with others in a community committed to the work of liberation.

Click here for program outline

We completed our first cohort (2024-2025) this past May and are currently fundraising for future cohorts.

Photos on this page by Tarik Bartel

Who is this program for?

Hearth is for those of us grieving the ongoing global violence, displacement, and systematic disenfranchisement of Black, Indigenous, and working class people around the globe. This program is for those of us wanting our spaces to embody the same qualities of the liberatory worlds we are fighting for. This program is for those of us trying to find our place in the movement. This program is for those of us with strong political analyses that are wanting to further merge theory with practice and embodiment.

This program is for those of us who have a project in mind that would advance liberatory power for our communities, but need the resourcing, love, rigor, and accountability to actualize that project.

Engagement & Key Dates

Hearth: a liberation lab consists of two in-person retreats, bi-weekly virtual workshop and practice lab sessions (two sessions per month), and one-on-one coaching to collectively experiment with being our most liberated selves, moving in reciprocity with land, and being accountable to our communities and the earth. We hope it will be a space to manifest our visions of collective liberation and embody them, grounding in liberatory thinking, network weaving, and somatic practice.

Applications Open: March 29, 2024

Applications Close: April 21, 2024 at 11:59PM EST


If selected to participate, you can expect to:

  1. Receive a $2500 stipend to support your participation in the program and travel, accommodation, and childcare support.

  2. Attend two in-person retreats and bi-weekly virtual workshops centered in navigating the effects of oppressive systems on our bodies while grappling with the current tensions in our liberation movements.

  3. Practice and embody your visions and project ideas in Liberation Lab, our wisdom-centered model for learning and co-creating in community.

  4. Participate in one-on-one coaching sessions to facilitate your self, community, and movement work.

Participant Requirements

This program is for Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) community members, including healers, organizers, policy-makers, educators, culture-workers, and artists in the Northeast who are currently cultivating, nourishing and advancing movements for justice, equity, and liberation. 

Key Identifiers– More explicitly, this program is for folks who are: 

✱ Over the age of 18 and holding intersecting identities marginalized by dominant culture - for example: gender, sexuality, ability, race, class, citizenship status, housing status, etc...

✱ Currently living and/or working in the Northeast United States occupied land of Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont

✱ Interested in building or deepening their work in relationship with other leaders and community members to contribute to systems change and experience tangible and felt evidence of liberation in their lives, the lives of their communities, and future generations

✱ Working in one or all of the following categories for a minimum of four years: 

  • Dismantling or transforming oppressive systems into liberatory ones (for example through policy, organizing, or governance)

  • Building liberatory structures that promote self-determination, reparations, and deep democracy and Indigenous governance

  • Supporting our communities to heal from oppressive systems

  • Telling and building the story of liberation through art

Lineage &

Acknowledgments

Lead Design Team

Juli Santoyo, Tarik Bartel, Andrea Atkinson

Program Team

Juli Santoyo, Tarik Bartel, Adeola Oredola, nisha puroshotham

Past Contributors:

One Square World leadership team & Liberation Leadership Pilot Committee Members

Hearth: a liberation lab is a program incubated and birthed at One Square World in 2024. Hearth was molded by many hands after a rigorous multi-year community design process catalyzed by Andrea Atkinson, founder of One Square world in 2021. Stewardship of the process was eventually entrusted to Juli Santoyo in 2023, Hearth Studios founder, who helped build clarity, coherence, and systems of care to manifest the vision. We acknowledge and honor the many lineages of strategy, organizing, and community care that helped shape this container.

Gratitude:

First and foremost to our beloved, Andrea Atkinson, founder and Executive Director of 1SW at the time Hearth was launched for her unwavering commitment to this work. This program exists because of Andrea’s sensibilities and unrelenting advocacy for organizing and community transformation spaces that are rooted in embodied practice and ancestral connection. Thank you for anointing us, over and over again, with your love and confidence for our medicine. We pray your generosity and humility in this work returns to you in all the abundance you deserve.

Second, to our partner in crime, community-coordinator extraiordinaire, and brilliant healing artist, Tarik Bartel— THANK YOU. Tarik Bartel worked alongside Juli Santoyo to bring Hearth to life and steward the vibrant and loving community vessel that it became. Tarik’s visions for beauty, decadence, rigor, and abundance have left an invaluable imprint. Tarik remains as the main collaborator on Hearth: a liberation lab related projects.

Lastly, to our wise teachers, Adeola Oredola and nisha purushotham, thank you for your practice, your compassion, and the ways you love our people. Getting to have your brilliance help shape and then bring this project to life has been a blessing of a lifetime. You keep our work in integrity to our values and commitments; we are grateful for the sharp mirrors and delightful companions you are.

Participant Testimonials

  • “The entire Hearth program and project has been 10 out of 10 enjoyable. I feel as though the program feels like a living breathing organism that is moving alongside the curriculum and the needs of myself and the cohort members as well as the facilitators in a way that I've never experienced in any other group/ membership project before.”

    Hearth Participant

  • “I loved learning about the frameworks on change and conflict, and also getting to design/articulate our own theories of change in silent solo or small group time."

    Hearth Participant

  • “Recognizing how my frames around time and power have impeded me from using my voice in ways that support my community. I could have stepped up to facilitate needed conversations because I recognized them as a need instead of waiting for someone else in my organizing community to also recognize the need, name it, and be willing and able to step up and facilitate the conversation.”

    Hearth Participant

  • "Staff feel successful in having created a program that embodies what it is teaching by not only delivering though-provoking and experiential learning frameworks but by also engaging them as a living practice through the ways facilitators interact with each other, the liberatory creation of the systems holding the program, and the sustainable systems engaged. We really sought out to create something that refused to be extractive for anyone involved, and we feel we were able to do this."

    Hearth Staff

  • “As a youth facilitator, my personal work through Hearth has allowed me to hold greater conversations with myself, my students and organizations I work with around sustainable impact. I am taking into account our conversations on time, on building sustainable movements and centering/honoring the humanity and *how* we gain results in our work versus just the *what* , and integrating these concepts into the foundations of the programs I build, how I choose to facilitate with students and how to have conversations with parents/program heads around the work impact.”

    Hearth Participant

  • “Throughout my time with Hearth, I’ve realized that I can be more creative in how I create impact but also the process of what I am building is just as important as what I’m building; so stressing myself out/depleting myself in order to make something for community isn’t necessary to make impact, but also is out of alignment with accountability to myself”

    Hearth Participant

  • “I cannot stress enough how deeply held I feel by the entire Hearth staff and facilitators. The level of care, transparency, communication and accountability that each member brings to the cohort is a real-life model of how to be in more aligned community”

    Hearth Participant

  • “One specific learning that has shaped me in my personal practice has been Hearth's approach to conflict. The initial document around conflict and care that was presented/ expounded upon at our Opening Retreat helped me contextualize how community reconciliation and repair can be modeled in organizations where harm is inevitable and repair is necessary for longevity, trust and real impact. I have adopted some of the principles in my personal life and brought many of the points into my work. I often review the list with friends and partners, and have presented it to my organization as a starting point for our own conflict and care practice.”

    Hearth Participant

SUPPORT OUR WORK

This work has always been rooted in the practice and intention of redistributing resources to community members who are working to steward social movements. We invite you to pour into this work so that we may be financially sustained to continue these offerings.

3% Cover the Fee