Community Pillars
Our programs create visibility and support healing for black women and children.
Leadership
We have all that we need.
How I Wear My Crown
Celebrating joy and connection, How I Wear my Crown is a community practice in black women's care. Each cohort meets annually to engage in support and advocacy for one another. Centering beauty, connection, and uplift, we focus on keeping one another safe and building resilience in our collective experiences.
Wealth
Abundance creates wealth.
Giving Circle
Support for one another is crucial to our success. Through our Giving Circle, we support community projects led by Black Women and Girls who are making an impact. These programs create opportunities for Black Women to develop skills while practicing joy in community.
Wellbeing
Professional support, for us, by us!
Black Female Leadership Network
We recognize that black female leadership can be taxing. However, because we have traveled a similar path, we see the gaps in accessing tools and cultivating a support network.
Our Black Female Leaders Network provides Black women with leadership development, capacity building, and organizational infrastructure.
Culture
Highlight & uplift one another.
In the Company of My Sisters: Memorial Project
A tribute to those that keep us most healthy.
We have created public healing spaces with a bench and a garden. These exist for deep conversation and healing. In these spaces, we interact with our wise aunties and health officials. These are spaces to focus energy and create more visibility for the healing of Black Women.
Theory of Change
At Society of Clotilda, we see healing as systems change.
To heal, we first look within. How we support and care for ourselves and one another is the starting place for all change. It requires us to shine a bright light on three levels of relationships–self, community, and world. By examining and understanding our relationships at these levels, we shift our internal landscape and break the oppressive systems surrounding us.
Personal
As we develop, we absorb the direct and indirect messages of families and the places and spaces we connect to–schools, faith communities, workplaces, and social groups. These are the foundation of who we are and how we see ourselves and one another. Unfortunately, as black women, these messages can sometimes be harmful; they can shift us from self-love into self-censorship and internalized racism. Society of Clotilda approaches this level through How I Wear My Crown; in this series, we work for and with one another to hone our advocacy skills and develop into being our sisters' keepers.
Interpersonal
The ways we show up for one another matters; it matters in the development of our relationships and in how we pass healing to the next generation. Our sisters are complete when we practice personal care and mindful communication. We don’t vilify one another based on the perception of bad choices. Instead, we hold each other in our complexity at the interpersonal level, recognizing that we are always learning. Society of Clotilda hosts the “In the Company of My Sisters” Bench; here, we give one another the gift of time and attention. So we can learn, grow, and heal together.
Systemic
Societal, political, and legal institutions are often set up to disregard our lived experiences and needs. Our commitment to one another and in shifting written policies and procedures starts in the places where we hold power. As we face the historical impact of violence against black women and girls, we can often feel the weight of the world. Our Black Female Leadership programs support black women in power to develop an anti-oppression approach in their organizations. We arm them with tools for change and support them in implementation through focused circles of practice. Our advocacy and financial influence can impact the larger world.
Self Healing
All current and future programs of SOC are designed using an anti-oppression systems approach. We look at all the pieces to the puzzle of oppression and place focus on immediate issues for black women–gender violence, bias in social services, health care, racial oppression, and internalized censorship and harm.
Celebrating our care and uplifting one another allows us to focus on our abundance. It gives us more resilience to show love and care for one another. It is circular; caring for one another gives us more energy to care for ourselves and our children. Being nurtured and nurturing gives us access to overflowing joy.