Meeting the Moment
A Liberatory leadership Program
for those who feel called to embrace and wield their power
in service of collective liberation and thriving for all
September 2024 – December 2024
This moment is a calling to rise to the occasion.
The occasion of love. The occasion of justice. The occasion of liberation.
What does it look like to meet this moment?
Well, it’s not enough to know what we’re against.
To create a more loving, just and free world, we must expand our capacities to live our visions now and inspire others to do the same.
This means facing any fears we may hold about doing it wrong, about not being capable, about being publicly criticized, about being offensive or making others uncomfortable, about unintentionally doing harm, or about being seen more fully.
*deep breath*
We cannot allow our fears to hold us back from our freedom. Not when our freedoms are so intertwined.
Meeting the Moment is an opportunity for you to face those fears, embrace your power and resource yourself to be catalyst and conduit for the change you envision in your communities and our world.
If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. If you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
— An Aboriginal Activist Group, Queensland, 1970s
This is for you if…
- you are grieving for, angry or heartbroken about the state of the world and the future of humanity/our planet and you are devoted to using your gifts, skills, experiences, resources to make a difference
- you are holding visions for change in your communities, organization, school, business and/or the world and you’re feeling excited/nervous/stuck about how to make that vision reality
- you are turned off by the models of leadership you’ve seen, experienced or learned about and you want to explore another way, but you doubt your capacity to lead in ways that are aligned with your values
- you are struggling with taking care of yourself or getting nourished while showing up for the world around you
- you are seeking community and accountability as you go after creating change in your corner of the world (so you don’t feel alone in the challenges and obstacles you may face)
If this is speaking to you, I’d love to invite you into this program.
But before I give you all of the details, I want to share my intentions with you:
I hope to influence you and support the impact you wish to make in your communities. My desire is for you to sign up for this experience only if it feels aligned with your vision, your body, and your resources.
I also expect to learn from you – to be influenced by you. My overall intention is to infuse my commitments to love, justice and collective liberation for all into everything I do and create. I want to support you in doing the same, in your own way.
Meet Your Facilitator
![ARJ image](https://andrearanaej.notion.site/image/https%3A%2F%2Fs3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com%2Fsecure.notion-static.com%2Ffdfee75f-ec06-41b2-9f04-9105013bd49f%2FDSC_0551.jpg?table=block&id=e37485fb-0963-4a96-a9d1-02eb0c89f149&spaceId=74b53f65-0cd7-4882-9db6-a2d479dc473a&width=1340&userId=&cache=v2)
Hi! I’m Andréa (she/they pronouns).
For most of my life, I’ve been living in the question: “How can I live, work and relate in a way that supports and contributes to positive social change?“
Finding my answers to this question has been my life’s journey and I lovelovelove partnering with others who are also living in this question and supporting them in finding their own answers.
I began creating offerings like this for my peers, colleagues and comrades when I was 20 years old. 10 years and thousands of participants later, so much has changed for me and within me, but one thing has been constant: my desire to remind people of their power.
There is too much pain and unnecessary suffering to tend to in our world for us to be stuck in inaction.
So I’m committed to doing what I can with who I am and what I have over the course of my life. This offering is a part of my contribution. Should you decide to join me for this Meeting the Moment adventure, I hope that it’ll be a catalyst, a challenge, and a comfort for you, as you engage in making your own contribution.
If you’re interested in the nitty gritty about me:
I facilitate. I write. I create. I speak. I sing. Very black, very queer, very into God. I’m 29 years old (I’ll be 30 on August 10! 🎉), living in Chicago, IL. I’m a Leo, extroverted introvert, 6/2 mental projector in Human Design and a plant mama. I feel most led by the work of Audre Lorde, Octavia Butler, bell hooks, Adrienne Maree Brown, Jenn McCabe, June Jordan, Mariame Kaba, Relational Uprising, James Olivia Chu-Hillman, Sasha Heron and many more.
About Meeting the Moment
Meeting the Moment is a 3-month intensive group program with three main objectives:
- to develop and articulate your vision for yourself, your community and our world
- to define and build the skills, capacities and systems required for you to live your vision
- to explore your relationship with power and embrace your unique way of leading
*This is all a process and it’s truly lifelong work. You won’t reach enlightenment through this program, but you will receive frameworks to draw from that you can continue to integrate into your work and life way after this program is over.
Program Overview:
Meeting the Moment kicks off on September 12, 2024 and runs through December 5, 2024.
This is a robust program with many opportunities to challenge yourself, connect with other participants and practice new ways of leading and creating. Explore below!
The Opportunities
Leadership Labs (Bi-Weekly 1.5 hours)
Thursdays from 12:00 – 1:30 pm Central Standard Time
Starting September 12, 2024 (7 Labs total)
Live via Zoom. These will be recorded and made available to you.
Bi-weekly trainings designed to meet you where you are in your leadership development journey. These calls will support you to map out the landscape of your leadership and support you as you navigate unexplored terrain.
Topics of focus may include:
- Attuning to your source (of power, knowledge, belonging, etc)
- Developing and articulating your vision
- Building the skills & capacities you need to live your vision
- Inviting co-creators (clients, community, collaborators, etc)
- Practicing leadership and followship (both are necessary)
- Cultivating systems of support and nourishment
Scroll down to the “This is a Person-Centered Learning space” tab to find out more about how we’ll engage with these topics.
** You are not required to attend every Leadership Lab, but your attendance and the quality of your participation in these calls will impact what you get from this program.
Vision Cafes (Weekly - 30 minutes)
Mondays from 9:00 – 9:30 am Central Standard Time
Starting September 16, 2024
Live via Zoom. These will NOT be recorded.
Weekly gatherings at the beginning of your week to get rooted in your vision, connect with community, and explore what practical action steps you can take over the coming week to bring your vision to life.
Dream Teams
Big, liberatory work requires big support. Based on your intake information when you register, I’ll set you up with a Dream Team that you can lean on throughout this 3-month program (and beyond, if you want!)
Your Dream Team is a small group of 4-5 people that would ideally support you as you develop, articulate, and share your vision with the world around you (and vice versa).
No special skills needed, just a willingness to be in the process together.
You will have a chance to practice many skills in this small group: negotiating needs, asking for, receiving, and cultivating support, holding each other accountable, harnessing the unique gifts and insights of each individual, building a shared vision across difference, etc.
During each Leadership Lab, you’ll have a chance to gather with your Dream Team. You are welcome to meet outside of our regularly scheduled calls as well if that’s what your group desires.
Curated Resource Library
You will have access to a powerful selection of content, workshop, and courses from my vault – focused on Liberatory Leadership, Supremacy Culture, Crafting a Vision, and more!
This is offered to you as a supplement to your learning and growth – not as the main event. You are not at all expected to engage with every piece of content.
Where relevant, I will do my best to guide you to the content that may be most supportive to you depending on where you are in your journey.
The Space
You're encouraged to Show Up + Take Responsibility
What truly makes this such a potent space + the above points possible is when each of us does these two things:
Show up as you are. Show up with whatever you’re holding. Show up and engage with others in the space. Your presence is foundational to your power.
Take responsibility for how you choose to show up. Take responsibility for your learning and your experience.
These are simple, but in practice, they often require integrity, courage, and deep care (for self and others).
This is a Person-Centered Learning space
I am guided by you – where you’re at and where you want to go, what you want to learn, and how you want to grow.
The design of this program is rooted in a Person-Centered Approach to learning.
What this means is:
- I (Andréa) am responsible for facilitating learning
- and you are responsible for your experience and your learning.
I am not the holder of all knowledge here to bestow The Truth™ upon you while you passively absorb my wisdom, take notes, memorize, and repeat what you’ve been told in your own words.
Rather, this is a unique opportunity to set aside The Right Way© and learn YOUR WAY by putting your desires, questions, and challenges at the center and from there, craft an experience that supports you and others to get what you each want out of this program.
A Person-Centered Approach is a way to uproot supremacy culture.
Supremacy requires a disregard for humanity. A Person-Centered Approach puts your humanity, your personhood, sovereignty, responsibility, and power at the forefront.
Over the course of our 3 months together we will have 7 bi-weekly, 1.5 hour live Leadership Labs. What we do with those gatherings and the time between them will be individually and collectively determined.
I recognize that this type of learning container is very different from what many of us have experienced before, so I’d like to use our first Leadership Lab to get better acquainted with this Person-Centered Approach and what it looks like in practice.
The key question that I’ll ask in every Leadership Lab is: what do you want? (to learn, to get from the call, to explore, to create, etc)
I work to hold this as a Liberatory Space
One vital skill involved in Liberatory Leadership is tending to our current reality while creating a different one. This space invites us to be with that tension.
As the facilitator of this program, I work to make this a space that supports the work of getting free from and being free to.
A few of the ways I put that into practice:
- I tend to the experience of the most marginalized in the room (people of color, trans/gnc/nb folks, disabled folks, etc). If you hold any of these identities, I encourage you to practice prioritizing your learning and experience rather than trying to make sure those with respective privileged identities are comfortable (because you’re joining this for. you.)
- I make space for the process of actively uprooting beliefs and ways of being that uphold systems of oppression through the content we’re digging into, in the way we show up with one another in the program, in our work, families, and relationships
- I work to co-create a psychologically and culturally safe space for each of us to learn, grow, make mistakes, and practice relational accountability. people are messy and so is liberation – purity, perfectionism, and punishment have no place here.
How to Join
Enrollment for Meeting the Moment is open! The deadline to join is September 5th!
Quick review – by joining Meeting the Moment, you’ll get:
- Access to a Curated Resource Library (available to you September 3rd)
- 3 Months of Leadership Labs and Vision Cafes
- A Dream Team to have your back as you dive into this courageous, world-changing work
Ready? Let’s do this.
I’m offering this program under Pay What You Choose pricing.
This means that you can choose from 3 payment options as you sign up or select “Other” on the registration form and enter a number unique to you. The payment option you choose does not change what you receive access to – everything listed above will be available to everyone who joins.
As you decide, I encourage you to take into account your resources and your needs. Money can bring up a lot of feelings, so if you’re worried at all about how Andréa might feel about what you’re able to commit to, set that aside. Decide on a number that best serves you and honors the value you believe you’ll receive from this program.
Choose your preferred payment option below to register.
PWYC Options:
$300/month for 3 months
$225/month for 3 months
$150/month for 3 months
[$ of your choosing] for 3 months
PWYC Options:
$900 total
$675 total
$450 total
[$ of your choosing] total
Testimonials
Working with Andréa and doing this work is so much more than becoming a good or just person. It’s about really getting to the heart of who you have been told that you are, looking deeply at that and letting those layers fall off of you so that you can get to the heart of who you are and show up in this world and be the person you’re here to be and do the work in this world that you’re here to do and serve the people that you are here to serve.
There’s something about the way that she regards each her own and everybody else’s sovereignty that invites you into your own. It invited me into my own and gave me the permission and allowed me to see the possibility of me being able to do that, in the facilitation work that I do and in the spaces that I hold.
I feel like the work I’ve been doing here has been like rehab for my soul – rehab from capitalism and patriarchy, all of the things that have been harming me and getting to experience something healthy instead.
You really recognize: who am I? Who are my people? What is the work that I am here to do? And to let everything else go and not try to do everything and be everything. That has created so much freedom and space and allowed me to show up a lot more powerfully in my work and in my life as well.
Being in that kind of space made me realize that the reason why I felt so stuck on wanting to do anti-racism/anti-oppression work and the reason it felt so disconnected from my other stuff was because it was disconnected from me. It was like something that I had seen as like a thing that I could do instead of a thing that I am. So I have started to see, through being in this community with these amazing people who are also doing this work and all of us like figuring it out together, and through the ways that Andréa is able to reflect us back to ourselves in such a truly, truly loving way, all of the ways that I was absent from my own life and my own human interactions.
I got focus and clarity from Andrea’s work around what actually is my lane in social change work and how to take care of my boundaries around that. That both included her take on that, the communities take on that and also her modeling that. I think that’s honestly one of the most critical things that I’ve noticed is that Andréa actually models what she teaches, which means it lands in my body much more easily. It’s one thing to learn content. It’s another thing to learn in my actual body. And I think that Andréa’s work is really critical to like teaching embodied change.
Andréa helped me level up in all areas of my life. If you are wanting to make a positive change level up in your business in your life, Andréa is a catalyst that will help you reach new heights. Thank you, Andréa, for having a space – an amazing space for me to listen, to hear, to be seen, to learn consistently.