Our Programs
Reparations Café
Radical Black public healing—moving trauma from silence and individualism into communal restoration.
Monthly Virtual Gatherings | Trauma-informed Facilitation | Diasporic Sanctuary
THE INNOVATION: We're not just talking about healing. We're practicing it. In community. Where it's designed to happen.
Through carefully facilitated dialogue and embodied somatic practices, participants access the wisdom that lives in our collective Black body. We create sanctuary where historical and present-day wounds can be witnessed, felt, and powerfully integrated. This is how communities develop capacity to be present with what has been frozen in our families and collective memory for generations.
We're resourcing the collective Black body to metabolize 400+ years of frozen trauma in order to access collective wisdom—not despite our wounds, but through creating compassionate space to turn toward them together.
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This model regulates the nervous system at scale.
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Trauma-informed facilitation holds the container so participants can access vulnerability without flooding or freezing.
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Collective healing environments activate the ancestral knowing that we are safer together than alone.
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Somatic practices move trauma from the mind to the body where it can finally be felt and integrated.
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Ancestral connection reminds us we're not starting from scratch—we're continuing work our people began.
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Witnessing as medicine transforms isolation into belonging.
Culturally Competent Museum Partnerships
Current partnership: Metropolitan Museum of Art
The model is replicable across exhibitions and institutions ready for authentic community access.
Black Exhale transforms how cultural institutions serve Black communities. Through partnerships with organizations like Arts Justice & Safety Coalition, Akoben Institute, Mahaba House, and Intelligent Mischief, we create experiences where the Black diaspora engage with sacred cultural artifacts in sanctuary—as family, not strangers. As belonging, not observers.
What Shifts
Community members describe the transformation from trying to decipher plaques alone in hostile crowds to being held in space where context, safety, and truth create belonging. The experience becomes ceremony. Participants leave feeling both seen and inspired—carrying the memory as life-changing.
The Methodology
Trauma-informed facilitation, culturally competent guidance with an appreciation for the weight of what's being witnessed, co-designed programming with community partners, integration practices that anchor the experience in body and spirit.
Black Exhale Nest
"The Black body was created to be loved."
Sanctuary on Sacred Ground
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In 2022, on the sacred grounds of Weeksville Heritage Center where free Black communities once thrived, Black Exhale collaboratively created a human-sized nest as sanctuary for system-impacted Black men. In partnership with All Kings and Exodus Transitional Community, Black men encountered a space designed to cradle the Black body through institutional harm, and into embodied freedom.
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A space to express that the Black body is sacred. A place to be embraced, loved, and cherished. A container strong enough to hold the ancestral and institutional wounds. As one participant shared: "It's all generational trauma. I am bringing peace to the pieces. I just want to tell his story. I want to tell our story."
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When we create conditions for vulnerability in sanctuary, transformation becomes possible. Participants described the experience as liberating—finally having a container that could hold them fully.
Reparations in Public Space
In honoring the African Burial Grounds throughout New York, we explored how public spaces can be transformed from sites of collective trauma into platforms for healing, repair, and Black joy.
All the Black Girls are Bestsellers Campaign
Through this campaign, 50,000 books written by 10 Black femme authors were provided to over 175 nonprofit organizations, 5,900 avid readers, 20 HBCUs, educational organizations, and more.
Building Capacity for Decolonial Futures
Black Exhale partners across the African diaspora to resource liberation movements with trauma-awareness and healing-centered practices. Through deep attunement to each community, we support organizers, artists, and leaders in accessing embodied tools for sustainable movement building.
When collectives can metabolize historical harm together, we stop unconsciously recreating oppressive power structures in our own movements. We build from wholeness instead of woundedness. From presence instead of reactivity.
The Work
Capacity building for collective trauma integration
Somatic practices for nervous system regulation
Ancestral connection as resource for contemporary movements