A Letter from the Founder

I chose a life, a professional career, that challenges me to see an individual’s innocence before they were left scarred by injustice; that forces me to hold onto my own innocence before I was taught a world of resentment.

While helping others, I realized the more limited our worldview as a child, the harder it becomes to dream as an adult; the more we normalize injustice through naive eyes, the further away we get from understanding that we’re worthy of good.

Later in life, it becomes an argument about whose been most oppressed, rather than a conversation about how our points of pain make us more alike; whether we are held captive by the illusion of hate or a victim of its falsehood. I have been hurt by people I love and trusted the most. But I am learning to face my pain with forgiveness and acceptance, assertiveness and boundaries. Because I know that those who hurt me are, too, hurting; that their worldview had been shrunken as a child; that their innocence was violated by the ordinance of someone else’s unhealed pain; that their worth had been diluted and their resentment enhanced.

And still, what I want for them is what I want for myself: peace.

It’s far too easy to perpetuate resentment, to justify inflicting hurt as a mean to ignore our own. I, too, wanted to hate my perpetrators and to bury my pain. But I knew that would further distance me from my goal.

My mama often tells me that I’m a lover, not a fighter. And that’s why I’ve spent the majority of my life breaking down the walls I had made to protect myself because it was leading me toward the direction of resentment. As much as I understand the desire to confide within our own walls, I must say that doing that only pushes one further from peace. And as Martin Luther King Jr. noted, peace is justice.

Above all, I believe in justice.

I believe in doing the personal work and taking the invaluable time it takes to heal - myself and community. And I believe the innocence and naiveté, that I so firmly grip to, serve as roads to justice. It starts with speaking my pain into existence so I can better understand how it can make me susceptible to perpetuate the very cycle I am trying to break.

Choosing peace is the hardest, most courageous thing one can do. And I did not choose this path because it was easy, or hard for that matter.

I chose it because it is necessary. Because to achieve justice, I see no other option.