A year ago, we put something into the world and watched it take root in places we didn’t expect.
We launched the Liberatory Leadership Framework in June 2025, and it has been making its way through the social good sector with fellows, teams, cohorts, and leaders who took on the challenge and responsibility of practicing liberatory leadership. This framework is a practical tool for shifting times, and we hope it has offered you affirmation, inspiration, and applicable next steps. Perhaps it has also felt like a coming home to values and intentions set long ago. This is because it is not completely new technology. Rather, it is a new amalgamation of wisdom and practices of countless leaders and lineages on all that has worked and is working to support our collective liberation. Below, find more on our journey and what our learnings have been about a year since the framework launched.
Prepare the Ground, Tend to the Soil
In 2019, LLC co-founded and participated in the Liberatory Leadership Partnership. By 2022, LLC had started our journey practicing liberatory leadership as an organization. In other words, we are a liberatory lab for ourselves. Our internal culture, decision-making structures, facilitation approaches, and how we hold staff transitions are all sites of ongoing experimentation with liberatory principles.
Taking Action, Plant and Grow
In 2023, we began documenting learning and wisdom from our team, leaders in the field and the Liberatory Leadership Community of Practice. By 2025, we released the Liberatory Leadership Framework. Today in 2026, we partnered closely with a handful of organizations and collaboratives to introduce and apply liberatory leadership principles to their leaders and/or strategic processes.
Learn, Refine, Harvest
What we have learned along the way is that change towards racial equity and collective liberation is hard in a system that rewards moving fast, accumulating power, and supremacy. We have found that culture shifts in organizations are needed at all levels of leadership. Moreover, the ‘how’ of our daily work must align with the ‘what’ of our long-term vision, and we know we can’t shift global systems through theoretical thinking alone. We shift them through our daily habits by leading from a place of wholeness and prioritizing community; we really start to bring about our freedom dreams from out of this abstract theory and into a direct, physical, and shared reality.
Below are 8 learnings we’ve gathered from seeing the Liberatory Leadership Framework live, breathe, and adapt in the world:
1
There is no formula; what is required is culture-building. The “secret sauce” of liberatory leadership cannot be packaged as a rigid document to copy. Even the framework does not capture everything. True liberation requires each leader/organization to do the heavy lifting of carving out their own space, trusting their own wisdom, and adapting the principles to their unique structures, identities, and cultures.
2
Recenter on values and repeat again. Given that everyone’s lived experiences are different, the inner work looks unique for everyone and has no fixed timeline. Liberation is a practice, not a destination. In moments of crisis or exhaustion, our default is to snap back to old strategies, meaning we must continuously pause, recenter on our core values, and commit to the process over and over again to keep that muscle strong.
3
We cannot skip processing the “monsters” of today. People are incredibly open to liberatory leadership, but they cannot bypass the deep inner work and self-examination required to understand how all these pieces fit together. Deep inequities, consolidation of power, a contracting social good sector, fear and instability are among many “monsters” that we must continue to grapple with. To truly shift systems, we can consider how we take on risks, rather than avoiding the harsh and difficult realities present. Moreover, we can move toward seeing risk-taking as an essential, iterative experiment in building a new world.
4
Even well-meaning, equity-steeped leaders struggle with dominant culture and oppressive habits. No amount of expertise or good intentions exempts us from systemic programming. Even in heart-centered spaces, oppressive habits can simply disguise themselves in more subtle ways. We must approach this work with radical humility, shedding shame and acknowledging that we are all actively recovering from the conditioning of the dominant culture. We refer to this work as a practice because it is continual.
5
Boundaries are healthy. Because change, transformation, partnership, collaboration, and interdependence are all energetically rewarding and demanding, we’ve learned that leaders cannot practice liberatory leadership without clear boundaries, including intentions, goals, expectations, and risks. Boundaries are not walls to keep people out; they are the essential structures that preserve our own well-being, protect the integrity of the container, and prevent burnout while we innovate, change, and transform together.
6
Friction is a natural step toward finding flow. True collaboration and culture shifts are rarely smooth. Friction is a healthy, necessary part of the process; in fact, a total lack of friction can be a yellow flag that people are playing it safe or avoiding the real issues and honest conversations. We have to learn to tolerate, navigate, and embrace friction as the path to true alignment.
7
Urgent times require the radical power of slowing down, play, and seeing the whole more clearly. In these tumultuous times, we’ve seen more evidence that these three practices are essential to move from survival mode to a place of clear-eyed vision. When the world demands that we sprint, know there is deep medicine in intentionally slowing down to regulate and respond rather than react. When we are stuck, we lean into the power of playfulness—not just to disrupt the crushing weight of urgency, but because play allows us to connect with one another in low-stakes ways and unlock the creative freedom needed to imagine entirely new solutions. Finally, actively forcing ourselves to look at the forest rather than the trees helps us recenter our core values and our North Stars, giving us the clarity to make deeply aligned, collaborative, and strategic decisions from a place of grounded power and purpose.
8
Applying the framework as an intuitive tool for translating values into daily action; inspires a desire for the “how-to.” Overall, we’ve learned that the Liberatory Leadership Framework is an accessible tool for building containers, facilitating groups, and helping leaders, organizations, and networks deepen into their values and move them into tangible daily practices. The framework’s immediate resonance triggers a strong craving for prescriptive answers, checklists, and blueprints. We’ve realized that the best way to satisfy this hunger without overwhelming folks is to meet them where they are by breaking the framework down into bite-sized, digestible pieces, focusing on just one principle at a time and evolving supporting tools to be applicable when possible.
Compost
Even though the Liberatory Leadership Framework and our journey towards collective liberation is still growing and maturing, we know there are pieces of how we have held this work that need to be reexamined. Resting and also releasing what no longer serves us is a critical step in making space for new growth. To enrich our soil for future endeavors, we are actively composting other learnings from the past year like scarcity mindset and the pressure to perform alone. Instead, we will continue to lean into each other, liberatory leaders in the field, and our communities.
So, what is next? In response to the growing momentum we have witnessed this past year, we are setting our sights on making this practice approachable, as well as continuing to deepen into our practice through a new Liberatory Leadership Community of Practice and other offerings to learn together. Stay tuned as we continue to hold more spaces where we can slow down, play, experiment, dream, and do just work in just and joyous ways.
