From Sharecropper to Shareholder: My Journey to Liberation
Six years ago, I wrote about learning to cradle books for comfort because the women in my family hadn’t learned to cradle themselves or each other. I spoke of being captivated by Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon,” where characters could escape harmful environments by taking flight.
After almost six decades of trying to escape racial, gender, and sexual oppression, I’m finding a new path—not of flight but of transformation.
My Ask: I am personally asking you to support a campaign that I co-created and have fought for alongside my comrades since 2017 to get our co-op off the ground. The Road to Liberation campaign will raise money to launch Dandelion Medicine Liberation and prototype its offerings. For me, Dandelion Medicine Liberation is not just a vision; it’s a lifeline for communities yearning for justice and healing.
It’s about creating spaces where every weary soul, including me, can find solace, strength, and a renewed sense of purpose.
Getting to this moment in our development has kept me from flying away during moments when I could admit to myself and sometimes say to someone else, “I don’t want to be here anymore.”
Please support my choice to stay alive and continue doing good work by supporting Dandelion Medicine Liberation.
Ancestral Roots and Modern Wounds: I was born in Oklahoma, carrying the lineage of resilience and resistance. African—born enslaved people who became sharecroppers, Cherokee and Choctaw warriors who fought for their land, and visionaries who fled the Klan in Mississippi to walk the trail of tears into Indian Territory in the 1850s. My family history connects directly to Black Wall Street in Tulsa, where my great-uncle T.J. Elliott and great-aunt Anna Elliott McGowan owned stores in that thriving, self-sufficient community before racist white mobs destroyed it violently in 1921.
By 1910, my ancestors collectively owned 13 million acres of land at the height of racism in America. Within a generation, our family, along with countless others, lost our land through racist policies, violence, and economic exploitation. These ancestral experiences of achievement and dispossession taught me about injustice, resilience, and the necessity of creating one’s path forward.
The Critical Moments That Changed Everything:
My critical moment came while working at what felt like my dream job—six figures, great benefits, in charge, working with a Black-led all-BIPOC team in low-income communities of color. I loved the people and the work but spent all my time working. I lost relationships and friendships; my health deteriorated; I gained weight; I couldn’t breathe or sleep properly, and I traveled constantly.
Then came the moment of clarity: my boss called me at home at 7:30 am when I was making tea. After hearing the weariness in my voice, she laughed and said, “Well, we are working you like a dog.” At that moment, I recognized: “Yes, and I am allowing you to.” This conversation was the critical moment I knew I had to liberate myself from toxic work environments, even those we co-create.
Our collective critical moment came later, during COVID-19, when our efforts to meet escalating community needs created unique challenges. Working with more white-led multiracial groups than ever before while using that revenue to subsidize our work with BIPOC-led groups, we experienced significant discrimination. The result? Heart conditions, escalating blood pressure, diabetes complications, domestic violence, strained relationships, and other health challenges. Most of our co-op members became ill with COVID-19 or cared for sick family members. Our health deteriorated, and many of us became partially or fully disabled.
The Transformation: From Hoarding to Circulating Energy:
What I’ve learned through this journey is profound: Weight gain was a physical manifestation of “hoarding energy”—storing up energy rather than expressing it in the world, much like someone who keeps money under their mattress instead of investing it, or someone with talent who is too self-conscious to share it.
“Weight loss is not hard—holding all that energy in is hard.” The same is true for stress management—it’s not about pushing through difficulty but about releasing what we hold and allowing ourselves to flow with the universe’s energy.
Now, I practice daily communion with water and nature. After growing up with limited outdoor play due to asthma, I intentionally reconnect with the elements—swimming when possible (even with alligators in Belize!), standing barefoot on the earth, talking to plants and trees, and watching the water move. These practices ground me in “nature-based spirituality,” which has replaced my Christian upbringing with something more elemental and directly connected to ancestral wisdom.
Laughter is medicine in my life now. Reclaiming clowning as a form of expression and community-building reconnects me to joy and ancestral rhythms. Having experienced how social isolation from illness controlled my childhood, I’ve reclaimed laughter as an expression of freedom.
Creating New Systems: Dandelion Medicine Liberation: This personal journey has evolved into Dandelion Medicine Liberation—a vision and a lifeline for communities yearning for justice and healing. It’s about creating spaces where every weary soul can find solace, strength, and renewed purpose.
After spending three decades serving vulnerable communities and witnessing how social justice leaders often reproduce the systems of harm they seek to dismantle, I recognize that sustainable social justice work requires deep integration of healing practices into our personal and collective processes.
Dandelion Medicine Liberation builds on lessons from Sweet Livity, where we learned that the more your intersecting identities come from marginalized groups, the more likely you are to experience oppression and harassment, not only in your personal life but also at work.
These workers have high levels of trauma and stress, disrupting well-being, capacity to work and lead effectively, and energy to sustain momentum and win social justice campaigns.
The Path Forward — Watering the Seed: As Howard Thurman is known for saying: “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
The Road to Liberation campaign seeks to raise funds to launch Dandelion Medicine Liberation and prototype its offerings. This funding is “Watering the Seeds” for our collective rest and restoration, especially for those who need extra support and deployment of offerings that provide vital resources, support grassroots activism, and create tangible positive change.
In embracing my identity as a Black/African American woman with Cherokee heritage who now identifies as gender nonconforming, I bring multiple perspectives on how embodied liberation can address intersecting oppressions. I declare my intention to break the generational cycle of workaholism that has plagued our movements, stating firmly: “I’d like to be the last generation of workaholics.”
My journey from “sharecropper to shareholder” has taught me that sustainable social justice work requires a deep integration of healing practices into our personal and collective processes. True service to the community requires treating myself as part of that beloved community—worthy of the same care and consideration I offer others.
Through Dandelion Medicine Liberation, I’m not taking flight to escape—I’m staying grounded to transform, creating a world where we can all be valued, respected, and empowered to live our truth. Please join us in this crucial work of liberation, joy, and well-being in our lifetimes. Now.
Call to Action: In the face of adversity, we find strength. In the depths of despair, we find hope. We have heard a lot of “NOs” in our co-op discovery journey. With your support, we will turn the “NOs” into “Yes, and right now.”
This funding is “Watering the Seeds” for the first steps of security for our collective rest and restoration for those of us who need extra support, and deployment of our offerings to provide vital resources, support grassroots activism, and create tangible positive change in our communities.
THANK YOU for your support and contribution. No gift is too small or too large.