WHO WE ARE
We are a constellation of Liberatory world-builders.
We are a collaborative constellation of seasoned liberatory and decolonial coaches, consultants, facilitators, cultural organizers, spiritual strategists, and healing justice practitioners— (re)weaving kinship networks and working together to help you and your organization embody Liberation—
so that together we may shape more Liberatory worlds.
ChE or Xé (we / they)
Founding CEO & Creatrix DirectorWith roots in Bvlbancha/ New Orleans, North Carolina, California, and the diasporic lands and waterways that shape them, ChE (Xé | we, they) is a steward of living ancestral wisdom. An award-winning Creatrix— Xé embodies decades of experience weaving the arts, movement organizing, decolonial Liberatory praxis, African Indigenous spiritual and contemplative pathways to conjure worlds of embodied Liberation.
ChE is the founding priestexx of HAUS OF THE BLACK MADONNX, an emergent sanctuary and marronage movement home centering QTBIPOC, initiating the worldbuilding conjurers of our most Free and Sovereign futures through its four hauses: haus of the sacred, haus of art and culture, haus of living publication, and haus of liberatory praxis, known as FREEDOM LAND.
As founding CEO & Creatrix Director of FREEDOM LAND, ChE facilitates a Liberatory worldbuilding platform offering spaces for healing the impacts of oppression and becoming the Creatrix of radically imaginative futures. By facilitating decolonial organizational systems transformation, coaching, Freedom Schools, immersive cohorts, land-based retreats, healing justice programs, and rites-of-passages, Xé supports communities with re-membering their Power to embody Freedom and reshape their world.
All of the spaces ChE stewards utilize, Afro-Indigenous Liberatory Praxis, a decolonial reorientation towards our relationality with all of Life. Steeped in Gulf South folqways and The Black Radical Tradition, Xé is a lifelong scholar-practitioner of the Ring Shout, Freedom singing, Circle-keeping, Indigiqueer cosmologies, and the subversive resistance methodologies of Black feminist marronage. They have been a Fellow Awardee with Intercultural Leadership Institute, Southerner’s on New Ground: The Lorde’s Werq; a MAP Fund and Eva Yaa Asantewaa Queer Art Grant finalist.
As a transdisciplinary artist, ChE’s work comes alive with choreography, vocal compositions, immersive installations, mixed media painting, storytelling, and land-based community rituals that span multiple years. They have been featured on the OWN television series, Queen Sugar; Netflix media campaign, Tales of the City; and have received multiple artist-in-residence awards with Brown University’s Center for Slavery and Justice, Black Spatial Relics; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Dancing Grounds, Destiny Arts Center and more.
As a National Performance Network Southern Artists for Social Change Awardee, ChE is currently developing The People Can Fly, a cross-regional living folqtellin’ exploring climate migration and the worldbuilding technologies of marronage. This living series unfolds through a decade of land divinations, performance rituals, and sacred movement activations centering the freedom dreams and medicine-ways of gender-expansive Black and Indigenous peoples of the Gulf South and diasporic beyond.
Germane James
Co-Producer & Liberatory Resource DeveloperGermane James is a strategist, fundraiser, and community-rooted organizer working at the intersection of social justice, philanthropy, and cultural movement-building. Based in Durham, North Carolina, their work centers the creation of infrastructure—programmatic, relational, and financial—that allows justice-centered organizations and communities to thrive.
For more than fifteen years, Germane has partnered with nonprofit organizations, philanthropists, artists, cultural workers, and advocacy groups to design large-scale convenings, develop resource strategies, and build collaborative initiatives that strengthen community power. Their work spans the arts, democracy and civic engagement, public health adjacent initiatives, and grassroots organizing, with a focus on cultivating partnerships and mobilizing resources that support historically marginalized communities.
Grounded in traditions of collective care and movement accountability, Germane’s practice is shaped in collaboration with queer communities, particularly queer youth of color, and people directly impacted by the carceral system.They approach philanthropy and resource generation as a site of transformation, working to shift how resources flow, strengthen organizational sustainability, and expand the capacity of community-led efforts to imagine and build more just futures.
Known for weaving together strategy, storytelling, and operational design, Germane helps organizations translate bold visions for equity into durable structures, through national gatherings, partnership networks, or resource development strategies that sustain long-term movement work.
Nana Fofie Amina
Fiscal Sponsor, Executive Director of Institute for Ashé Movement (IAM) | Mindfulness & Healing Justice Cohort Guide | Facilitator, Expressive Arts & Somatic Therapist | Constellation Memberancestral futurisms | connect@nanafofie.org
Rooted in Bvlbancha/New Orleans and Abiriw, Ghana, Nana Fofie roots her life and work in the lands, waters, and wisdoms of her Akan, Somali, and Black U.S. Southern lineages. She is the founder and principal of Ancestral Futurisms, an initiative offering cultural arts and education, Circle processes, embodied wellness, and collective land practice for communities and organizations seeking connection, imagination, and aligned action.
Nana Fofie also leads the Institute for Ashé Movement (IAM), a collaborative community organization advancing culturally resonant, decolonial approaches to therapy through narrative, expressive arts, and somatic modalities.
Across the Gulf South and the Global South, her work weaves climate and environmental justice with interconnected liberation movements, education, and healing arts—drawing on technologies of memory and ancestral wisdom to co-create liberatory visions and systems of change.
Chiquanda “CJ” Johnson
Accountant, Abundance Infrastructure Co-Conspirator | Constellation MemberChiquanda “CJ” Johnson is a visionary entrepreneur, financial strategist, and transformational leader dedicated to helping individuals and businesses achieve alignment, stability, and sustainable growth. As the founder of multiple ventures spanning accounting, consulting, and insurance, CJ brings a unique blend of financial expertise, operational strategy, and purpose-driven leadership to every client relationship.
With a strong foundation in accounting and business development, CJ specializes in helping entrepreneurs structure, scale, and stabilize their businesses, particularly those seeking clarity, compliance, and long-term financial success. She is known for simplifying complex financial concepts and creating customized strategies that empower her clients to move with confidence and intention.
Known for her authenticity, strategic mindset, and ability to see both the big picture and the fine details, CJ partners with her clients not just as a service provider but as a trusted advisor committed to their evolution and success.
Wendi Autumn Moore-O’Neal
Liberatory Worldbuilders Cohort Participant | Co-Director Emeritus of Southerners On New Ground | Freedom Singer, Cultural Worker, Constellation MemberWendi Moore-O'Neal is a cultural worker, activist, facilitator, educator and founder of Jaliyah Consulting. Born and raised in New Orleans, she has worked in local, regional and national organizations; but her heart’s work is rooted in the Deep South of the US. Her work is based in the legacies of voting rights, Women’s Anti-Violence, Poor People’s and Queer Student Movements. Her teachers include John O’Neal, Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, Dr. Ysaye Maria Barnwell, Suzanne Pharr and Tufara Waller-Muhamed, among many others.
In 1991, Wendi helped found one of the first documented out Lesbian/ Bisexual women’s alliances at a Historically Black College, Spelman, in Atlanta, GA – which continues to exist today as the group, Afrekete. Some groups Wendi has worked with include: The Southern Regional office of Amnesty International, Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children, Southerners on New Ground, The Highlander Research and Popular Education Center, INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence, Junebug Productions’ Free Southern Theater Institute, Project South Institute for the Elimination of Poverty and Genocide, and the Movement for Black Lives. She often collaborates with New Orleans-based liberatory consultants from Community Solstice and FREEDOM LAND. For nearly a decade, Wendi has led a monthly Community Sing in New Orleans where people gather to learn and sing freedom songs as a practice of strengthening connections to our shared pasts, and to what it takes to work together in spite of differences and conflicts.
Wendi’s work supports social and economic justice groups’ to strengthen alignment between their values and how they work toward actualizing their visions. Her work is grounded in the belief that community interdependence is key to the kind of solidarity required to create lives with a measure of safety in today’s material conditions. We do not have to know everything individually–collaboration and cooperation help each of us be stronger and sharper. There is no need for competition, we live in abundance no matter what we have.
CarmenLeah Ascencio
Mindfulness & Healing Justice Cohort Guide | Ecotherapist, Radical Life Coach | Constellation MemberCarmenLeah Ascencio (she/hers), LICSW, MPH, RYT, CPC, is a bilingual (Spanish-English) public health social worker, ecotherapist, radical life coach, trauma-sensitive yoga instructor and educator. She integrates artistic, spiritual and body centered practices into her therapeutic and transformative work. CarmenLeah is also a Boricua queer femme, ocean devotee, novice surfer and freediver, student of the Dharma, Ashtanga yoga practitioner, outdoor explorer and super enthusiastic mother of two awesome little humans.
Alonzo “Zochi” Young
Mindfulness & Healing Justice Cohort Guide, Taiji & Qigong Master | Wisdom Keeper, Constellation MemberZochi is a master teacher, using holistic and evidence-based modalities that create a transformative container for an enriched learning experience. His integration of movement praxis, mental affirmations, and real life practicums assist the learner to easily bridge the ancient teachings and the principles associated with them to address the needs and challenges of our contemporary society. This contemplative approach is designed to assist in balancing the individual holistically to; eliminate chronic diseases, reduce stress and trauma, enhance overall wellbeing, navigate conflict, and to enrich relational connections with oneself, others, and the universe so, that we may all evolve to a higher level of consciousness. He is an active practitioner and teacher of various healing arts as well as being proficient in the various martial disciplines. Zochi has over 4 decades of training and life experience therefore recognizes that there are many roads and names associated with embodiment such as: the Dao, Taiji, Qigong, Smai Tawi , Aikido, yoga, meditation, and somatics practices... but all their individuality serve as single purpose, Oneness. Zochi is a certified teacher/facilitator in Trauma & Healing informed methodologies, Corporate and Community Wellness, Conflict Resolution, Non-Violent Communications, Leadership Embodiment, Executive/Personal Defense.
Rev. Iya Efunbola Carolyn Wilkins
Mindfulness & Healing Justice Cohort Guide | Wisdom Keeper, Constellation MemberRev. Carolyn Wilkins is the Minister and Spiritual Director of Inspirational Ministries, a virtual New Thought Spiritual community, and the founder of Imagine Consulting, a personal development consulting company. Rev. Carolyn spent 10 years as a staff minister for Agape International Spiritual Center, under the leadership of Rev. Dr. Michael B. Beckwith, and as the director of their GlobalWorks Ministry. These global humanitarian programs provide support for food, training/schools, libraries, orphanages, hospitals, clinics, homes for unwed mothers, micro-loans, financial support during natural disasters, and human advocacy in 8 African countries, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Colombia, Ecuador, India, Iraq, Kosovo, and Sri Lanka
Rev. Wilkins is a minister, featured speaker and workshop leader on nonviolence, inclusivity, social justice, and ethical and spiritual leadership for organizations and global conferences. She is a convener of community dialogues and a lead facilitator for mediation and mindfulness programs. She chaired the Culver City Area Interfaith Alliance and been on program or advisory councils for UDC, LA Voice, LA Interfaith Council, Association for Global New Thought (AGNT), United Religions Initiative, Compassionate California, Compassionate Arts and Parliament of the World’s Religions.
Wilkins was a marketing executive with Xerox Corporation and General Electric, and a project manager for an Oprah Winfrey Network program. She earned an MBA in management, a masters degree in Transformational Leadership and completed Doctoral studies in Ministry and Spirituality.
*Please note that this space reflects only a portion of FREEDOM LAND’s ever-growing constellation of Liberatory World-builders. We are grateful to all the brilliant, kind, and generous beings—including those who choose to remain unnamed (for political safety and other purposes), whom we have the honor of shaping Change alongside.
If you are interested in learning about how to join us in this world-building werq, feel free to reach out.