Wangũi's Resilience Toolkit Certification

Hi! My name is Wangũi and I am from East Afrika.

I am fundraising for the remainder of my fees in order to participate in The Resilience Toolkit   Certification programme beginning in January 2021. The Resilience Toolkit is a system for reducing stress and growing resilience in individuals, organizations, and communities so they can envision, create, and implement positive change. I am undertaking this Certification so I can support changemakers and justice workers in East Africa in expanding their inner resilience so they can be effective in their outer transformation work.

Here is my story:

I am a regeneration practitioner and a retriever and bearer of indigenous Afrikan lifeways. In my work I weave together consciousness of the world, of the Earth, of the self, and of indigeneity to offer folks in my context in East Afrika and the broader continent, many ways to heal the traumas of the past and present, and to create and direct new realities for their present and future.

I come to this vision for regeneration rooted in indigenous Afrikan ways in this way from a background in studying environment, urban histories, and Afrika. Along the way I began to ask deeper questions about why the world was structured in a way that caused a lot of pain, injustice and suffering for many people, not least those immediately in my context in Kenya.
 
Through studying process-oriented psychology I began to recognise trauma and its subtle traces within myself and in the histories of my communities, country and continent. I have spent a few years now working on understanding the roots of these silenced collective historical traumas evident in the dysfunction of our political system, in economic inequalities, in our education system and in our disconnections from our bodies, from indigenous spiritualities, and from Earth care.

More and more I recognise the ways in which unacknowledged and unprocessed individual and collective trauma hijacks possibilities of just regenerative life. And in order to build new just worlds, we need to heal the pain of the injustice we have lived through or else we will continue to replicate it.



Earlier this year I was moving through cycles of grief from resurfaced personal and global traumas. For several months I was overwhelmed, and around me, my activist and healer comrades were also overwhelmed and had retreated from public life. In that moment, I recognised the depths of support that healers and activists working to shift unjust cultures in still colonial contexts need, in order to be well and continue their justicemaking work. I also recognised how much this support is inaccessible or lacking.

I took the introduction to the Resilience Toolkit and the simple, quick practices nested in a just transformation framework pulled me out of the cycle of overwhelm and restored joy and the capacity to do public work again. I knew then that I needed to bring this offering to my context to provide fellow changemakers with effective practical tools to build internal resilience for outer transformation work.

Thanks to a generous donation I have been able to pay the deposit (£750) and secure enrolment on Lumos Transform’s upcoming 18 week Resilience Toolkit Certification programme. I need to raise the remainder of the fees £1800 to participate in the programme which begins on the 19th of January 2021. The Resilience Toolkit will give me a deep, embodied understanding of stress and trauma physiology in a social justice-oriented framework aimed at building (mine and others') inner resources in order to create and sustain meaningful change. 

My writing, dance practice, research, facilitating and teaching centre ancestral knowledge, Afrika, and the Earth. Researching, reconnecting, reimagining and creating in order to regenerate ourselves and the Earth, for the thrival of both. My interest in the Resilience Toolkit is part of broader goals and work towards regeneration (healing and creating new realities) in East Afrika. I am deeply grateful for your support of me and this vision through your contributions, care and sharing. Às̩e̩. Ashe oleng'.