Root Cause Collective

Liberation cannot be controlled. This is something Ella Baker deeply understood.  

While others sought power, she invested in people, organizing quietly, challenging hierarchy, and building movements that could survive without a single face at the center.

She believed freedom wasn’t enforced from the top down, but practiced together, day by day. 

For us, Ella Baker’s work reframes abolition as community infrastructure. It asks us to move away from systems that rely on punishment and policing, and toward models rooted in shared responsibility, care, and collective wisdom. 

Abolition doesn’t require heroes. It requires people who trust one another enough to build something new together because we cannot do this work alone. 
This is abolition as a practice. 

Throughout the month of February, we’re sharing abolitionists known and unknown, past and present whose work has shaped
Black futures across time. 

In what ways have movement leaders shaped your perspective on community care?  

We are entering the Year of the Fire Horse 🔥🐎 

Named in the lunar tradition as a time of speed, volatility, courage, and movement that refuses containment. 

Fire Horse years don’t reward careful leadership. They demand intuitive leadership. 

This is an off-script moment. What has worked before will not carry us through what’s unfolding now. 

Transformative times are where prophetic leaders thrive: the dreamers, artists, futurists, and bridge-builders who can imagine new routes while still quarter-backing systems as they move toward the end of their era. 

This time calls us to reach back for what has sustained us while building something that has never existed before. 

At Root Cause Collective, we are naming four areas we believe community, social change leaders, and anyone feeling the fire of this moment, should prioritize this year. 

Not as trends, as survival, discernment, and strategy. 

✨ Save this for the days you need grounding 
✨ Comment one word or intention you’re carrying into this Fire Horse year 
 

Earlier this fall, our healer Brianna (she/her) led the National Benevolent Association’s Young Adult Social Service Peer Learning & Wellness Group Retreat in New Orleans. It was a space where care workers and spiritual leaders came together to rest, reconnect, and reimagine what healing can look like. 

Across three days of deep work and gentle unlearning, Brianna guided the cohort through: 
 
✨ A re-centering of “loving others as you love yourself,” starting with the self. 

✨ Explorations of the nervous system, stress responses, and ancestral practices for regulation. 

✨ A real-time pivot into embodiment, grief ritual, and solo processing, honoring choice and agency as core to wellness. 

Reflecting on the experience, Brianna shared: 

“I remembered that therapeutic language and the language of somatics overlap, but they’re not the same. And that maybe the greatest liberation is realizing healing doesn’t have to be so complicated. Doing less can still bring us back to ourselves.” 

Gratitude to the team: Mark Anderson, Héctor Josué Hernández Marcial, Bere Gil Soto, and Tania Diaz, for holding this transformative container, and to the cohort for showing up with honesty, curiosity, and care. 
Here’s to the work of restoring wholeness, one choice, one breath, one brave gathering at a time. 💚 
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