Our Story
March 14, 2023
It started in a fifth-grade classroom.
First year teaching, high hopes - and a feeling in my body I couldn't argue away: the system wasn't built for these children to thrive.
The design of education itself treated learning as compliance and children as machines. The dissonance lived in my bones day after day. And so, I went looking for answers.
A master's in curriculum and instruction began the unlearning.
The questions that pulled me: How do we actually learn? How does community shape it? How do we heal the harm school can cause?
The answers led somewhere ancient and new at once - toward the body, toward Indigenous wisdom held across many nations, toward the Rarámuri ancestral teaching carried in my own maternal line, toward learning as a practice of healing rather than control.
That search became Liberated Learning. And what began as one teacher's reckoning has grown into something a single person was never meant to hold.
The Institute is how this work outlives any one of us. It's the movement body - a cooperative home for the practitioners, partners, and communities co-creating this together.
We continue to grow alongside organizations doing this work on the ground:
Dr. Pedro Albizu High School Yates Elementary The Honeycomb Network Puerto Rican Cultural Center Community as a Campus Classroom 2 Table Program Survivors Know Imagine Englewood If Healing To Action The Firehouse Dream Elevating La Cultura Latina Brilliance Loud Bodies Dance We Each Belong The Joy Room We All Grow CASA – National Museum of Mexican Art
Our North Stars
Unity and love are the soil this grows from - spaces where everyone feels seen and supported, where we transform cycles of harm into healing by meeting the needs underneath them.
Liberation is a moment-to-moment practice.
We have the agency to choose it in how we live each day. It takes courage, honesty, and trust.
This work draws from these teachers, thinkers, and traditions:
Dr. Anita Sanchez – writer of The Four Sacred Gifts bell hooks Toni Morrison Django Paris and H. Samy Alim's Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies Gloria Ladson-Billings' Culturally Relevant Pedagogy Body-centered learning Indigenous Knowledge Systems Trauma-informed care Transformative justice Social-emotional connection science Community care Zaretta Hammond's work with culturally responsive neuroscience Dr. Gabor Maté's work – Compassionate Inquiry adrienne maree brown's Pleasure Activism and Emergent Strategy Tricia Hersey's work with rest as resistance Dr. Shawn Ginwright's work with healing-centered engagement
See → Reclaim → Liberate
We stand for the right of every person to exist authentically and claim their belonging.
For learning that frees people into their own gifts.
For education as liberation - cultivating liberated people who, in turn, liberate others.
This is an invitation to build it with us.
Begin Here