You Belong Here

The Future is Bright

Welcome to 2025, beautiful community! I hope that your holidays (if you celebrate) were restorative and filled with joyful moments. If you aren’t a big fan of the holidays, I hope you found pockets of peace and rest during the slowdown that inevitably comes at the end of each year.

My family and I spent the last weeks of 2024 down with the flu and food poisoning. 😭 It’s been a tough cold and flu season! Fortunately, we found ways to continue filling our cups, spending time together, and slowing down a little to recover.

As we’re heading into 2025, I realize there is a mixture of feelings about what lies ahead. If you are in the United States, this can be an apprehension of how our world will change as a new but familiar president enters office. Oligarchs are on the rise globally and it seems like the world is changing to benefit the few over the many.

But I still hold hope. In the midst of these changes that can make us feel powerless, I also see the rise of class consciousness and the common person beginning to speak up and push back against elitism. I see collectivist movements on the rise, with people corralling their power together to create change. More people than ever are exploring social justice and allyship. There are many reasons to hold hope.

I am excited to dive into topics like these in the upcoming year, along with some new focus areas that are driven by your feedback in the welcome survey you have an opportunity to complete when you subscribe to this newsletter. If you didn’t take that survey when you signed up for You Belong Here, you still have an opportunity to now. You can complete it here.

What is Staying the Same & What is Changing?

The trajectory of You Belong Here is one that I’m very excited about. We are going to keep exploring topics that many of you have shared that you enjoy, along with some new areas.

What’s staying the same?

We will continue to explore topics related to DEI strategy, current events, and being an effective advocate and ally. Many of the changes we’re seeing around us intertwine with topics related to DEI; it’s more important than ever that we continue to learn together about these changes, why they’re happening, and what actions we can take in response to them.

I will continue to provide you with opportunities to reflect through introspective questions and share effective approaches to practicing solidarity, allyship, and advocacy. This will be more needed than ever in the years ahead.

What is changing?

Happily, we are only adding to the focus areas of 2024! In addition to learning about the topic areas we’ve already been exploring, I am excited to share that we’ll also be exploring:

• Collectivism and its necessity in social justice

• Self-care to help you show up as your authentic self

• Understanding the trauma of systemic oppression

• Healing from trauma stemming from discrimination and bigotry

In other words, we’re expanding our world here at You Belong Here to create a more holistic conversation about individual care and development and its connection to social change.

Joining Community Leaders

Community Leaders is a way to support the work I do and acknowledge the labor required to create the thoughtful, researched insights that I bring to you weekly.

In addition to sharing insights in this weekly newsletter, the Community Leaders tier will receive deep dives into these new topic areas, resource curation, and tools for these new topics. We will continue to have monthly Ask-Me-Anything sessions where we meet live to talk about anything you’d like related to social justice, allyship, advocacy, inclusive leadership, collectivism, and more. These are unfiltered, critical conversations that will be needed for the days ahead.

Both monthly and paid memberships are available. If you choose to commit to an annual membership, you save 20% on the cost of a full year of membership. You can visit membership signup by clicking the button below.

Thank you for supporting the work that I do. ❤️

My Door is Always Open

I love to build communities of care, and this newsletter is no exception. My goal is to continue responding to your suggestions and ideas and finding new ways to dive into the topics that interest you. As we embark on this new year, I would love to hear from you! You can always share your ideas and thoughts by hitting reply to any newsletter and starting a conversation directly with me. I can’t wait to hear from you!

Instead of making resolutions this year, let’s make 2025 a year of revolutions. Small, impactful revolutions that build over time. I can’t wait to see how we grow together.

I hope you remember that no matter where you are on this journey, you belong here.

See you next week!

Ready to join Community Leaders?