I had already experienced burnout in the social change sector twice. I felt lost in my purpose and whether what I had to contribute was valuable. A type of anger and frustration also grew inside of me because my ideas remained unreceived and my role, no matter how good I was at it, lacked impact on the communities and people I cared the most about. 

I desperately wanted the people in the communities I grew up in to live freely so they could cultivate their own gifts and abundance and make their contribution to the world.   

I started doing political organizing on behalf of immigrant workers and marginalized communities in the late 1990s. I believed that economic justice was a pathway to collective liberation for people of all cultural identities in the US. I gained so much knowledge being on the ground with workers with rich cultural and linguistic traditions. Their stories inspired me and grew me into a leader with deep awareness of and reverence for diversity and the possibility of a future where all voices were included. As I rose up the “ranks of leadership” inside movements, I was surprised to find that indigenous women, black women, immigrant women, were often excluded from the highest roles of leadership and were rarely able to lead from the center and lacked the autonomy to guide decisions even though they were closest to the communities we were advocating for. 

As I got closer to the roots of the problem, I found that strategy was not driven by women of color. Early on my age, my youthful appearance and my cultural background seemed to be a problem for white male leaders. My ideas were often referred to as naive or new age or not relevant to the conversation. Questions of diversity or equity were never central to the strategy. Even though it was devastating to be invisible and ignored, I found ways to do the work on smaller scales and to make the stories, experiences and policy recommendations of communities of color heard by insiders who had influence. I took a long range relationship and strategy approach to creating change. 

While I contributed to short term change in some spaces, I never saw communities of color come to the center of the political strategy or the center of leadership. This experience would repeat itself in other movements. Most importantly working to prove myself worthy of leadership resulted in burnout.