✦ March 2025 · International Women’s Month
By Nuna Gleason, Founder · WHI · March 2025 · 9 min read
Why healing and leading are not two different movements — and what it looks like when survival refuses to stay quiet.
In most of the world, leadership is framed as something you acquire — a title, a credential, a seat at a table. But in the communities I come from, and in the work we do at Wounded Healers International, leadership looks different.
It looks like a woman who sat in a healing circle last year and now runs one. It looks like a teen mother who was told her future was over and went on to build something for other girls. It looks like survival that refuses to stay quiet.
When a woman hears her language spoken and her practices honored, something unlocks. Not because we unlocked it. Because it was always there.
We have inherited a story about survivors that centers suffering. It frames women who have experienced gender-based violence, displacement, or trauma as objects of rescue rather than agents of change. This story is not only incomplete — it is harmful.
At WHI, we have watched women transform their own healing into community leadership in ways that no outside organization could engineer. When a woman processes her pain in a culturally grounded space, when she is not asked to strip her identity at the door, when she hears her language spoken and her practices honored — something unlocks.
Not because we unlocked it. Because it was always there.
It looks like the women in our Kenya programs have created their own accountability networks to protect other girls in their neighborhoods. It looks like immigrant women in Maine who began attending Afro Yoga not as patients but as participants — and who now bring other women, translate for newcomers, and hold space for grief in their own homes.
Leadership in this context is not about power over others. It is about the power that comes from having moved through something real and choosing to reach back. It is about what happens when healing is not privatized — when it becomes collective.
Women in Kenya who created accountability networks — organically, without instruction — to protect other girls in their neighborhoods.
Immigrant women in Maine who arrived at Afro Yoga as newcomers and now bring others, translate for them, and hold space for grief in their own homes.
Survival that chose community over silence.
Trauma does not exist outside of culture. Neither does recovery. African-rooted healing practices are not alternatives to healing — they are healing.
One of the most persistent failures of Western healing models is the erasure of cultural context. Trauma does not exist outside of culture. Neither does recovery.
When we ask African women to heal through frameworks that were not built for them — frameworks that individualize pain, that silence ritual, that treat the body as a problem to be managed — we ask them to leave themselves at the door.
Our work at WHI is grounded in the belief that African-rooted healing practices — communal gathering, storytelling, movement, ancestral acknowledgment — are not alternatives to healing. They are healing. When we hold healing circles, when we integrate Afro yoga and somatic practices, when we invite women to bring their whole cultures into the room, we are not doing something niche. We are doing something necessary.
This March, we are celebrating not just women, but the particular kind of leadership that emerges from survival, from community, from the refusal to let healing be a solitary act.
If you work in nonprofit, social services, or community health — we invite you to examine how your organization creates space for survivor leadership. Not as a program add-on. As a structural commitment.
And if you are a donor, a partner, or someone who has been touched by this work — know that every contribution to WHI is an investment in women who are not waiting to be empowered. They are already leading. We are just making sure they have the resources to keep going.
Every gift to Wounded Healers International supports women transforming their own healing into community leadership — in Kenya, Maine, and worldwide.