Rethinking Leadership: From Anti-Racism to Liberation-Centered Facilitation

Liberation-centered leadership invites us to imagine and practice new ways of being together — ways that don’t only resist harm, but actively cultivate healing, creativity, and belonging.

Leadership, at its core, is not about authority — it’s about relationship, accountability, and collective growth. For years, educators, organizers, and facilitators have leaned on anti-racism as a framework to address inequity and create more just systems. Yet, as language and awareness evolve, so must our practices. Today, many are realizing that true transformation requires moving toward liberation-centered leadership.

Liberation-centered leadership invites us to imagine and practice new ways of being together — ways that don’t only resist harm, but build structures that actively cultivate healing, creativity, and belonging. It asks: What does it look like to lead in ways that honor everyone’s humanity? This post explores how we can move beyond anti-racist frameworks toward liberation-based facilitation — connecting this evolution to trauma-informed, restorative, and arts-centered practices that reshape not only our workspaces but also the culture of leadership itself.

From Resistance to Liberation

Liberation means creating spaces where people can thrive, not just survive. Rooted in the teachings of Paulo Freire, liberation-centered leadership is about transforming relationships of power — moving from control to co-creation. It invites leaders and facilitators to center collective care, community wisdom, and creativity as guiding principles. This approach reimagines power as shared and dialogic, where everyone’s knowledge matters, and every voice contributes to shaping the path forward.

Liberation-centered facilitators integrate creativity, storytelling, and movement into leadership development — not as extras, but as essential tools for reflection and transformation.

The Role of the Facilitator: Holding Space, Not Controlling It

Traditional models of leadership often value control, productivity, and expertise. In liberation-centered facilitation, the facilitator’s role is different: it’s about holding space, not dominating it. Holding the “container” for participants for them to have the space to grow, be vulnerable, create and plan.

A liberation-centered facilitator knows that the wisdom in the room is collective. They design spaces where people can connect across differences, engage in honest dialogue, and practice shared accountability. This involves more than managing discussions; it requires an embodied awareness of how power operates in every room.

Facilitators grounded in trauma-informed and restorative practices recognize that people bring lived experiences, pain, and resilience into every learning space. Leadership, then, becomes less about teaching and more about tending — tending to the conditions that allow others to feel safe, seen, and free to participate fully.

Beyond Awareness: Practicing Liberation

Anti-racist education emphasizes awareness — knowing history, examining bias, naming oppression. But awareness without practice can only take us so far. Liberation-centered leadership insists that awareness must be paired with embodied practice.

This means integrating creativity, storytelling, and movement into leadership development — not as extras, but as essential tools for reflection and transformation. To use embodied practice as a way to move us into action.

For example, arts-based professional development allows participants to explore identity and power through visual expression or collaborative creation. Somatic-centered learning connects participants to their bodies as sources of knowledge, helping them notice where tension or discomfort arises when discussing systems of oppression. Restorative practices invite repair and relationship-building when harm occurs.

These methods cultivate emotional safety and deeper accountability — key components of trauma-informed leadership. In this sense, liberation-centered education doesn’t just happen in the mind; it happens in the body, in community, and through ongoing practice.

Rather than placing all responsibility on an individual, liberation-centered leadership frames leadership as a shared ecosystem, one where everyone has a role in sustaining liberation-based work.

Liberation-Centered Leadership

One of the most radical shifts in liberation-centered leadership — as inspired by Paulo Freire and expanded through adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy — is the understanding that leadership is collective.Rather than centering a single voice, it honors leadership as a shared ecosystem — one where everyone contributes to sustaining liberation-based work through dialogue, creativity, and care.

At Creative Praxis, we practice this through art-infused reflection, somatic grounding, and collective decision-making circles that invite every participant to co-create meaning. In this model, feedback, reflection, and mutual care are not add-ons — they are core learning tools that keep communities adaptive and responsive.

This approach is especially vital in schools and community organizations, where burnout and secondary trauma are often symptoms of disconnection.Leaders who engage in collective care, shared accountability, and reflective practice model what sustainable change looks like — not only for their teams, but for the broader systems they influence.

Research on trauma-informed leadership (SAMHSA, 2014), healing-centered engagement (Dr. Shawn Ginwright, 2018), and emergent systems thinking (brown, 2017) all affirm that sustainable transformation emerges from relationships, art, and iteration — not control.

A tangible tool for practicing this is “Check-In/Check-Out Circles”, a Creative Praxis ritual where teams pause to ground, share one reflection, and identify one collective intention before and after meetings or sessions. This simple act builds rhythm, reflection, and shared accountability — helping leaders and teams slow down, listen, and lead from a place of connection rather than exhaustion.

Liberation-centered leadership is not about perfection — it’s about practice. It calls us to lead with curiosity, creativity, and compassion, remembering that liberation is a collective journey we build together, not a destination we reach alone.

Liberation-centered facilitation isn’t a framework to master, it’s a lifelong practice of humility, reflection, and care.

Cultivating Conditions for Liberation

Liberation-centered leadership invites us to move beyond “fixing” systems and toward cultivating conditions where people can thrive. It begins with awareness of both the internal—our beliefs, habits, and embodiment—and the external—policies, power structures, and organizational culture.

For educators, this might look like co-designing learning spaces where students explore how knowledge connects to their lived experience. For facilitators, it means starting with grounding, storytelling, and shared agreements instead of rigid agendas, allowing creativity and connection to lead the way.

At the organizational level, this practice involves reimagining hiring, evaluation, and decision-making so that equity, transparency, and care are built into the foundation. Research on healing-centered engagement and adaptive leadership shows that sustainable transformation grows from culture, not compliance.

Arts-based social emotional learning allows participants to explore identity and power through visual expression or collaborative creation.

The Courage to Unlearn

Perhaps the hardest part of becoming a liberation-centered leader is unlearning: letting go of familiar hierarchies, habits of control, and the urge to know all the answers. Unlearning is uncomfortable because it asks us to confront how deeply systems of dominance have shaped even our best intentions.

But it’s in this unlearning that growth becomes possible. As facilitators and leaders begin to see themselves not as experts but as co-learners, they open pathways for creativity and authenticity to emerge.

Liberation-centered facilitation, then, isn’t a framework to master — it’s a lifelong practice of humility, reflection, and care.

From Reflection to Practice

Liberation-centered leadership bridges reflection and action. It reminds us that systemic change doesn’t start with policies; it starts with people — people willing to reimagine how they relate to one another, how they hold power, and how they create spaces of belonging.

When educators, organizers, and facilitators begin leading from this place, they transform the very systems they’re part of.

Practicing Liberation Together

At Creative Praxis, our approach to anti-racist leadership development and restorative liberation is rooted in this belief: leadership is an ongoing practice of liberation. Through arts-based, restorative, and somatic-centered trainings, we help educators, facilitators, and community leaders cultivate the tools to lead with care, creativity, and collective responsibility.

To learn more about how liberation-centered education and leadership development can support your team or organization, explore our trainings and workshops, or contact us to discuss a workshop that suits your organization's needs.