FAQ

What makes The Louisville Retreat Center relevant in this time and place?

These tumultuous times are a radical call to embrace interdependence and more effective organizing for liberation. This systemic work is better accomplished when folks have the space and guidance to engage their healing. This entails exploring our own unique intersections of privilege and oppression, of resistance and resilience, and how the lineage wisdom of change-makers can inform our work today. While we often distinguish between the ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ work of healing the world, they are one and the same; the individual process of ongoing healing informs how we work together. These can include decolonizing practices, ancestor work, examining internalized biases, and learning better language and practices for authentic presence.

Louisville, Kentucky is a prime site for a retreat center grounded in the lineage wisdom and ancestral healing of community change-makers. Once the crossroads for the American industry of trading enslaved people, it also became the heart of global uprisings in protest to the murder of Breonna Taylor. The Louisville Retreat Center is guided by the folks closest to these societal wounds as they hold the medicine needed to heal our systems, psyches, and souls. 

How is the Louisville Retreat Center different from other local retreat venues?

Our community is graced by many magnificent centers for connection and healing. Most are linked to faith communities or serve as places for energy work, organizing, or reflection. Here are some ways the Louisville Retreat Center differs from others in and around Louisville:

• The Louisville Retreat Center is a secular space that warmly welcomes all people willing to be in motion in their personal healing and liberatory collective action.

• The Louisville Retreat Center is a healing space, a hub for work already being done in our city, as well as a place for improved intersectional alliances to be seeded, resourced, and supported. Local organizations (listed in the Supportive Organizations below) have expressed a need for an effective space to do their work; this Center will offer a vital resource to change-makers in our community.

• The Louisville Retreat Center lives in the heart of the city, ensuring it is accessible to all people in Louisville. At this time, the majority of healing spaces and retreat centers are located in East Louisville or outside the city. This Center is situated close to our greatest resource for collective liberation - the wisdom of communities who have long led the vision for justice in Louisville. Our location reclaims our city-home as fertile ground for transformation.

• The Louisville Retreat Center prioritizes programming that interweaves healing modalities, liberation education, and visionary action. These facets of our personal and collective activism are interconnected; intentionally juxtaposing them in a reflective communal setting offers richer potential for effective transformation.

What happens at the Louisville Retreat Center?

The Louisville Retreat Center first and foremost serves as a hub for folks already organizing, healing, and visioning in our city. Our facilities host folks across the city to offer communal practice, learning, and connecting. Facilitators and offerings are evaluated by a Board committee to ensure the space is home to practices and approaches serving our mission, and also centers marginalized voices and perspectives.

The Center’s range of offerings is innovative, iterative, and inviting. This physical Center nurtures the emotional, spiritual, and communal needs of organizers, teachers, healers, and changemakers in our community.  They may create, deliver, and receive the programming they need. While there might be a teach-in one evening, there may be a yoga class the next, and an organizing training on the weekend. One day there might be a facilitated immersion experience through downtown that interweaves meditation and journaling, and the next may be an all-day somatic workshop for ancestral healing. All of these offerings serve personal and collective healing to further a more just, equitable, and flourishing Louisville.

The Center aims to include spaces for respite and rejuvenation for folks doing the work of liberation in our city. This will allow for organizers, teachers, healers, and other significant leaders in our community to take true solace. Grants, funds raised from programmatic offerings, and donations will support this respite space so that participants not only access it for no cost, but are compensated for taking this time to retreat inward.

How is Louisville Retreat Center financially resourced?

The Louisville Retreat Center is supported and sustained through a combination of individual contributions and grants, as well as in-kind support. A scaled rubric will determine if, and how much, individuals or organizations may pay to attend offerings. As operations grow, memberships,, printed resources, and other offerings will expand income possibilities.