Jennifer Roberts
Jenn Roberts had done everything right. But it all seemed to be going wrong.
“I was one of the first in my family to go to college,” she says. “I found a good guy in college, got married early, and did everything I was supposed to do. And then I woke up one day: “This doesn’t feel good. I’m not happy, my (soon to be former) husband is not happy, now we have children. Everything started to fall apart, everything I had worked so hard for.
So she started dancing – something she had done throughout school but gave up when she became an adult. It reinvigorated a feeling, she says, “when I didn’t care what people thought, when I just did the things that made me feel good.” And then my friends were watching and they were like, “We want to do it too!” You look peaceful, you look happy, you look free.’
This feeling of freedom inspired Roberts to start hosting get-togethers for her friends and friends of friends, creating a space where they could talk, share and be themselves. These gatherings quickly turned into Colorful Girls Liberation Laba community of creativity, education and self-care designed to empower black women to cast off the twin chains of racism and patriarchy, in a supportive environment.
“Black women can come in and say, ‘Hey, I just need a space to break down a little bit with people who are going to take care of me, hold me, help me and pick me up.’ “, she says. “‘And once I get to that space, I need people who will tell me that everything I dream for my life is possible and who will be there to encourage me.’ And that’s really the goal of the laboratory: to help women be happy and free in life.
Although space to breathe and heal is its primary mission, Roberts emphasizes the “laboratory” element of her organization’s title. Alongside self-care classes, she encourages members to “play” with their lives: be imaginative, think big, envision a limitless future, and dream of what they can do without anything holding them back.
“This laboratory has become for me a space to combine all these things: art, creativity, fraternity, Afrofuturismand design,” she says. In the lab, she says, she encourages participants to “really play with the idea of what it looks like to have my own toolbox of liberation.”
For example, “every Monday at noon we get together – it’s called ‘Dreams and Schemes,’” says Roberts. “It’s a place inspired by bell hooks”Yam Sisters‘, where it’s really the time to tell the truth about your life, to share your story: ‘OK, this thing isn’t working the way I thought I wanted it to,’ and no one will shame you for it.
Rather than a fixed curriculum, Roberts says, the lessons and gatherings vary; the same goes for leading group discussions.
“Right now we’re doing one around the (hooks)’All about love: new visions,’” Roberts said. “We made some about pleasure, we made some around plant medicine. And we come for three to four weeks, every week. And whether it’s me or another woman in our community who has this knowledge to pass on, they’re able to bring us together and have us explore this topic in a way that doesn’t feel like they’re trying to tell us what to do. , but in a way that we can figure out how we want to incorporate it ourselves.
