A Global Community for Collective Liberation: Comunidad Construyendo desde Adentro

In 2020, Ethan Hughes, a dear friend and mentor of mine, attended an IFS training led by Richard Schwartz. As the training came to a close, Ethan raised the issue of the cost of the training, and noted the homogeneously white participant pool, fed by a cooking crew of the global majority. He questioned the extent to which IFS could transform legacy burdens in practical ways, while operating within a dominant economic framework that does not prioritize caring for and meeting the needs of all beings on our finite planet. Richard was open to his feedback, and they became fast friends.

Shortly thereafter, 20 of us gathered around a 3-day bonfire in the frigid Maine winter, mid-pandemic, to receive Ethan’s IFS for activists training, in the gift economy. I was lucky enough to get to attend the training, just before returning to the much warmer climate of El Salvador, where I’d been living and taking part in various peacebuilding initiatives since 2010. Upon my return, I started leading IFS sessions for my close friends and collaborators in El Salvador (with admittedly much less training than ideal, but much more than what we had access to in El Salvador for trauma healing, which was next to none). 

Just over a year later, Richard invited Ethan to speak on a keynote panel at the IFS annual conference, and Ethan asked me to take his place, so that I could share about what was happening in El Salvador. In March, 2022, the Salvadoran government issued a “State of Exception” which stripped Salvadorans of the right to due process and has resulted in the arrests of over 84,000 people since it was put into place. While this “security” policy has been praised world-over, from my experience, living in a marginalized community under the State of Exception has felt akin to what I can only imagine it may have felt like living through the Holocaust. Beloved friends and neighbors are with me one day, someone denounces them as gang members the next, and they are swiftly and violently removed from their homes and warehoused in prisons that resemble concentration camps (death comes more slowly and insidiously than through gas chambers, but it comes nonetheless). When the lucky bodies that avoid mass graves get sent back to the community for their wakes and burials, undercover detectives infiltrate the gatherings and take photos of those in attendance. Those who dare to honor the dead and to uphold the ritual of collective grief are the most likely to disappear next.

*Photo taken by Carlos Barrera, from El Faro News, with permission from the publication.

At the conference, I shared the stories of those I love who have joined the ranks of those disappeared from their communities overnight, without the hopes of returning alive. I made a request (without having a formulated idea about how this could happen in a coordinated way), for IFS therapists to support movement leaders and those working towards systemic transformation in repressive contexts world-over. 

In my experience, therapists and healers often do beautiful work one-on-one, only to send people straight from the therapy room back out into systems that ultimately re-traumatize them time and again, no matter how much inner work they do. At the same time, it seems that social movements or innovative projects to transform oppressive systems often implode due to interpersonal conflicts caused by unattended protective parts acting in overdrive. In my experience, activists and organizers doing critical work often have the least access to (or manage to make the least time for) inner or interpersonal work that could support the transformation of cultural and legacy burdens and allow for greater self-leadership in the difficult work of movement building and systems change. In my closing remarks at the conference, I shared my longing for collaborative efforts at the intersection of personal healing and systemic transformation.

Comunidad Construyendo desde Adentro Takes Shape

Several months went by, and the conference faded into the past. One afternoon in mid-December, 2022, I received an email from Ender Villafana, a Venezuelan engineer recently trained in IFS, who expressed his interest in supporting collective healing in El Salvador in some way. 

I linked Ender to several Salvadoran peacebuilder friends of mine, to strengthen their self-leadership capacity through therapeutic support, and asked if he’d ask his IFS community if there were others wanting to join in. Nearly 20 IFS practitioners replied to his message with interest, which compelled Shawn Gregory, my beloved collaborator, and I to spend the next several months formulating the structure of what has since become the Construyendo desde Adentro (Building from Within) community. Salvadoran community leaders Magdalena Quintanilla and Xenia Velis soon joined the coordination team, and the rest was history.

Two years later, we have just launched the fifth cohort of Comunidad Construyendo desde Adentro (CDA), El Salvador, and the third cohort of Building from Within, a sister community supporting Palestinian community leaders and activists. The Salvadoran community, which is the focus of this article, continues to expand and amaze those of us who steward its ever-evolving existence, as a truly emergent, iterative, and co-creative entity. 

Here is a snapshot of a semester-long cohort in the CDA community:

1. In-person orientation for 60-70 Salvadoran peacebuilders to frame the purpose of the CDA community (collective liberation at the intersection of personal healing and systemic transformation, in the gift economy). Orientation meal prepared and gifted by CDA members from previous cohorts. 
2. 60-70 IFS Spanish-speaking therapists and practitioners from around the world (“Global Team”) are linked to Salvadoran peacebuilders and community leaders for five months of weekly or bi-weekly IFS accompaniment sessions.
3. Salvadoran peacebuilders attend bi-weekly virtual “learning circle” sessions in small groups facilitated by IFS practitioners, to deepen into IFS theory and practice experientially and explore connections between IFS and systemic transformation.
4. Global Team members attend optional weekly mutual support calls to tend to/grapple with parts that arise in the context of this cross-cultural/cross-class experience which often surfaces legacy burdens tied to structural violence and oppression.
5. In-person three-day closing retreat for Salvadoran peacebuilders to strengthen ties between the CDA community and deepen into a shared practice of approaching social change work from a place of self-leadership, depolarization, and collaboration in the gift economy. (Retreat meals prepared and gifted by CDA community members from previous cohorts).

*All coordination of the above-mentioned tasks (conducting initial peacebuilder interviews, recruiting IFS practitioners/therapists, linking therapists and peacebuilders, coordinating small group schedules/facilitation, coordinating logistics for the in-person orientation and closing retreat, coordinating mutual support calls for IFS practitioners, etc.) is carried out by an expansive team of CDA community members who gift their labor to the community as an offering towards collective liberation. Global Team IFS practitioners offer their accompaniment as a gift–an offering of gratitude for the intensive work towards social transformation that Salvadoran peacebuilders have been doing for many years (with little to no access to support for healing the myriad of legacies of harm, often caused by international interventions.) The only money in the CDA community is $3,000 a year, which is gifted by US-based collaborators in the spirit of reparations, and used to cover room, board, and transportation for all peacebuilders who participate in the two in-person closing retreats a year.

Closing retreat, Cohort 2, 2023

CDA Deepens its Practice– Hosting the First In-Person Level 1 Training in Latin America (in the gift economy!)

Throughout the first several cohorts, Salvadoran peacebuilders in the CDA community continued to share the ways that the CDA community and IFS accompaniment had transformed their lives. (For a closer look, see this blog of testimonies several community members compiled to share with the broader IFS community). Community members repeatedly asked for more training, in order to enhance their own self-leadership and support their peers and colleagues in their journeys of healing and liberation.

At the annual IFS Conference in Denver in 2023, Analia Castaños, Imma Lloret, and Rosa Bramble agreed to gift the CDA community with an in-person Level 1 training in El Salvador the following year. In no time, a Program Assistant crew coalesced of IFS practitioners eager to support the continued formation of CDA peacebuilders. Half of the program assistant team members were Salvadorans from the CDA community who had completed the Level 1 training online with scholarship support from the IFS Institutes of Barcelona and Madrid.

Given that our training was a-typical, we were faced with the concern that if participants didn’t pay, they wouldn’t attend consistently. We trusted, however, that the gift economy model of CDA had fostered a commitment and a sense of belonging that went far beyond economic exchange, and we trusted that attendance would be the least of our worries. The IFS Institute gave the go-ahead for the training, and we were off to the races. 

This past December and January, a committed team of 36 CDA peacebuilders started and completed the two-week, Level 1 training, during which time they spent the evenings self-organizing into committees to keep the gift flowing. Since the training started a few weeks before the start date of the new IFS Institute norm, restricting Level 1 trainings to “mental health professionals,” we were able to include many skilled community leaders in the training who do not meet these “professional” standards, but who have served as de facto mental healthcare providers in their networks and communities for decades.

Photo from the recent CDA Level 1 Training in El Salvador

Half of the peacebuilders who received the Level 1 training have now joined the “Global Team” and are gifting IFS accompaniment to their colleagues and peers in social change organizations across the country. Several are seeding a pilot project in Honduras, and others are organizing ongoing practice groups and community based healing initiatives. Another committee is working at the intersection of IFS healing and indigenous philosophy, and will be hosting a training in the gift economy in November, under the tutelage of Teresa Ishikawa-Xochitl Rivas, founder of the Escuela de Medicina Indígena Amita, in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Learnings from the CDA Community

CDA is an ever-evolving organism, co-held by the collective efforts of many people with a shared vision for collective liberation. So much has happened in the first two years, that it is impossible to sum up the learnings in a few sentences.

Personally, I have learned to trust in collective vision, and in the power of collective efforts to create possibilities well beyond the realm of my imagination. When I spoke at the IFS conference in 2022, I was connected to a great deal of anger and grief, and to an underlying sense of powerlessness and despair. I did not have any practical vision in mind as to how the IFS community could organize to partner with my fellow peacebuilders in El Salvador. Two years later, the community has birthed and toddled itself to life, step by step. I’ve tried to hang on for the ride, co-creating decentralized and horizontal leadership structures along the way, and trusting in the power of the gift economy to create an energetic field of love and generosity like nothing I’ve experienced before. 

Photo from the CDA Level 1 training

While there is much to celebrate, the CDA community has not yet been able to reach the 84,000 people newly incarcerated under the State of Exception in El Salvador, hundreds of whom are dear friends and neighbors. Those incarcerated do not have the right to family visits or phone calls, let alone to programs or human rights protocols that could support their wellbeing, or their survival, at the very least. My despair and sense of powerlessness remain intact. It is my sincere hope and vision that as CDA and parallel communities evolve and expand, we might take part not only in accompanying those who are warehoused, but in transforming the many systems whose logics lead us to cage one another to begin with.

If you’d like to explore seeding a parallel community, or to learn more about CDA (or its sister community, Building from Within (BFW), for Palestinian activists), reach out to Jenna Knapp (CDA) jenna.e.knapp@gmail.com or Shawn Gregory (BFW) shawn.collective@gmail.com.