Fled violence at 13. Migrated alone at 15. Survived, studied, learned, healed. Continuing with gratitude to heal. Used all my grandmother showed me to survive, love and find peace.
PASSING IT ONIN LOVE
Our core of “heart and mind, emotion and reason, side by side”, led me to true freedom. The value I gained, I give to you.
Coral Human Ecology was born in Trinidad and Tobago. It’s heart, foundation and value were birthed in Trinidad. It is a birth that was hosted by the K’alina First Peoples and transported from West Africa and Asia. It’s growing pains were in Canada. Our launch as a company in New York is a ritual coming of age.
Sharing clarity.
Expanding freedom.
Facilitating strategy.
Giving help that works.
Growing up with multiple cultures gave me gifts of clarity.
CORAL HUMAN ECOLOGY was formed as an entity in NYC in 2024. Its start was much earlier. The work of helping people and organizations and the necessary precursor of CORAL HUMAN ECOLOGY LLC, began in 1997. The method and its clarirty, have been consistent.
The gifts of greater clarity, discovering freedom and developing life strategy, that we provide came from my own sources of strength and clarity.
Growing up with multiple cultures gave me gifts of clarity. My adult life experiences added to that clarity even more. I discovered entirely divergent meanings of what it means to be free. With the clarity came too, the ability to discern, which gives rise to easy strategy.
These gifts are help that actually work.
CORAL HUMAN ECOLOGY’s story began at the first major turning point in my healing journey, in 1997, in Toronto, Canada.
At that initial turn, I had found my voice again after more than a decade of it feeling lost to me. Reclaiming my voice, was the impetus then to starting a not-for-profit organization called FAMILY VOICES.
FAMILY VOICES began while I navigated life as an immigrant alone with children, while pursuing a university education.
In its beginning and first year, I was a student and homeless on the street with an infant and young child.
I had migrated to Canada thirteen years earlier, and my adult life in my new home had showed me clearly the gaps in the non-profit sector.
Both research and people’s stories, staff and clients, told that the sector did not fulfill its claims.
Like FAMILY VOICES, where it identified and responded to gaps in the non-profit sector, CORAL HUMAN ECOLOGY responds to a gap in folks getting effective emotional help and support.
In 1997, I felt confused by the helping professions. I was still emotionally adapting to Canada after migrating, and this new emotional landscape was still unknown to me.
I recognized that what had protected me through my experiences, is what was missing throughout these sectors.
My staying connected to me had been my protection.
What I was seeing, was that the people providing help and guidance, were disconnected from themselves.
The two pivotal points in my healing were tied to the distinction of this gift that I had received from my childhood culture, from my adaptation to my new home in North America.
The first major turning point of my healing occurred after migrating.
Within months of migrating to Ottawa, I began to have a series of violent experiences by strangers. Just walking to school proved hazardous, and by 1996 I had incurred two events of being held against my will.
In the subsequent interactions over the years, with the people I had been told were there to help me, I felt unseen and unheard.
I spoke and over time found from the replies of those I spoke to, that I was not actually seen nor heard. It was as if I was invisible and my voice had no sound or content.
It felt surreal.
Trying to get through the confusion, I reflected on my life after migrating and on my family histories that led me here.
I saw that all of the feelings and thoughts that the generations before me had had, as part of their specific cultural and historical experience, as well as my own now, were not part of the reality and new world I was now in.
More and more, I questioned if speaking at all had value here, if nothing could actually be heard. I then felt unsure as to how to do strategy for my life and children for food and shelter security, without a voice.
I entered university in 1989 as my one perceived strategy to economic stability. Here too, were the demands for my voice to be unspoken, and if dared to be spoken then being unheard.
I started university while going through a criminal trial as the survivor of a kidnapping and assault.
I paused attending when I went into protective custody, hiding from the assailant who was released on bail.
In 1997, I returned to university. The country was undergoing structural changes. The changes were immediately visible even by who was attending and who was not, compared to before.
Students were crying everywhere I turned. Students were leaving university in masses, unable to afford to stay enrolled. Many of those who stayed were homeless, even sleeping on the campus overnight.
It was a reality juncture. It was a time where I felt compelled to confront the new world that I lived in, as I now understood it.
My confusion about the nonprofit sector, the absence of the easy way people helped people as was familiar to me culturally, met with the grief and anguish I saw around me.
My voice inside of me became even clearer with each student I spoke to and each story I heard. I wanted to speak to their needs and speak through actions all that was being omitted in my adopted home.
It was here and then, that FAMILY VOICES was born.
The mission of FAMILY VOICES was to reduce barriers to entering and completing university.
We sought to demonstrate the connections we have with each other through kinship, and to communicate through the way the organization was set up and run, that each and every person is inherently valuable.
To ensure that our mission was not compromised, FAMILY VOICES relied on volunteers and donations to operate.
A key message was that each of us is whole and sufficient.
FAMILY VOICES was designed around the real-life daily needs of people with the least resources, as something conventional non-profits do not fulfill. It was designed around listening to and clearly hearing people’s needs.
We helped students, alumni, faculty, administrative and janitorial university staff, and people who were homeless and experiencing poverty in the wider community.
FAMILY VOICES ran for 17 years until 2013. Four of its initiatives continue today.
FAMILY VOICES did what CORAL HUMAN ECOLOGY does today. It helped people heal and recognize that they are whole exactly as they are.
After COVID-19, I came to New York to support a family member.
My family had history in Brooklyn. In now, only my fourth time in New York as an adult, I recalled my frequent visits here as a child when I would come to visit family and kin.
The first two times visiting New York as an adult, I was a survivor during violence. The third time was to support a family member during early COVID-19 during lock-down. This fourth time in New York was different.
After thirty-eight years away from home, I was invigorated by Brooklyn’s Caribbean community. Even as I dealt with medical issues in my family, a soothing and quiet comfort from my early childhood years returned.
This new experience in New York created the second major turning point in my healing.
Almost three decades since 1996 and FAMILY VOICES, I re-discovered myself in New York, as familiar memory yet in a new way.
In this once familiar and now new place, I felt like I was living a map, walking and moving through its streets and amidst its buildings/landmarks, as it was being drawn.
The journey of the years since 1996 had been a path of healing and learning, and it had led me to this moment now.
I felt ushered, back to a very early me and to a new me now, at the same time. And as my own healing continued in New York, so did my work helping others.
I felt afraid that I would be subject to violence by launching CORAL HUMAN ECOLOGY, through reaching more people.
My speaking for FAMILY VOICES and the success of its innovation, had led to violence, reprisals, homelessness, and my departure from the university.
In CORAL HUMAN ECOLOGY’S creation, I would be naming things that again questioned sectors and worldviews. I persisted despite this fear.
Structural barriers kept CORAL HUMAN ECOLOGY in labor stages, until I was truly more ready.
Brooklyn nurtured my readiness.
As labor pains went along, the obstacles to forming fostered new inspiration. In each step, I gained more clarity and the clarity deepened my healing. My readiness and capacity matured.
Brooklyn brought me back home. Home where culturally speaking and “being” was easy.
I saw and felt deeply how my entire life made complete sense, as I watched and heard the Caribbean diaspora all around me.
I remembered in my truth, that there was nothing to actually fear.
My truth felt again like my source of peace, as it did in my childhood and after migrating.
The familiar me and a new me, met in this advent.
Synchronously, compelling life events in New York removed the structural barriers.
Word of mouth of successful client outcomes co-occurred as a third stimulus, and the ideological planning I had done for CORAL HUMAN ECOLOGY for over 15 years, gave birth.
I had gone full circle and came of age. And from this, CORAL HUMAN ECOLOGY also came of age.
CORAL HUMAN ECOLOGY aims to help everyone we connect to, heal and be part of scaling that healing through their relationships. Our vision elaborates these goals.
Our work is successful because we are authentic, relevant, use a whole picture view, and have a big picture vision.
We work holistically, using knowledge that crosses disciplines. These core strengths are described in our insights.
As a social enterprise in every sense of the word, we also aim to reach people who experience the most visible hardships without the social reinforcement for their strengths.
To reach this end, we will launch THE CORAL FOUNDATION, as a direct service operating foundation, after our sixth year of profit.
Birthed in Trinidad and Tobago, having survived through growing pains in Canada and coming of age in New York, CORAL HUMAN ECOLOGY uses our strengths to help people heal.
We create ripples, scaling across current time and into the future generationally.
We scale through relationships to help people and help the world.
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We disrupt and innovate leadership with heart and mind, emotion and reason, side by side.
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