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.
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 gave rise to easy strategy.
These are the gifts I give to you. I give you help that actually works.
Through CORAL HUMAN ECOLOGY, I share what was in the making through generations of life experiences. My life acts as a vehicle of expression for generations before me.
CORAL HUMAN ECOLOGY’s story began at the first major turning point in my healing journey, in 1996, 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 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.
In what was still early years for me, of emotionally adapting to Canada, paired with the backdrop of my childhood culture, I felt confused by this.
The solutions seemed easy. This perception amplified my confusion, as to why so many gaps existed that made the pains of survival persist for myself and so many.
Within months of migrating, 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 realized that I was unseen and unheard. I spoke and over time found that my voice had no sound or content for those I spoke to.
Despite being in a body, I was unsure I could be perceived by others outside of my children. It felt like a strange surrealism. I described it as witnessing a live Salvador Dali painting.
Trying to figure my way out of the surrealism, I reflected on my life after migrating. I remembered the generations of women before me and their life hurdles and perseverance.
Trying to figure my way out of the surrealism, I reflected on my life after migrating. I remembered the generations of women before me and their life hurdles and perseverance.
I thought of all the feelings and thoughts I had that were not part of the reality and new world I was now in. I saw that it had been the same for my family’s earlier generations in different ways, and for others in similar levels of poverty as myself.
I increasingly questioned the pragmatic value of speaking if nothing could be heard, and felt unsure how then to do strategy for my life and children without a voice.
My one perceived strategy to social stability for my children was to get a university degree. I entered university in 1989,
I started 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. And many of those who stayed were homeless.
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.
I heard my voice again inside of me. And heard it clearer and clearer with each student I spoke to and each story I heard.
I vowed, that if and when I could, I would break the emotional silences we are taught, and speak the truths that so many of us may have that are not spoken.
I wanted to do this in action through helping others, because it was action that was needed for so many at that time. In finding my voice, I spoke and strategized actions to help others.
It felt like speaking symbolically for all the women before me in my lineage.
It was here and then, that FAMILY VOICES was born.
The mission of FAMILY VOICES was to reduce barriers to entering and completing university, to demonstrate
the connections we have with each other through kinship, and to communicate through our structure that each and every person is inherently valuable.
A key message was that each of us is whole and sufficient. It 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.
In its success, I experienced more violence through my speaking for FAMILY VOICES. I experienced both praise and anger for the innovation and effectiveness of the work. Committed to the value of my voice and to the vision, I persisted.
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 now. It helped people heal and recognize that they are whole exactly as they are.
These same principles have embodied the work since 1997 and continue now in CORAL HUMAN ECOLOGY.
The work has been consistent, because the unfolding of questions and answers that arose, as I adapted to my new home, created insights that were inextricably congruent and coherent.
As a necessary precursor, there was a first congruence that existed inside of me. Throughout my experiences, I had never left my self. This was something I had learned in my childhood home that stayed with me. It was also something I witnessed, and in witnessing learned, from my grandmother.
This seed was planted early on, and sprouted during my childhood.
I felt. And kept connected to every feeling and sensation, honoring each one. I valued every thought that came. All as keeping true to me.
One purpose in life is to feel.
After COVID-19, I came to New York to support a family member.
My family had history in Brooklyn. In 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.
With the first two times as an adult being as a survivor during violence, and the third time occurring during COVID-19 to support a family member, 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 my self as familiar memory yet in a new way. In this once familiar and now new place, the emotional clarity of the years leading to this moment, sprouted new buds.
The journey of the years since 1996 had been a path of healing and learning. It had led me to this present moment. I felt ushered, back to a very early me and to a new me now, at the same time. I had come of an age.
And as my own healing continued in New York, so did my work helping others.
Similar to FAMILY VOICES, where I had identified the gaps in the non-profit sector, I had long identified a significant gap in folks getting effective emotional help and support.
Through the years of violence and poverty, I had sought emotional help. I saw that the absence of real help was tied to the same surrealism I had named so many years ago now.
The people providing help were disconnected from themselves, and as such could not see or hear me. And without seeing or hearing themselves and me, could not help me.
It had been more than 15 years of research, study and problem solving how to address this gap. And, as in FAMILY VOICES, the solution to healing seemed easy. For myself, I knew I had healed by staying connected to me. And that I would continue to heal, once I remained true to my self.
The question was how to deliver the solution, and evaluating my own fears in doing so. I decided how to deliver the solution. The then structural barriers to forming a viable business entity, sustained the problem-solving of how to address the gap.
The solution was to help folks learn how to stay connected to who they are. The solution was to feel.
The steps to staying connected to oneself is to feel “and” to stay with and in the feeling, no matter if fear is present. The latter can make the former difficult.
For years, I had seen the solution work. The method was clear and straightforward.
Everyone who had been helped in the three decades reported positive change – both organizations and individuals. Many were folks and two large organizations (one city-wide and one national), who had tried conventional methods for their respective problems with no success.
With the solution in hand, the labor in CORAL HUMAN ECOLOGY’S birth was then a weaving of two sources: the structural barriers and those barriers reigniting my fear of speaking.
The now sparked fear of speaking had history. The violence that had occurred through the success of FAMILY VOICES, led to re-experiencing homelessness and my departure from the university.
I felt afraid to launch CORAL HUMAN ECOLOGY, with the new work having larger reach than my previous endeavors. Reaching more people felt linked to the possibility of a greater risk of violence.
In its innovation, I would be naming things that again questioned sectors and worldviews. As with FAMILY VOICES, I persisted and was prepared to launch despite this fear. The structural barriers kept CORAL HUMAN ECOLOGY in labor stages until I was truly more ready.
As labor pains went along, the obstacles fostered new inspiration. Life also continued to give challenges and insights as life does. I worked through the hurdles and continuing life events.
In each step, I gained more clarity and the clarity deepened my healing. My readiness and capacity matured. The process brought me of age.
Brooklyn, New York, nurtured that readiness. Brooklyn brought me back 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 knew and understood the backgrounds, migrations and the strategies and hope.
The understanding allowed me to “feel” the discernment of emotional truth versus non-truth. And in truth, I would feel 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.
At this same time, compelling life events in New York removed the structural barriers, creating a synchronicity.
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.
We are … emotionally naked. Emotionally honest. Creating truer relationship.
We see the whole picture through observing the small.
We have a big picture understanding and vision. We believe that each action we do affects another person, who then affects someone else they’re also in relationship with. And by extension, each of us affects the next generation, and so on, for future generations.
We scale through all the people we touch through relationships.
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We disrupt and innovate leadership with heart and mind, emotion and reason, side by side.
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