Help Minerva get Roots Healing its Forever Home!

Hi, I’m Minerva, founder of roots healing. Can we ever really be free if we aren’t whole? Can we ever really experience healing, if we aren’t getting down and dirty and to the root of it all? Can we do all of this AND experience joy and laughter and build community at the same time? Yes. And that is why I created Roots Healing many moons ago. Roots was born from my own healing journey and the desire to cultivate spaces of deep healing for my community on many levels.

Let's get straight to it—the ASK: For my community to help me realize the dream and the vision and the plan of getting Roots Healing its very own physical, permanent space! I have 30 days to raise the funds and solidify the deal! 

the WHY: 
Because I have the opportunity to concretize this vision, RIGHT NOW! I found the perfect plot of land. The owner is a 90-year-old Italian and his Dominican lawyer handling the sale of the property has offered me the lowest rate for the land in all the area. I have the down payment money and I tried to do this on my own. But because I do not have enough credit history in the Dominican Republic and because of my student loan debt in the united states, I am not eligible for a loan to purchase this land. And here’s the thing it’s a fact that companies with female founders perform 63% better than those of their male peers and yet less than 10% of all venture capital deals go to women, people of color and LGBTQ+ founders. In 2019, only 2.7% of venture capital went towards female-founded companies. This is where you come in with your donations, I hope to reach the goal of this gofundme and be able to complete phase one of this project: Purchase the Land!


The HOW:
The journey began when I left my home in NYC with an MPA from NYU under my belt, ten years of NGO experience, a fresh 200-hour YTT certification, my best furry friend, Little B and one suitcase. Off we went to the ancestral lands of my mother and my father—Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, respectively, to get to understand my own roots. After a few months of deep healing work, I landed in Oakland, California and dived headfirst into becoming a yoga teacher. At times barely making enough to cover all my expenses yet never wavering in my commitment to these practices! Since then, I’ve deepened my training as a yoga teacher with over 550-hours of class time, became an Ayurvedic Wellness Counselor and now as a Doctoral student in psychology with a focus on death, dying and grief work—all for the love of creating spaces to heal. I wouldn’t even be able to tell you how many classes I have taught over the years or how many hours I have put in to not only teaching them but crafting them—from developing the theme, making the right playlist to evoke the exploration and crafting the sequence to get us to experience it within our bodies. But I know it’s enough to make me an ERYT with yoga alliance. LOL. Many of those yoga classes have been donation based and held for my BIPoC communities, in the effort of making these offerings accessible to everyone—to the point of turning my home into a studio to be able to hold classes at low cost. I’ve also had the honor to partner with Shipt, Twitch, Whole30, the Warriors Foundation, el Museo del Barrio, UC Berkeley, Oakstop, Code2040 and E14 Gallery to bring yoga, meditation, and ayurvedic to anyone and everyone because I will never get tired of sharing this knowledge. One of my favorite things to have done thus far is lead a yoga and meditation retreat for Women of Color and create sacred space together because I believe in us and I believe in the power of individual healing done within the collective.


the WHAT:   
It has been a dream of mine, for almost a decade now, to be able to give Roots Healing a physical space to call home on my ancestral lands of the Dominican Republic. Why the Dominican Republic you may ask? Because by having its own space in DR we would be rewriting what it means to be a retreat center and really bridge the gap between the local community and Roots larger community. Not only would it mean reclaiming and healing the land, it would also mean Roots Healing becomes the first Dominican queer woman-owned retreat center in the Dominican Republic. A center to host our own yoga and meditation retreats, PoC yoga teacher trainings, death, dying and grief work retreats and also other retreats, especially to fellow Black and Brown creatives needing a space to congregate at costs affordable to their communities. A retreat center with environmental justice informing not only the way we build the center but how we run it. Farm to table food with Ayurvedic nutrition guiding the process. Community access to events. Everything local and obviously equitable pay to all employees. And so much more lives in my vision and my plan.

the PERK:
And I know that with gofundme I don’t have to offer anything in order to receive donations. But your donation of 10K gets me so much closer to my goal and also gets you 4-7 days/6 nights all-inclusive stays once the retreat center is open, good for the first five years we open (Goal of grand opening is end of 2022/beginning of 2023). Your donation of 5K continues to get me closer to my goal and gets you 2-7 days/6 nights all-inclusive stays to use within the first three years of opening. And remember no donation is too small. Every little bit counts. Everybody who donates will have their name on a plaque that we put up in the center to honor all the love, trust and belief you all have in me, my vision and my plans!
 

And this Women’s History Month, I invite you to support this one-woman show in realizing her dream and make history. Share with your friends, your family and honor the work of not only this queer DominiNuyoRican but also all the women who came before me, who continue to lift me up to do this work, honor the women who will be served by this center and to honor those to come who will benefit from all of us doing this work. Àṣè.

 
QUESTIONS? email and we can talk details and go over the deck! 

in community & con amor!