Building Beloved Community is a global vision in which all people can share in the wealth of the earth. In The Beloved Community, poverty, hunger, and homelessness will not be tolerated because global standards of love and human decency will not allow it.

Embrace builds beloved community by providing a platform for social entrepreneurs, spiritual innovators and liberation leaders. Together, we co-create access to the spiritual, social and material resources needed to make our greatest contribution to the world.

This vision, articulated by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., is the same vision that our ancestors have been dreaming for generations, and that indigenous peoples and wisdom traditions around the world have been reminding us of.

Love & Liberation | Radical Joy | Healing Justice

We Stand For:

Meet the Team

  • Mazin Jamal

    CO-FOUNDER, CO-EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

    Mazin Jamal is a spiritual, innovator musician, community organizer and ritualist. He is the founder of Holistic Underground a fiscal sponsorship and organizational development agency supporting visionary people and projects. Mazin has been invited to share his gifts by leaders and movements around the world —From grassroots movements in Sudan, Ghana, Malaysia and across the US, to the board rooms of global non profits and fortune 500 companies. But his truest loves are playing music, taking naps, spiritual retreats, and being with his family and friends.

    holisticunderground.org | mazinjamal.com

  • Lotus Wong

    CO-FOUNDER, CO-EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

    Lotus Wong is a Soulful Facilitator, Experience Designer, and Brand Strategist with 14 years of experience guiding and gathering groups to grow and heal together. With a passion for people, Lotus is dedicated to leveling up leaders and teams to bring their visions to life. For Embrace, Lotus leads all things brand, strategy and programming. Lotus is also the Founder of School of Unconditional Love (SOUL) an education platform that centers BIPOC love and liberation through transformational courses, sacred ceremonies and community events. Beyond her soulpreneur pursuits, Lotus enjoys all things art, food, and culture.

    lotuswong.com | schoolofundcontionallove.com

  • Inertia DeWitt

    BOARD ADVISOR & RESIDENT ARTIST

    Inertia DeWitt is a multifaceted human being: an activist, psychotherapist, dancer, performance artist and more. She is the founder and clinical director of The OHM Center, a trauma recovery center focused on holistic and psycho-sensory treatment programs for BIPOC communities. Specializing in the treatment of trauma and use of somatic psychotherapy approaches, she provides individual and couples psychotherapy services rooted in healing the body-mind-spirit connection.

    theohmcenter.com | @inertiadewitt

  • Sonya Mehta

    DIRECTOR OF PARTNERSHIPS

    Sonya is a community strategist, a business and life coach, and co-founder of The Embrace Incubator: a community of practice focused on elevating projects committed to healing and justice. She loves weaving community with fellow visionary leaders, building foundational supports for spiritual innovators, and catalyzing growth and expansion in our social movements. She is a student of Sikhi, Yogic, and Vedic lineages, and knows that ancient wisdom traditions can offer us potent guidance during these transformational times.

    metamorphosispath.com | @son_yasita

  • Christine Juang

    COMMUNITY & EVENTS MANAGER | RESIDENT ARTIST

    Christine Juang is a community-builder, creative, non-profit program manager, speaker & facilitator, who is passionate about empowering all communities to more deeply engage with issues of social & racial justice, and works to help individuals and organizations embody values of inclusivity & equity. She is a certified J.E.D.I. practitioner & consultant through Holistic Underground, and practices a strength-based, trauma-informed approach with all her work.

    @thechristinejuang | @juangstudio

Our Community Leaders

“We urgently need to bring to our communities the limitless capacity to love, serve, and create for and with each other.”

— Grace Lee Boggs

Our Values

  • We create justice from the inside out. Healing-justice recognizes that oppression creates trauma, which gets passed from ancestors to descendants. And thus, true justice restores the wholeness and integrity of our minds, bodies, families, communities, and planet.

  • We gotta make healing, justice, equity, and transforming our world the most irresistible, enjoyable option there is.

  • Joy is a revolutionary act in the face of despair. To love ourselves is a revolutionary act in the face of hate. We claim our right to not only survive, but thrive, so we may become all that we can be, and from cups overflowing, pour into those we love, and those in need.

  • Only thriving individuals, families, and communities can sustainably heal our world. We actively invest in our prosperity so that our impact can scale.

  • “Love is what justice looks like in public.” - Dr. Cornell West

    Liberation is both material and spiritual. Just as we work to break the physical bonds that hold us back from exploring our full potential, we must heal the wounds that are mental bonds, and ancestral wounds that are spiritual bonds, that hold us.

  • We embrace the healing that is ours to do, and the medicine that each of us carries. We rise into our role in the collective story. We work side by side to leave a better world for future generations. We gather and celebrate the opportunity to be human and alive on this wild, whirling planet.

Theory of Change

We are the mycelium under the forest floor - connecting, uniting, and nourishing an ecosystem of impact.

  1. Serve the leaders

    These are the individuals who drive healing, justice and change in our communities every day. They expressed the need for curated community, tactical support, resources and avenues for collaboration to make a greater impact. We must meet these needs in an effective, accessible, sustainable, scalable and irresistible way. First, that looks like trust, relationships, and a community with shared values and goals. This also takes the form of practical support like coaching, mentorship, networking with opportunities, collaborators or funders. Finally, it includes community strategy sessions where we look at the state of our community, and map the ecosystem of opportunities for impact and collaboration.

  2. Serve the seekers

    Seekers are those actively looking for or engaged in healing, justice, and community. They express a need for safety, quality, consistency, containment and avenues for deepening their journey. We provide engaging opportunities for community building where those healers, practitioners and creatives named above can share their magic. This includes events for celebration and revival, and deeper programming like healing circles and opportunties for engaging in community service, mutual aid and reparations.

  3. Serve Oakland and the East Bay

    Oakland has a deep legacy of being the source of positive social change, but like many others, it faces unprecedented challenges. Oakland needs her healers and leaders to rise up, work through our divisions, and address local community challenges as a united front. Oakland needs safe spaces for grieving, truth and reconciliation, healing justice, collective reimagining, strategy and action. It needs the spiritual innovators to hold the space for healing and action, the seekers to participate and represent the community’s voice, and local leaders to show up, listen, and cooperate. Furthermore, we need the creatives to make the call, tell the story, and sing the song of a better tomorrow.

  4. Serve for Society - Providing a Replicable Model

    Multiple failing systems have pushed many people into an unprecedented age of isolation, division and collective overwhelm. Beloved Community is both the balm for the soul, and the platform for the change movements we need. Without community, our movements at best lack a beating heart and at worst are self destructive. While the local centers, religious institutions and other community platforms of the past have either been lost, or haven’t adapted to meet the needs of the day, our world needs new models for beloved community and sustainable movements for healing and social transformation. With Oakland and the East Bay as an inspirational example, the ultimate goal is to replicate this model nationally and globally - an internationally network embracing our planet, and carrying us into a future guided by love and liberaiton.