
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:
Our Values
GOD/SPIRIT
Demonstrating love and liberation.
BELONGING
Fostering beloved community across lives and lineages.
AUTHENTICITY
Surrendering to your sacred nature.
BEAUTY & HONOR
Living in reverence, awe, and right relation.
CREATIVITY
Expressing your divine calling.
THE POWER OF CO-LEADERSHIP
LOTUS MALANA WONG
CO-DIRECTOR & CO-FOUNDER
Lotus Wong is an Executive Facilitator, Experience Designer, and Brand Strategist with 15 years of experience guiding and gathering groups to grow, heal and transform together. With a passion for people, Lotus has worked in 35+ countries with a diverse portfolio of clients including Fortune 500 companies, educational and non-profit institutions to bring their boldest visions to life. Lotus currently has her own Creative Studio that specializes in personal branding for soulpreneurs. At Embrace, Lotus leads all things brand, strategy, and programming. She is also the creatrix behind the BIPOC Spiritual Innovation platform and short film “Lineages of Love & Liberation”.
MAZIN JAMAL
CO-DIRECTOR & CO-FOUNDER
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.
Founding Community Members
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King David Lee Walker Jr.
Co-Leader, Embrace Men’s Circle
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Chun-Mui Miller
Board Member, Reverend Mother, Embrace Ceremony Guardian
Founder & Herbalist at Remembrance Apothecary -
Dr. Brendan Collins-Bride
Board Member, Co-Leader, Embrace Men’s Circle
Family and Sports Chiropractor - Lead Doctor, The Source Chiropractic Berkeley
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Mischa Byruck
Board Member, Co-Leader, Embrace Men’s Circle
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Tomás “Chicome Mikiztli” Riegos
Co-Leader, Embrace Men’s Circle
Co-Founder of DreamLabs, Aztec dancer, & Community Ceremonialist
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Inertia DeWitt
Board Advisor, Resident Artist, Founding Member
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Christine Juang
Social Justice Leader | Resident Artist
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Sonya Mehta
Liberatory Coach
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Désirée Freda
Co-Leader, Embrace Women’s Circle
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Jordon Jo
Embrace Business Coach, Accounting Wiz, Musician
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Nathaniel Jenkins
Somatic Bodywork, Joy Embodiment Coach, Interior Designer
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Tamika Marie Banks
Spiritual Coach, Ritual Holder, Ancestral Guide
“We urgently need to bring to our communities the limitless capacity to love, serve, and create for and with each other.”
— Grace Lee Boggs
Theory of Change
We are the mycelium under the forest floor - connecting, uniting, and nourishing an ecosystem of impact.
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.
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.
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.
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.