Sunset is not an end, it’s the evolution of a legacy
The gs Journey
For over a decade, gs has transformed lives and movements through politicized somatics, partnering with organizations like the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Women on the Rise. Together, we’ve built embodied leadership, healed trauma, and advanced justice - leaving a legacy of resilience and liberation.
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Years of Advancing Liberatory Movements
Celebrating gs and a 501c3 Completion
gs' Sunset Message
In the past five years, gs has entered a deep phase of transformation —focusing on power-sharing, accessibility, and cultural change. We began to ask different questions, exploring what it means to be responsive to our movements in a time of shifting terrain. As the political and cultural landscape evolved, so did we.
Our recent work has centered on free, accessible, and practitioner-led spaces – revealing that an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit structure is not the best vessel for our mission. In a time when the 501(c)(3) form can constrain more than it liberates, we chose to move differently.
We have determined after more than 16 years of work rooted in politicized somatics, collective care, and transformative justice, gs is formally closing its chapter as a staffed independent 501(c)(3) organization.
The organization is ending, but the methodology and the vision of a politicized approach to embodied leadership and trauma healing for powerful, vibrant, durable, and visionary movements for social and climate justice will live on.
A Living Legacy
This offering—of tools, training, embodied practice, and deep experimentation—was never meant to exist forever as a single institution. It was meant to seed something broader, bolder, and more aligned with the future our movements are building.
And it has.
What we’ve witnessed across the field—the rise of politicized somatics practitioners, the depth of experimentation in community care, the flourishing of peer-led spaces—is a living testament to what gs helped initiate and nurture.
gs was never about permanence. It was about possibility. Today, we continue to see that possibility unfold in beautiful, unexpected ways.
A Bold Experiment in Practice and Possibility
gs began as a bold experiment: to bring politicized somatics—a practice-able theory of change that supports individual, community, and collective liberation—to movement leaders and organizations. At our core, we’ve always held the belief that personal, collective, and systemic transformation are interdependent, that engaging in intentional transformative practice builds our capacity for effective, values-aligned political action.
Over nearly two decades, we offered relevant and useful interventions into movement building, in particular, deepening people’s understandings of transformative organizing with depthful offerings that skilled people up in somatics, organizing, and trauma healing. We reached thousands of leaders throughout the country, through rigorous training programs, one-on-one leadership support, partnerships with organizations, and public offerings.
An Ending, a Celebration, and What Comes Next
In 2025, we mark this transition with full hearts— as an ending, and as a celebration. A moment to honor what has been, release what is no longer needed, and make room for what is emerging.
This decision was made collectively, grounded in our values of transparency, shared power, and deep accountability to our movements.
We honor every staff member, board member, practitioner, teacher and supporter who brought this work to life. We hold deep gratitude for all who journeyed with us—and especially our beloved staff and practitioners, past and present, whose care and vision made this offering possible.
The Work Continues
Today, gs continues as a practitioner-led board community holding the legacy and values of the work as we transition as an organization.
We celebrate 16+ years of bold experimentation, mistakes and learnings, love and rigor. Thank you to every practitioner, organizer, donor, healer, cultural worker, and community member who helped make this experiment possible.
We are proud to have helped shape a field where politicized somatics and movement work continue to flourish—well beyond the nonprofit form.
With gratitude and love,
The gs board
gs Stories
When I entered Somatics and Trauma in 2014 I was organizing in New York, winning campaigns, but not able to feel the impact of my work. I felt stuck and disconnected. Somatics gave me the ability to feel more, to connect to those around me, and to be a more impactful organizer in the movement. Since 2014 I’ve seen gs transform entire organizations, offering tools for organizers to deepen their ability to heal with both love and rigor.
– Che Johnson-Long, Community Engagement Specialist, Reimagine ACDC
Over the last five years my personal and professional life has been transformed through the courses, coaching, mentorship, and community of generative somatics. I credit so much of my learning and growth as an organizer to generative somatics. In this political moment, gs is needed more than ever.
– Ileana Mendez-Penate, Communities United for Police Reform staff
Being able to identify and communicate what I’m feeling opens up a world of possibilities. A lot of people look at me and the work I’ve done and think ‘he’s cool, he’s got this.’ They could assume that I don’t need support, but that’s not true. Now, I can say, ‘I am really afraid and I need you to hold this, I can’t keep holding everything and being at the center’. That’s completely new for me to have the awareness to say—‘this is what I’m feeling, this is what’s happening’. It opens up a door to say—I can be competent, and also afraid. I can lead, and also need support.
– Nate Mullen, Director of People in Education
Somatics has opened to me a community and a methodology for integrating personal healing and transformation into political leadership. And as I’ve transformed, I’ve had more access to my own creativity and power. Today I’m designing more creative and impactful campaigns and I’m successfully cultivating new leaders who find this work liberating rather than demoralizing and draining.
– Sendolo Diaminah, Carolina Federation Co-Director
gs has allowed me to believe in the power of my self worth, renew my commitment to social justice work, and reclaim my dignity in profound and life altering ways.
gs has taught me how to tap into the infinite power I have within myself, my histories, and my futures to better serve social and ecological justice movements across the world in ways that honor the inherent dignity and worth of land and people.
– Sam Jung, gs teacher
gs is the most powerful source of that healing I have ever come across. It is a rare space for personal inquiry and change that is actually grounded in the radical anti-colonial, anti-racist, feminist, queer politics that we love and need. It is the first place I ever felt like I did not have to set aside my politics, or swallow a harmful environment, in order to access group practice toward personal transformation.
– Dean Spade, gs student
Initially I was skeptical of somatics. I was concerned it might just be some hokey New Age thing, some bland and typical Orientalist American appropriation of healing modalities from around the world. I really got hooked when I realized how deep, pragmatic and effective somatics was, how it acknowledged its syncretic and at times yes appropriative lineage, but leveraged these for change rather than being stuck and made small by those contradictions.
– Sumitra Rajkumar, gs teacher + practitioner (Psychology Today, 2019)
One of the reasons the generative somatics approach works for me is that it is concerned about somatics as a collective way of understanding trauma and pain. It isn’t about going away from the community to heal, which was the main way I had experienced healing work prior to somatics. It isn’t about being a special “healer” who is apart from community. generative somatics feels into how, in a collective or group, patterns of pain can indicate the mass, or intergenerational, trauma people are surviving. And how each of us has the power to help each feel more, heal, and move toward our longings for liberation and justice together.
– adrienne maree brown, ‘Feeling From Within: A Life of Somatics’ Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, gs teacher