Four Black founders on creating healing communities in LA: ‘so all of us can have access’
After traversing the summit of Mount Whitney in the eastern sector of California’s Sequoia national park, Michael Washington pitches his tent, looks across the forest terrain and preps for a frosty night before his trek through 10ft of snow the following day. As the sun pierces the veil of fog obstructing their view of the great Sierra Nevada, Washington and a group of travelers embark on a “climb of a lifetime”.
In Los Angeles, where dreamers congregate and entrepreneurial spirits thrive, building community is as actionable as it is a necessity. The growing consciousness about the state of people’s mental health arose post-pandemic, specifically for communities of color as the nation grappled with a racial reckoning that has yet to provide equality. Leaders such as Washington are uplifting and making the overall health and wellness of people of color a priority. The Guardian connected with four Black founders of three organizations who have affected the cultural DNA of Los Angeles by creating movement towards interconnectedness and finding community through healing.
Washington founded Usal, a Los Angeles-sprouted outdoor community inspired by his days camping at Usal Beach in Westport, California. The group gets referred to as “us all”, he said, which fits the togetherness of community camping trips. Usal has brought strangers (and friends) out to trails and campsites in places like Joshua Tree, Chocolate Lakes and Mount Baldy to promote bonding through activities and educational ways of becoming one with the outdoors.
“I think humanity needs to be connected for us to continue forward, so a camping trip of 20 people that you have never met can seem daunting at first,” he said, noting that he’d been seeking a community of nature lovers in Los Angeles for years until creating the Usal Project in early 2022. “I was interested in being outdoors and learning more about the kind of different ways to engage with it.”
Usal hosts monthly educational workshops for woodworking enthusiasts, and provides bouldering classes, fly-fishing introductions, floral design, sacred tea ceremonies and community camping trips across California.
“I am aiming to be cognitive about really creating space for people who have felt historically marginalized, whether that is people of color or just women in general,” Washington said. “I try to include certain types of outdoor activities that vary in scale and levels of danger so all of us can have access through where people grew up.”
A holistic approach to the outdoors is a necessity for Etienne Maurice, who curates weekly active meet-ups through his organization, WalkGood. Maurice is a gun violence survivor and an advocate for community healing through emotional solace, breath work, yoga, walks and runs. “I grew up in Mid-City [a neighborhood in LA], and my community was either the church or the function,” Maurice said. “Many of us don’t take the time to go out and find those communities or spaces in which we exist, that are centered around Blackness and all of its forms.”
Maurice was inspired to create WalkGood LA as a direct response to the deaths of Black and brown people while in police custody, including the 2020 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. He organized a rally before Juneteenth, the federal holiday commemorating the emancipation of the last enslaved people after the civil war, at a Los Angeles park. While on the microphone, he asked his cousin to lead a yoga flow. “She led these beautiful stretches and there was this real moment of tranquility where peace covered the entire park with 400 people,” Maurice said.
From that moment, WalkGood LA has hosted evening runs, hundreds of morning yoga flows and breath work that Maurice leads alongside his family. One special event is YouGood?, a Black men’s healing circle. “We all talk in a space where Black men exclusively can just be, share and be vulnerable,” he said. “It was so amazing to see a sea of Black men in the studio, doing sound baths, journaling, yoga, and having conversations with each other.”
Their Sunday sessions are the most popular, held at Kenneth Hahn Park, with hundreds of yoga mats dispersed on the bright green lawn and a wide sense of recharge circulating in the air. “As someone who goes to traditional yoga classes, I don’t tend to see the types of faces I am familiar with, but at WalkGood there were so many new types of faces and people that I’m not used to experiencing,” a music executive and Los Angeles local, Ynna Tugung, said. “The speaker was asking us to release our generational trauma, and when I looked around everyone was tearing up – it was powerful.”
For those looking to nourish their souls in Los Angeles, Ritual Dinners brings folks together over feasts that unite local farmers and culinary artists with the guests consuming their food. Co-founders Imān Benét and Rachel Bussey incorporate their backgrounds as chefs to infuse healthy ingredients into a dining experience where the proceeds are donated to a non-profit. Ritual Dinners started with the idea of restoring the sanctity of eating and dining together, Benét said over Zoom from Mexico City – wrapping their first hosted international dinner.
“I think that there is such a necessity for us to reconnect back into our bodies and back with our food,” she said. “Once we can do that, we’re more equipped to connect to each other and to the world around us.”
Their candlelit dinners have included intimate arrangements as well as a guest list of 30-plus consumers. Both founders are plant-based eaters and Bay Area locals, and activism and advocacy are intrinsic to the way they consume food. “A lot of the time we’ll have people who have never met us,” said Bussey, a Le Cordon Bleu graduate. “People will show up knowing no one and will have no idea what to expect and will leave the dinner as if we’re family.”
Benét and Bussey’s mission is to reintroduce the importance of inperson dining while making sophisticated meals feel less exclusionary. Through themed dinners that acknowledge seasons, change and identity,
Ritual Dinners directs guests to bond through the quality of what they eat and how they live. In August, the pair hosted a dinner in the Hollywood Hills, with a focus on natural elements: earth, air, fire and water.
“We started with a water cleansing ritual for the elemental experience of the dinner,” said Sophia Black, a musician who attended the dinner. “I loved being inside this open home as we went from floor to floor. The one honoring earth was upstairs in this beautiful garden with a bunch of local foods from a nearby farmers’ market.”
Artful flower arrangements, music and real-time preparation of the meals allowed guests to savor every moment and course. Seafood-based appetizers honored dishes related to water, and watermelon, oysters and sardines were served.
“There was even a live beehive so we knew exactly how fresh our honey was,” Black said.