The Work Beneath the Work

Dálida Rocha of Neighbor-to-Neighbor experienced the toll of burnout while organizing for justice. Confronting her own limits and wounds, she discovered the necessity of inner healing alongside social justice work. Now she integrates spiritual and emotional care into community organizing, helping leaders sustain their work from a place of wholeness.

“A lot of us come to this work from a place of pain, but you can’t continue to do the work from that place.”

Those words from Dálida Rocha, Neighbor to Neighbor Executive Director and Finding Our Way Home wisdom council member, echo her own journey. She understands all too well the importance of inner work when doing community work and activism.

When Rocha immigrated from Cape Verde, an African island nation, she internalized the American dream and committed her life to hard work. She went to school and worked full-time, all while raising three children. At the time, she was working for Roxbury YouthWorks Inc., an organization helping youth and their families transition from cycles of poverty and violence. She was passionate and determined, but exhausted.

“There were moments where life was unbearable, and I felt like I was going to lose my mind,” Rocha says of the burnout. She sought her doctor’s help, noticing she was losing lots of hair. She was told that if her stress continued at that rate, she likely wouldn’t make it through her thirties. 

She remembers being on her hands and knees one day, scrubbing her bathtub, when she lost control. “I’m not a person who cries, but I just cried and cried and cried,” she reflects. “In that moment, I realized that I needed to shift. I wanted to be an example for my children and let them know that they can ask for support, that they need a community around them, supporting them. But I was not modeling those things.”

Rocha got the help she needed and began to find ground again. Terrifying as it was, she began to unearth past pain such as childhood trauma that was calling the shots in her life without her knowing.

“In the United States, we are operating within a system that is all about productivity and being fast-paced,” Rocha reflects. “The world doesn’t create enough opportunities for us to show up as our full selves and for us to reclaim ourselves and walk on this path toward wholeness without being rushed.”

Rocha’s journey is not uncommon for people involved in justice work. When she accepted her current role at Neighbor to Neighbor — one of the most influential community-organizing groups in Massachusetts, which seeks to tilt the balance of power away from the handful of wealthy elites impacting state policy decisions — she remembered her own journey. What pains and burdens were her staff members carrying into their daily work? Might healing practices not only strengthen their work but also, most importantly, help them discover their own inherent wholeness?

She found a path forward with Finding Our Way Home, a project of Episcopal City Mission, led by Dan Gelbtuch and Neha Rayamajhi, and co-founded by Maria Elena Latona. Finding Our Way Home “calls attention to the spiritual and emotional health of those leading multiple fights on the front lines” and “invests in healing practices essential to bolstering resilience, addressing trauma, and sustaining efforts for power-building work in social movements.”

“What are the healing and spiritual needs of people doing justice work, and what can we do to support that financially?” Gelbtuch explains. “You can almost think about Finding Our Way Home as a technical-assistance grant to focus on their spiritual and emotional health. Whereas a traditional foundation might offer financial support to work on a website or learn budgeting skills, we want to give leaders access to continual spiritual nourishment and resources for their staff.”

Rocha admits that her staff at Neighbor to Neighbor was wary at first of incorporating Finding Our Way Home’s initiatives for spiritual nourishment into their work. Many Americans in our capitalistic system, Rocha says, have the drive to work but are hesitant to do the inner work it takes to heal. Even in social change and activism circles, work can become a mask, a distraction for dealing with what is actually happening within.

“We are all wounded and have different levels of suffering within the oppressive systems we’re navigating,” Rocha says. “We all have overlapping woundedness. But what role are we each playing in our own suffering? Healing is messy. And sometimes it’s the way we are holding our pain that becomes an obstacle to us showing up.”

Now Rocha’s staff at Neighbor to Neighbor is all in: They now see how everything — their own personal and communal journeys of healing and the healing work they do as an organization — is interconnected.

“Especially now, with the horrors of what folks are facing in this country, I think it’s really important to have places to go and reflect,” says Gelbtuch, who notes that Neighbor to Neighbor could be a model to other organizations seeking to integrate healing and organizing work. “We’re trying to push for a cultural change inside of movement work, to help make the work more powerful because it is done from a place of greater resilience, rest, and healing where the spirit of the organization and individual is valued.”

Reflect with Us  
Dálida Rocha’s story reminds us that the work of justice cannot be sustained without the work of healing. When we slow down and tend to our own wounds, we begin to show up with greater resilience, honesty, and care for others. Where might you be carrying pain or exhaustion in your own work or life? What would it look like to make space for healing — not as a distraction from your commitments, but as part of how you live them out? Share your reflection with us. 

We Conspire is a series from the Center for Action and Contemplation featuring wisdom and stories from the growing Christian contemplative movement. Sign up for the monthly email series and receive a free invitation to practice each month.