About our garden
Well-Being at ITOC
The ITOC Well-Being spaces aim to restore hope and energy among educators by providing intentional opportunities for connection and well-being. Through meaningful interactions, we unlock imagination and explore transformative ways of engaging with one another. By embracing our imagination and prioritizing well-being, we reclaim ourselves and our community, and honor our vision of liberation.
We create spaces where healing and imagination flourish, energizing educators and nurturing our collective spirit.
The garden represents our belief in the difference between place and space: place being physical, space being energetic or spiritual. We recognize we are all joining from different places across the country but we meet in a shared space. Wherever we are doing the work, we know our freedom dreams are real, that they are possible, because they exist in this shared space we have co-created.
Why this matters
Solidarity and Embodiment
Solidarity
In a world where many feel unheard and schools often diminish hope and energy, ITOC Well-Being spaces serve as powerful reminders that we are not alone.
Embodiment
By cultivating habits that promote well-being, we actively create and become the world we envision.
Named by educators, in their own words
What Gets in the Way
These are the barriers ITOC educators have named to nurturing their own well-being. If you recognize yourself here, you are in good company.
- Feeling unworthy of well-being, or unsure of what it truly means
- Doubting the importance of well-being, and questioning whether there is time for it
- Not knowing how to practice well-being effectively
- Fear that engaging in well-being will add to already overwhelming responsibilities
- Feeling disconnected from the spaces meant to support well-being, unsure there is capacity to participate fully
- Sustaining a practice once it has started
- Feeling the work is not meaningful unless it is hard
Our intention is to keep creating spaces for connection while developing low-commitment ways to take part, to normalize the language of well-being, and to treat wellness as a tool for advancing racial justice rather than a reward for surviving it.
What grows here
The Branches
The ITOC Garden
A symbolic extension of the ITOC community where well-being is nurtured and celebrated, supporting the work of normalizing well-being across the community.
The Well-Being Collective
A branch of the ITOC community committed to nurturing holistic well-being, building intentional community, and championing racial justice through the transformative power of collective healing. It gathers across a series of virtual sessions, combining the wisdom of past gatherings with new practices — pause, meditation, connection, community-building — rooted in self-compassion and communal strength.
The ITOC Summer Program
Solo and collective opportunities for community members to pour into themselves.
The Spirit of Our Culture is an original framework by Altagracia Montilla.
Taking Seeds for Your Garden
What are you carrying out of this room?
Weeding Your Garden
Something has to come out before something can go in.
Planting Your Garden
The part that happens after you go home.
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