Another Way of Leading
New Seneca Village exists to invite progressive leaders and healers into new paradigms for sustaining their work over time by centering restoration, strengthening connection and reinvigorating vision.
We do this to expand and deepen how leadership is both understood and practiced so that new futures become possible.​​
New Seneca Village exists to support progressive leaders and healers in sustaining their work over time by centering restoration, strengthening connection, reinvigorating vision.
We do this to expand how leadership
is both understood and practiced so
that new futures become possible.​​
MISSION
Creating the restorative conditions within which future focused leadership and strategy are engaged and sustained.
Sustaining Leadership for a Future Worth Having
We are working toward a future where leadership is grounded, relational and enduring—where people are resourced to lead with clarity, care and agency, and where collective thriving is actively cultivated.
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We believe that sourcing our leadership in new ways is critical in a world increasing in complexity and urgency. We will not get to the future we envision utilizing the same productivity, urgency and scarcity mindsets that got us to this present.
The Village is interested in the strategies, approaches and futures that arise from leaders and healers who intentionally explore and adapt their own perspectives, patterns and practices, distinct from the systems they are working to transform.
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We want to see how our individual shifts impact the collective change we all seek to create.
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This work is shaped by our core principles—Interconnection, Restoration and Evolution—which guide how leaders deepen awareness, rebuild capacity and expand what becomes possible.
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These principles are carried through our founding commitments and lived through our Village Living Values, shaping how we gather, practice and move in community with intention, accountability and care.
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Our Legacy Vision extends this work forward—establishing a permanent home that ensures these practices remain accessible to those shaping the future to come.
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Explore our principles, commitments, values and vision below.
Interconnection Everything on this planet is inextricably and intimately connected. This understanding affirms our knowing that resources belong to us all and calls us into the practice of intentional community.
Restoration is the intentional return to self, purpose and humanity, strengthening how individuals contribute to community and planet, and lead from a resourced place. This practice is crucial to seeding new futures.​
Evolution Endowed with infinite potential, humanity is fully capable of creating a future wherein all beings on this planet are free to live with dignity, agency and access to resources in abundance.
What this looks like Shared practices to expand awareness, sovereignty and agency and center consent, communication and collective wisdom.
What this looks like Dedicated space and practices that rebuild capacity, deepen awareness and support long-term leadership.
What this looks like Invitation to embody and practice new ways of being that actually align with the future we want to create.
Restoration as a condition for sustained, future-shaping leadership
Across movements and organizations, leaders are carrying conditions that are extractive by design. Burnout and isolation are not side effects—they are structural. And restoration is largely absent from how leadership is defined, resourced or sustained.​​
What does it cost to keep leading in systems that require your depletion?
What conditions is your leadership currently being asked to withstand—and at what cost?​
What is being lost when leadership is measured only by output, endurance and survival?
The Village creates space to interrupt this pattern.
Leaders step out of constant demand and return to themselves—engaging practices that restore their energy, deepen their awareness and expand how they lead.
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This work is a condition for interpersonal, organizational and systems change. Resourced leaders see more possibility, choose differently and create strategies that can actually shift what exists.
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Through shared practice and community, leaders strengthen their agency, reconnect to what sustains them and move forward with clarity and intention—shaping a collective future that is worth having.
Our Village Leadership Principles
Restoration
An intentional focus on reconnecting with one’s Self, with nature and with other resources so as to contribute to life, work and community from a resourced and sustainable place.
Connection
Recognition of one’s self in relation to, and relationship with others including nature, community and higher consciousness.
Visioning
Connection to self and purpose as a path to imagining, creating and Being our collective future in new ways.
these are our definitions, what are yours?
How We Be
New Seneca Village (Village) centers women and gender expansive leaders of color working toward progressive change, and we are intentionally inclusive of trans and queer folks of color within our broader community.
In solidarity with transgender and queer communities, the Village has had iterative conversations around gender and trans-inclusivity. We know that language is evolving, and want to be explicit that the Village is a community that welcomes trans women, trans femmes, demigirls, trans men, trans masc people, masculine of center people, studs, butches, fems, two-spirit people, nonbinary folks, genderqueers, agender folks, genderfluid people, gender-expansive people of color, intersex people, etc.
While this is not an exhaustive list, we hope that we are clear that we are building a world where cis-heteropatriachy, and by extension the gender binary, is no more – where all of us are free to express and explore our authentic gender(s) and selves without discrimination.
Continuing in the legacies of Black feminism, Indigenous wisdom and women of color organizing, New Seneca Village is a space that will continue to center BIPOC cisgender women and be intentionally inclusive of trans, gender expansive and queer people as we practice and work toward collective liberation.
We invite you to explore what this means for you and to be in relationship with the fullness of y/our communities.
New Seneca Village is named in honor of Seneca Village,
a community founded and led by free and formerly enslaved Black people in New York City in 1825.
This community was one of the only integrated multi-racial communities in early NYC, welcoming Irish and German immigrants before they were assimilated into whiteness.
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Seneca Village grew to boast 3 churches, a grade school
and the highest rates of home ownership in New York City.
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This thriving village was destroyed
in order to build Central Park.
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We choose this name to reclaim the lasting power of intentionally
inclusive communities in the face of systemic erasure.
New Seneca Village is designed with the intention to care
for one another as if we are all residents of a prosperous,
resourced and thriving community.
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Because we are.
People, Place & Labor Acknowledgement
National
As a remote organization whose pilot model includes travel to natural settings across the country, we acknowledge that we find ourselves on various stolen lands that are sacred to a number of Indigenous Peoples, including but not limited to Tribes, Nations, and Peoples such as: Coosati, Muskoke, Ohlone, Snohomish.
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We are grateful to the Indigenous Peoples who have cared for and stewarded these lands in Right Relationship from the beginning. We are clear that our ongoing presence on this land is egregious. ​
Global
We also want to acknowledge all people who have been forced from their own indigenous lands, practices, ancestors and relationships due to de-humanizing economic, political, violent or climate related transgressions of others. As well as those whose labor and life force have been extracted and used in service of others before themselves. ​
Labor
We acknowledge the legacy of slavery and the enslaved African people whose life force and labor was exploited for generations to help establish the economy of the United States and many other nations across the world.
By recognizing the land that was taken from First Americans, the forced labor that was provided by enslaved Africans and black people, and the ongoing extraction foundational to many of our systems and societies, we acknowledge that we understand the source trauma that has shaped our collective present.