The Institute for Worthy Living

The Institute for Worthy LivingThe Institute for Worthy LivingThe Institute for Worthy Living

The Institute for Worthy Living

The Institute for Worthy LivingThe Institute for Worthy LivingThe Institute for Worthy Living
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Generational patterns are woven into the fabric of our lives. But they are not set in stone. Fabric can be unraveled, tears mended, knots untangled. And a new pattern can be tenderly and intentionally begun..."

L. R. Knost

The Family Legacy Empowerment Program

In an ideal world, systemic racism ceases to exist and the doors to previously blocked opportunities fly open and become equally available to all. In this setting, Black families are granted unfettered access that maximizes their wealth, health, educational achievement, social and economic equity and equality, fully activating their freedom to flourish. Many Black families will walk through the doors and fulfill the potential they are inherently capable of manifesting. 


Other Black families will continue to struggle. These families are subconsciously navigating the fatalism, learned helplessness, internalized oppression, self-hate, poverty-mentality and other limiting beliefs formed as a result of attempting to survive in an overtly racist, blatantly anti-Black society. Many will remain mired in the negative social indicators closely associated with generational poverty even though they unknowingly possess dormant qualities  that can be used to transmute their circumstances. 


Within that population are families that don't know what they don't know, but are subconsciously open to discovering a new way of living, a new way of doing, a new way of being. The families in this group have an underlying sense that, with the right type of support, they would be fully capable of  manifesting the life they deserve. 


These are the families from which many "firsts" emerge; first to go to college, first to own a home, first to be an entrepreneur, first to practice gentle parenting, first to embrace a different way to think. They are drawn to opportunities to be their lineage's change-agents, making them the ideal firsts to end generational poverty in their families. 


Enter The Family Legacy Empowerment Program, a comprehensive initiative that empowers low-income families ready to break the cycle of generational poverty and create a new trajectory of generational worthiness, generational resilience and generational freedom, all of which are essential to building generational wealth. 


The holistic, place-based project provides tools, training, and resources to progressive community organizations that help to create a sustainable impact through a structured approach that normalizes the development of a lasting legacy of wealth and empowerment. 


The Family Legacy Empowerment Program operates on the premise that in order to facilitate substantive transformation that involves family, the whole family must be involved, treated as the institution it is. The interrelated dynamics present within each family unit makes it essential to work with the unit as a whole when attempting to shift generational patterns. 


To that end, The Family Legacy Empowerment Program focuses on the individual family unit while simultaneously cultivating a community-wide paradigm that normalizes wealth-building as an essential aspect of family and community legacy. 


The Family Legacy Empowerment Program is an innovative, methodical, strength-based, solution-focused strategy, ideal for community organizations providing financial literacy, employment assistance and/or wealth-building programs in marginalized communities.  


PROGRAM COMPONENTS


Train-the-Trainer: Family Legacy Meeting Facilitation

Objective: Equip community organization staff with the skills and resources to train family members in facilitating their own monthly Family Legacy Meetings.


Family Legacy Workshop Series

Objective:  Providing families a series of digital workshops that support them in unplugging from an old lack-based paradigm while learning new ideas and principles that bolster their ability to see themselves as worthy of wealth. Importantly, the series includes informational content to help Black families understand the impact that racism has had on them and their lineage to help remedy fatalist beliefs. 


Quarterly Family Legacy Gatherings (Community-Wide Events)

Objective: Bring together participating families for collective learning, motivation, and celebration. The gatherings draw on the inspiring power of peer support to reinforce the importance of consistency and full participation.  


Annual Banquet or Brunch

Objective: Celebrate the achievements of participating families, recognize contributors, and inspire continued growth.


Key Benefits for Families and Communities

• Empowered families with actionable wealth-building plans.

• Strengthened family bonds through shared goals and accountability.

• Increased financial literacy and access to wealth-building resources.

• Recognition of family and community achievements, fostering pride and motivation.

The Family Legacy Meeting

Every family has a legacy. Whether created intentionally or by default, families have identifiable characteristics  and patterns that define who they are as a unit. As it relates to wealth, without intention, black families are far more likely to maintain generational patterns that unwittingly perpetuate poverty, even if they have what it takes to end the cycle.


The Family Legacy Meeting is the cornerstone of the Family Legacy Empowerment Program. It's an exciting and innovative planning process that solidifies and supports a family's role as change-agents determined to end generational poverty in their family's lineage. The FLM is a strength-based, solution-focused family meeting facilitated by a family member trained in the process that meets the family where they are, optimizes existing wealth-building habits and practices and introduces the family to additional skills, ideas and approaches that includes quarterly follow-ups to maintain momentum and consistency. 


The primary intention of the FLM is to introduce the family to a different way of thinking by helping them dispel preconceived ideas about what constitutes wealth and, importantly, clarifying what it looks like for their family.  The  inspirational meetings help families take inventory of their specific dynamics; strengthening the positive and eliminating the negative. Ideally, families leave the sessions hopeful about their ability to achieve a more prosperous future for themselves. 


The 90-minute FLM emphasizes the importance of mindset in the family's wealth-building journey. At the end of the first session, the family will have completed a customized blueprint that includes their mission statement, action steps for each family member, as well as action steps to achieve the family's short and long-term wealth-building goals. 


The FLM invites the family to embrace success principles like affirmations, vision boards,  a family wealth mantra and other concepts and activities that help create a foundational belief system conducive to thriving.  The C.L.E.A.N. S.L.A.T.E. framework is also introduced as a guiding philosophy to motivate the family's individual and collective growth and transformation. 


Importantly, by educating families about the nation's historic agenda to deprive Black families access to the American Dream, the FLM pokes holes in fatalistic limitations that prevent some Black families from even considering a wealthier existence for themselves.  The FLM strengthens a family's belief in their ability to achieve wealth by sharing success stories of Black families with similar circumstances who have ended generational poverty in their lineage.  


Having at least one family member participating in a wealth-building program offered by a community organization or financial institution is required.

We do people a huge disservice when we assume they do not have dreams they want to achieve.

Michelle Hollinger

The FLM's Train the Trainer

JOIN THE WAITING LIST

Progressive organizations offering services and resources to help families end generational poverty can help their clients deepen the integration of wealth-building practices, ideas and principles by introducing them to the Family Legacy Meeting. 


With The Institute for Worthy Living's C.L.E.A.N. S.L.A.T.E. framework as its foundation, The Family Legacy Meeting is a bold new strategy designed to help families transform their lives by recognizing that they deserve wealth and have it within them to acquire it. 


By having key staff members trained in the process, community organizations can then train families to facilitate the process as a part of their wealth-building journey.   


The innovative process expands upon the family team meeting format by infusing concepts and ideas designed to  help families think differently about building wealth. With the use of the C.L.E.A.N. S.L.A.T.E. framework, families are guided to reframe their past, embrace the now and move forward with a renewed, more expansive perspective about their family's potential. 

Be among the first to become a certified trainer of The Family Legacy Meeting

Join the waiting list

“If you can control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his action... If you make a man think that he is justly an outcast, you do not have to order him to the back door. He will go without being told; and if there is no back door, his very nature will demand one.”

Carter G. Woodson

THE INSTITUTE'S PHILOSOPHY

INNATE WORTHINESS

Most community organizations exist to serve people Dr. Woodson referenced in the above quote. People whose thinking is controlled and whose nature demands the metaphorical entering through back doors.  At the core of the accompanying mindset is unworthiness, a subtle but powerful subconscious sentiment limiting how people see themselves and what they believe they're capable of manifesting. 


Unworthiness exists irrespective of  a person's race, gender or zip code and is often the culprit behind people going to jobs they hate, tolerating toxic relationships, overachieving, underachieving, shrinking and other limiting behaviors. As it relates to children and families in communities most impacted by the country's racist and oppressive practices, unworthiness is even more deeply entrenched, as it is an intentional consequence of racism and oppression. 


Providing services and resources to underserved communities without an awareness of, and strategies to alleviate, individual and community-wide unworthiness unwittingly stagnates progress.


Marginalized communities subsist instead of transform when the focus is only on remedying the external. To achieve the level of transformation children and families are fully capable of, especially changing generational patterns, the focus of intervention must extend beyond effect and embrace cause.


Efforts to reform racist economic and social practices at the policy level are absolutely essential, however, concurrent efforts to eradicate the harmful effects of  racism at the individual, familial and community levels must also ensue for transformation to happen. Whether the intervention is voluntary or mandated, an organization's approach can be an empowering catalyst prompting true change, or a Band-Aid covering root issues and perpetuating temporary fixes.


Therefore, in addition to community organizations prioritizing efforts that help people meet their basic needs, it is essential that the services designed to help people rectify deficits and dysfunctions and improve their quality of life, deliberately, consistently and unapologetically inform people they are innately worthy.

 

The Institute for Worthy Living helps community organizations infuse worthiness enhancing content into their programming to elevate their interventions into a powerful compass guiding people to their potential.  

If you always do, what you've always done, you'll always get, what you've always got.

Unknown

FOUNDATIONAL PROGRAMMING

C.L.E.A.N. S.L.A.T.E.

Community work can be tough work because it literally determines whether people change their lives. The organizations producing the most promising outcomes embody a certain professional consciousness that plays a powerful role in how they engage with their clients. 


The C.L.E.A.N. S.L.A.T.E. framework is an important self-validating, inside-out focused standard of operating built on the awareness that organizational consciousness is real and plays a monumental role in the community's success. 


It stands to reason that organizations serious about making meaningful changes in the lives of children and families have a foundation conducive to making meaningful changes in the lives of children and families. 


That foundation, the core of an organization, must embody progressive, innovative, unapologetically optimistic energy based on a commitment to make being the change it wants to see more than a cliche. 


The Institute for Worthy Living has developed an organizational framework based on a set of guiding principles that form a C.L.E.A.N. S.L.A.T.E.;  an essential foundation for agency-wide effectiveness, but especially significant for one of the most important components of effective place-based work: being that space in the community where it's safe to bare souls and dreaming is non-negotiable.


All organizations benefit from a C.L.E.A.N. S.L.A.T.E.


Regardless of whether an organization is chugging along, helping clients navigate broken systems; or bravely embracing best practices with awesome outcomes, functioning from a C.L.E.A.N. S.L.A.T.E. optimizes the organization's operational capacity and produces powerful ripple effects. 


What is the C.L.E.A.N. S.L.A.T.E.?


The C.L.E.A.N. S.L.A.T.E. is an acronym to describe a powerful organizational consciousness that is a precursor for transformative work. 

COURAGEOUSLY LEADING (with)

It takes courage to change lives. It takes courage to stand up for people routinely left to fend for themselves. It takes courage to ignite the dreams of individuals who believe dreams are for everyone except them. It takes courage to be a "man in the mirror" organization. It takes courage to say "we were wrong, we can do better." 


To say "thanks, but no thanks" to funding that pays the bills but does nothing to advance the organization's vision. 


To acknowledge your own unconscious biases.


To do more listening than talking. 


To see beyond behavior. 


To trust your instincts.To try a new approach.


To share the power.


To expect the best. 


Courageously Leading normalizes being courageous. It transforms the organization into better versions of itself, and its ripple effects inspire children and families to transform their own lives. It inspires courageous funders to fund courageous efforts. 

It boosts morale. Increases productivity.  Is cost effective. And makes sense. 


Courageously Leading changes lives.

ENTHUSIASM (&)

Enthusiasm is an inside-out state of being that emerges naturally from leading courageously, authentically and with gratitude. At the organizational level, enthusiasm flourishes when the workforce feels safe to be their authentic selves. It's on autopilot where courage and integrity are guiding lights. Enthusiasm replaces drudgery when the workforce believes in the organization's vision and mission. Unlike excitement, which is situational, enthusiasm is a naturally occurring, even-keeled energy resulting from the deep alignment with and expression of the organization's truth. Creating, serving and manifesting from organizational authenticity produces a natural state of enthusiasm. 

AUTHENTICITY

Operating from organizational AUTHENTICITY means practice and principles align for the greater good of humanity, beginning with the children and families an organization loves. (Agape love is an essential aspect of authentic services provision.) Authentic organizations attract employees, funders, stakeholders, and a community of people either operating in their authenticity or deeply desiring the opportunity to do so. The energy of authenticity is powerful. It cuts through noise and is easily understood. Organizational authenticity repels stagnation. Its enthusiasm for growth and perpetual evolving extends to every aspect of its existence. 

NOW

Resistance to change is indicative of organizations stuck in the past. Reviewing past performance is essential to growth and development when the focus is on improving. Worrying about what might happen tomorrow stems from the absence of strategic planning aligned with the organization's vision and mission. It also robs organizations of the focused ability to access the tangible and intangible resources currently available and necessary to maximize outcomes. The past is over and the future has not yet arrived. The only time organizations have actual power over is NOW.  Organizations  committed to growing from their past use a NOW focus to plan for and manifest a better future for themselves and the people they serve. 

(based on) SELF-LOVE

True SELF-LOVE cannot isolate itself to the personal, but is an extension of the whole person, so organizations with a culture that celebrates SELF-LOVE welcome its collective expression. Employees don't just work at organizations that lead with love. It's where they get to answer the call to fulfill the mission of their soul. Organizations, therefore, become a vessel through which self-love is expressed throughout every department, serving as a model for the children, families, stakeholders, funders and everyone the organization encounters. 

AUDACIOUS THANKFULNESS for EVERYTHING

Being AUDACIOUSLY THANKFUL for EVERYTHING encompasses full bodied gratitude for every aspect of the organization's journey. It's the comprehension that the organization's most challenging experiences were necessary for its ascension. It's the realization that workforce adjustments occurred to harmonize the team. Members who could not align with the organization's mission and vision had to leave  to make room for those who could. Organizations that are audaciously thankful exude great energy and attract team members who share the vision. Being audaciously thankful elevates the quality of the organization's vision and mission based on genuine belief in and support from the team. Being audaciously thankful establishes a level of optimism that extends beyond the organization's walls, essential for transforming lives and ending generational limitations.  

The Institute for Worthy Living

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