I'm Liz Wiltsie. I'm a white cis-gender queer woman in my 40s with class privilege, who grew up between Michigan and South Carolina and has spent most of my adult life trying to understand how people build trust, with themselves and with each other, and why that's so much harder than it should be.
I've lived in eight cities across six states. I've worked in entertainment, education, consumer products, retail, consulting, and as an Abolitionist organiser. I've spent my career obsessed with how people tell stories, individually and collectively, and how those stories shape what we think is possible.
My frameworks come from all of it: the research, the client work, the organising, and the first-hand experience of being a person trying to live differently inside systems that weren't built for that.
I didn't know I could have needs until I was 35 years old.
That sounds like a small thing. It wasn't. The idea that getting our needs met is essential for safety and thriving came into my life through the Modern Abolition Movement, and it changed everything about how I understand urgency, capacity, and what it actually means to care for yourself inside a system that profits from you not doing that.
I would not be doing this work, in this way, without Black Lives Matter Los Angeles and AWARE-LA / White People for Black Lives. That's not a footnote. That's the foundation.
"Liz makes it easy to assess yourself and make changes based on your own experience, not someone else's system."
The thing I hear most, the thing that matters most to me, is when someone says they no longer feel broken or alone. That's what this is for.
This work doesn't exist in a vacuum. EbonyJanice talks about the practice of "citing the spark," naming not just quotes but where the ideas actually came from. That's what I'm doing here.
Tricia Hersey viaThe Nap Ministry was the first to connect urgency, capitalism, and chattel slavery in a way that entered my world and made this analysis possible. Without that connection, this work does not exist.
Tema Okun's framework naming urgency as a characteristic of white supremacy culture was something I engaged with in a specifically meaningful way in 2020. That framing is woven throughout. Find it at https://www.whitesupremacyculture.info/
Jade T. Perry has been doing liberatory praxis work for a long time. As a self identified Black-queer-disabled-femme, she brings lived experience and deep study together in ways that have shaped how I think about this work.
Toi Marie Smith has a deep systems and structural analysis and I've learned so much from her over the years. She's also got the world's best recommendations for books.
Caitlin Rosenthal's Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (2019) shows in depth how many of our modern systems originated in plantation slavery. It came to me through recommendations by both Desiree Adaway and Toi Marie Smith.
Cyndi Suarez's The Power Manual: How to Master Complex Power Dynamics (2018), recommended by Toi Marie Smith, introduced the framing of coercive versus liberatory power that is central to how I teach.
Bunny McKensie Mack's boundary work and their journey building MMG Earth shaped how I think about capacity and values-aligned work.
Lisa Feldman Barrett's Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, Dave McRaney's How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion and Deb Dana's work with Polyvagal Theory inform the neuroscience layer of this work.
Christine Miserandino's Spoon Theory, which I was introduced to by organisers Hannah Jurs-Allen, Liz Sutton, and Virginia Schmitt, underpins how I think about capacity throughout.
James-Olivia Chu Hillman, Mia Mingus, Sonya Renee Taylor, Janaya Future Khan, Patrisse Cullors, Mariame Kaba, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Angela Davis, Richie Reseda, Sharyn Holmes, Clarinda Tivoli, EbonyJanice, Bear Hebert, David Eagleman, Jake Ernst, and Meenadchi have all shaped this work with their own.
Kelly Diels taught me the importance of naming and claiming space in our own work and conversations, across many of her courses.
I have been lucky enough to work with high school students more than once in my career and owe debts to every single one of them. Some continue to influence this work directly, particularly Martissa Beard and Kalen Cobb.
Finally, every person who has worked with me has shaped this too. The questions they've asked, the patterns they've named, the ways they've pushed back and made this clearer, that's in here. This work is better because of them.
I wrote Lead with Ease: a Field Guide for High-Trust Leadership, hosted the Sustainably Human at Work podcast, and have been a guest on podcasts and panels I genuinely loved being part of. The podcast isn't current but the conversations are still worth your time if you want to go deeper on any of this.
This is just one piece in a much larger movement for collective care. I've included citations and ways to dig deeper on purpose. Follow the threads. Read the people named here. This work is bigger than me.