About the Inspiration: Past Generations of Mothers, Grandmothers and Great-Grandmothers
Telos Training, Inc.’s mission is centered on community passion. We support an often overlooked community of grown women pursuing a holistically healthy “3-D” life that encompasses the spiritual, intellectual, and physical components of the self. The benefits of that pursuit flow between women and extend to their spouses, partners, children, extended families, neighborhoods, and communities. Telos Training, Inc. is passionate about supporting women’s reclamation efforts of the self, a self frequently ignored and patronized, often by the very people bemoaning patriarchy. The irony of much of the feminist movement and it’s fight against misogyny and patriarchy is that often the traditional, powerful work and insight of grown women, especially grown women of color is disregarded, discarded and viewed with disdain by the very beneficiaries of all that power, all that work and all that insight.
Objectively speaking, one would be hard-pressed to identify a singular demographic cohort subjected to more disrespect while developing phenomenal and evolutionary coping mechanisms than older black women, the descendants of the original African diaspora to the Americas. Those mechanisms, that strength, that insight, that power…Telos Training, Inc. is committed to the recognition and replication of all of that for the good and betterment of an often unconscious and ungrateful humanity-because all of it is sorely needed!
I grew up watching my great-grandmother, my two grandmothers, my mother, multiple aunties-plus the grown women friends of those grown women. I married a man whose mother and grandmother were cut from the same grown woman cloth. Telos Training, Inc. basically takes those grown woman skills, insights and powers once shared and transmitted via oral tradition and observation within community, and makes them available across new boundaries. Telos Training, Inc. received our official IRS 501(c)(3) designation in 2011 but the inspiration for the work of the organization is ageless.
Telos Training, Inc. has hosted seminars, discussion groups and conferences on marriage, parenting and educational options. We’ve held screenings of internationally recognized documentaries like Pray the Devil Back to Hell, depicting how the women of Liberia worked to end the civil war. We’ve hosted “Back-to-School Book Bag & Supplies Give-Aways” and lectures by incredible scientists and amazing authors including Isabel Wilkerson and her Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Story of America’s Great Migration. Our largest project to date is the 4,000 sq. ft. CMNMG@CCAF, The Charles Madison Nabrit Memorial Garden @ The Church of Christ of the Apostolic Faith which opened in 2014.