For Colored Girls Who Have Considered a Sabbatical

When a Wellness Retreat Was NOT enuf.

This is an ask.

Artwork credit: Jeri Rayon

THE LIFE WE CARRY

For LaQuita “Quita” Cole, who named the need for rest.

LaQuita “Quita” Cole was a Black woman entrepreneur from Nashville, Tennessee. She was known in her community as a business owner and someone deeply committed to her work and the people she served.

She passed away in April 2025 at age 40.

“I’m taking the next 3 days off. Quita need rest.”

She wrote those words shortly before her death,  a public declaration posted to her social media page. Seconds after sharing them, she sat down and transitioned to a guiding ancestor.

For us, Quita is a warning, a mirror, and a reason.

Across Zoom rooms, across kitchen tables, across global cultural spaces, we have started talking about rest. While those conversations are welcome, I find myself asking: how available is rest, truly, for women of color? How realistic is a sabbatical for the women holding the cultural infrastructure of this country?

Many of the programs built to answer that question are already retreating. Turning away from racial specificity out of fear of being seen as political. This leaves us navigating systems that were built without us in mind.

Sector research from the Building Movement Project found that 45% of nonprofit EDs and CEOs of color reported being ‘often’ or ‘always’ challenged by the stress of being called upon to represent a community, compared with 16% of white leaders, revealing how leadership for people of color often carries an added racialized burden beyond the role itself.

And for the sabbatical programs that remain, many of us enter a process that reopens old wounds. Applying for rest begins to mirror applying for funding for the organizations we sustain where our labor is questioned, our needs are measured, and we are often turned away empty-handed.

That cycle is the problem. We are also the solution.

“I don’t know if we, as members of Women of Color in the Arts, know our own collective power. Sometimes, I wonder what all of our lives would look like if we moved like we did.”— Jeri Rayon, WOCA member (2010), Sabbatical Fund Co-Program Manager

INVEST IN THE SABBATICAL FUND

WHAT WE CARRY, WHAT WE KNOW

Think about it. Since its inception, WOCA could probably argue that its members’ cumulative contribution to the arts economy falls somewhere between $4.8 billion and $9.6 billion easily. And that is on the low end. The women of WOCA play integral roles in producing some of the nation’s most iconic, impactful art. 

We influence millions of people and generate millions of dollars each year for the institutions we represent. Through grants raised, seasons programmed, contracts booked, artists engaged, audiences reached, institutional budgets managed, and cultural products brought to market. 

If we can do it for them, why can’t we do it for ourselves by investing in our own rest?

“For real change, we need feminine energy in the management of the world.”— Isabel Allende

We may be some of the most powerful women in the world. And we are only beginning to understand it.

We are people of culture and understand our contributions are measured in more than just dollars. Because of who we are and where we sit, we have the capacity to make sabbaticals a recognized arts-sector norm, if we move together. The same collective force that has generated billions in cultural value for others, can make rest a standard for ourselves once we treat it as part of our own collective vision. 

As a part of the WOCA community, your contribution is more than money. Each of us already holds something that can move this forward. One person. One skillset. One action. That is how we move the needle.

• If you write — write about rest. Highlight stories about how rest and art intersect. Put  it in your publication, your newsletter, your platform. Make the case for us all to use.

• If you fund — fund us! Put rest into your grantmaking. Make restoration a measure of organizational health. Prioritize it. We’ll show you a return on your investment.

• If you make art — make work about it. Choreograph it. Paint it, Film it. Score it. Exhibit it. We will affect the collective consciousness. .

• If you produce — share the knowledge. Build the toolkit. Host the conversation. Turn lived experience into something the next woman can use.

• If you advise — bring rest into the room. If you have a seat at the table, put it on the agenda. Recommend it. Require it.

• If you lead an organization — bake it into the structure. Create your own sabbatical for your team. Include sabbatical language in your bylaws, your onboarding, your culture.  Be the blueprint.

• If you consult — offer to be the bridge in the interim. Be the trusted person who steps in so someone else can step away without fear.

WHAT WE ARE ASKING

Beyond what each of us can do on our own,we are asking you to invest in a collective vision we are shaping together.

What you pour into us, we pour right back into you.

$5 a month. $60 a year.

That is your contribution in designing an ecosystem that is already working and already changing lives.

In the coming weeks, we will announce our most recent Sabbatical Fund recipients. Your contribution makes it possible for us to grow stipends to honor WOCA member panelists and advisors who give their knowledge generously and to member-led facilitators who hold space in workshops where we lean into our learning edges together. Your $5 a month helps grow a fund that circulates and keeps coming back around for you, or for the next person who needs to rest, to breathe, to be held by this community in return.

This is how it works. This is how it's always worked. We just need each other to say yes.

In community,

Jeri 

We are the one’s we’ve been waiting for.

Join us in building the infrastructure of our own liberation.

INVEST IN THE SABBATICAL FUND 

Written by: Jeri Rayon, WOCA member since 2010 and Founder of Rest Works, a testing platform for designing rest-centered organizational practice, and Co-Program Director of the Women of Color in the Arts Sabbatical Fund with WOCA member Meena Malik.