Maraliz Salgado is the founder of Libérate Life Coaching, LLC, where she finds it a sacred honor to walk fellow womxn of color back home to freedom through life transitions such as role misalignment, burnout, and relational and identity shifts. She’s a liberatory educator, facilitator, coach, author and speaker with over twenty years of dedicated service to Chicago students, teachers, and families and now sister-clients all over the country. A seasoned racial healing practitioner/circle keeper, mara has also engaged youth, parent mentors and school, community and nonprofit leaders through racial equity coaching, post-secondary purpose coaching, and ethnic studies curriculum consulting. Her work is values-based, holistic and transformational, incorporating strategic goal-setting, soulful, connected accountability partnership, reiki and indigenous healing into her practice. Whether 1-on-1 or in group settings, she is blessed to cultivate decolonial wellness and reignite folks’ passion for justice, starting with self, in beloved community. Maraliz is a fan of the deep dive, and is profoundly empathic, unapologetically authentic, a proud native of Borikén, loving wife to her sexy Mexi and an adoring Mama to two precious seeds. You can find her anywhere there’s community, cultura, and healing to be had in the city and far beyond.

Dorian A. Ortega is a person, a Boricua, a licensed clinical professional counselor (LCPC) and founder of F.L.Y. Radical Therapy, LLC. First Love Yourself (F.L.Y.) Radical Therapy is a mental and behavioral health therapy group practice centering love of/for/by the global majority AKA BIPOC (Biracial, indigenous and people of color) and LGBTQI2S+ individuals. We use talk therapy as medicine to remind us that loving ourselves is revolutionary. We value that healing for yourself, with each other, and helping others too, is how we get free. F.L.Y. Radical Therapy is inspired by ancestral wisdom, liberation, womanist and Black and Latinx psychology. Dorian is also co-founder of Healing Jodonas (Caribbean word pronounced ‘hoe-don-a’; meaning ‘agitator’). Healing Jodona/o/x/s organizes a series of free poetry healing circles and other events that seek to use art as a culturally relevant, accessible, and inclusive tool of expression, education, resistance, and community healing that began in Humboldt Park and expands across Chicago. Dorian is grown, a momma, a titi, a big sis, a partner to an amazing spouse and lover of free love.