On a cold, damp, overcast Saturday afternoon, warmth gathered behind glass. From 12 to 3 p.m. on December 6, dozens of attendees filled a bright, glass-lined community space just kitty-corner from NorthPoint Health & Wellness Center in Minneapolis.
Outside, winter pressed in. Inside, Sister Spokesman unfolded as a festival of kinship, healing, laughter and truth.
Hosted by the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder and its publisher, Tracey Williams-Dillard, Sister Spokesman was built around one central theme: Pause. Breathe. Heal. What followed was not simply a program, but more a communal exhale.
From the moment Williams-Dillard took the microphone, the room pulsed with energy. “Hey sisters!” she called. The response“Soul sisters!” ricocheted through the glass walls and into the winter air. Games, prizes, vendor spotlights, food, music, and movement set a festive tone. But beneath the celebration, something deeper unfolded.
For many women in attendance, Sister Spokesman was less about entertainment and more about survival. “I’m in my healing season,” said one attendee who had come alone. “This focus on stress, emotions and support — it’s exactly where I am.”
Another participant, Gladys Irving, shared that it was the atmosphere and the honesty of the topics that keep bringing her back. “And honestly,” she added, “I like the way Tracey runs it.”
Staci Suddith, attending on her cousin Carolyn’s recommendation, said she came simply to learn — open to whatever the day would bring. By the time the panel began, she had already found connection.
That is the quiet power of Sister Spokesman. It meets participants where they are.
The weight Black bodies carry
Midway through the afternoon, Williams-Dillard shared a personal testimony that reframed everything that came afterward. She described a recent moment when stress overtook her so completely that she struggled to breathe or think clearly.
“I had to pause,” she told the audience. “I had to breathe.”
Her vulnerability opened the door for the heart of the program: a dialogue led by two respected healing voices, Venus Burney, a licensed therapist and director of mental health services at Cornerstone Advocacy Services, and Dr. Resmaa Menakem, a therapist, trauma specialist, and author of “My Grandmother’s Hands.”
Rather than offering surface-level self-care advice, both speakers addressed the deep-rooted realities that shape how Black bodies, women’s in particular, experience stress, rest and survival.
Menakem spoke plainly about why pausing feels dangerous for so many. “To stop can feel like death,” he said, “so we keep moving. But what we’re really being asked to do in those moments is not fix ourselves, but tend to ourselves.”
He challenged the idea that exhaustion is a personal failure. “We think shame, laziness and overwork are individual problems,” he said. “But when every Black woman in the room recognizes those same feelings, that tells us it’s a communal wound.”
Burney echoed that truth through a clinical lens. “So many of us were never taught how to stop,” she said.
“We learned how to perform, how to survive, how to be useful. Pausing feels wrong because it was never modeled as safe.”
Together, they reframed rest not as laziness but as resistance. “One of the most revolutionary things in the world,” Menakem said, “is a Black woman who rests.”
Healing lives in the community
The questions that followed from the audience were raw. A Black educator asked how she could heal from the secondhand trauma of hearing her students’ stories every day. An elder wondered how to protect children from the long-term effects of the trauma they witness before they can even name it. Another person asked whether it was normal to feel unable to speak about the death of a loved one.
Burney addressed safety and support. “There has to be emotional safety before the words can come,” she said. “Sometimes the inability to speak is protection, not weakness.”
Menakem elaborated, reminding the room that modern pain is often layered atop ancestral and historical pain.
“Sometimes what’s showing up isn’t new,” he said. “It’s old. Older than our bodies. And when it shows up, that’s not a defect, it’s something asking to be tended to.”
For both speakers, community itself emerged as a central medicine. Not just therapy rooms but laughter, movement, witnessing, and shared silence.
“The most healing thing I know,” Menakem told the audience, “is watching Black people belly laugh together. That’s not small. That’s technology for survival.”
Burney added that healing doesn’t always look like productivity. “Some days, being present is the work,” she said. “Not performing. Not fixing. Just being.”
More than a program
Beyond the panel, Sister Spokesman unfolded as a living marketplace of wellness and creativity. Vendors offered financial advising, skincare, herbal healing, meal service, books, poetry, and self-care products. Attendees shopped, shared meals, exchanged hugs, and posed for photos.
Security for the event, a role held by the same man for years, called the gathering “a beautiful operation” and “very informative for the community.”
That evolution speaks to the quiet reach of Sister Spokesman. It is not just about women talking. It is about families healing. It is about cycles shifting.
As the afternoon drew to a close, Williams-Dillard reminded the room that an afternoon is never enough, but it can be a beginning. “All of us have to pause,” she said lovingly in closing.
Scott Selmer welcomes reader responses at sselmer@spokesman-recorder.com.