Welcome to Black Girl Burnout.

And today I want to talk about how to opt into creating your own circle.

And I want to tie this into our cultural and historical past around community and the concept of the sister circle, which has deep African roots, and talk about how we create our own community today, how we create our own circle.

And what does that circle need to look like?

Who are the people we need to fill up our circle with? And how do we create, basically create

community, which is our inheritance. Again, it can be a lonely and isolating experience to be

a black woman in today's world. And yet we have so many opportunities to

create connection and bring people into our lives. And I think black women are exceptionally

gifted at doing this. But then we have to ask ourselves, what is the quality of our community? And that can be a

loaded question that can have some ebbs and flows to it. And we may be in a space in our life where we're

trying to figure out how to attract more people into our community or how to create a community

that really responds to our needs.

And it made me think about sister circles and how they have been historically like a safe place for kind of healing and sharing and empowerment.

And how we can have a modern day version of this and what that could look like for us. So sister circles,

again, they have African roots. This is dates back to our true legacy, as I always say,

our true history of creating these kinds of community gatherings where many African societies would gather for ceremonies or discussions

or even like problem solving being a tradition, right? There would be ways that people would

create these informal and formal gathering places to center the community, to center connection.

And it was all about not just community, but creating these ideas of equity and shared

responsibility to your community. And even beyond Africa, this cultural tradition stayed within the black community,

even during slavery and civil rights.

We see elements of this in the United States particularly,

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