Reverend Dr. Melva Sampson opened the session by grounding the group in a ritual she grew up with: getting her hair stretched, sitting on the floor between the legs of another woman, her roots massaged and oiled, not to change them, but “to give room so that the roots would have room to grow and to be strong.” From that image she drew the thesis of the whole day: “Our roots are never meant to be tamed. Our roots are free to grow.” Even stretched, interconnected, and interwoven, she said, a root cannot really be contained — and the same way the ritual disrupts the “concrete” that tries to hold hair in place, generations of women have used it to disrupt the concrete of empire itself.
Dr. Somava Saha, Founder and CEO of We in the World, picked up the metaphor and pushed it further. In any forest, she explained, there’s reliably a “grandmother tree” — one that isn’t just producing its own leaves and fruit, but spending real energy tending the root system that connects the whole ecosystem, sending out signals a month ahead of a forest fire, thinking generations ahead. “A grandmother tree doesn’t see itself as only being about itself,” she said. “It sees itself as growing and tending the root system and creating the path for future generations.” The question she posed to the room was simple: what root system are we contributing to, and who else is already building it?
That question landed differently for each speaker who followed. Isatou Sonko, a social transformation intern with We in the World, answered it by looking back at her own roots, growing up in the Gambia. She spoke about watching girls she grew up with drop out of school or marry young, not for lack of talent or intelligence, but because “the system around them expected something different from them.” Reflecting on her mother, who never had the chance to finish her own education but pushed her toward it anyway, Isatou said plainly: “I don’t want my children to ever wonder whether education was affordable for them. I don’t ever want my kids to struggle with having tuition like I do.” She traced her own path — first in her family to graduate college, now preparing for graduate school — back to people who believed in her before she believed in herself, adding, “one of the things I strongly believe in is when women are empowered, they are able to make better decisions for themselves.”
From South Africa, Sarah Crawford-Browne brought a harder edge to the same question. She described the philosophy behind her work at Hudhadak, a “good ancestor hub” in the Cape region: “I am because you are. I am because we are.” But she was equally honest about how far that ideal still is from South Africa’s reality, describing a country that hoped democracy in 1994 would make it “this beautiful swan,” only to watch corruption and, more recently, xenophobic violence pull it back toward what it once was. Her conclusion was unflinching: becoming a good ancestor, she said, “is really rooted in taking full responsibility for our past, each and every person, and then think about how we can repair.”
Derek Young and Melva Sampson returned to close out the panel with One Love Festival, which Young co-founded in Winston-Salem in 2019 to “center culture, with a focus and lens on arts, music, innovation, wellness, and entrepreneurship” — and which they’re now growing toward Houston, Miami, and East Africa. Sampson described the festival’s companion gathering, the Restoring Institute, built around a concept she credited to colleague Dr. Itihari Toure: “kindred abundance is the sacred surplus that emerges when our lives are bound together in mutual care.” Its opposite, she said, is scarcity logic — “hoarding, competition,” treating people as disposable — and the work of the Institute is to practice the alternative on purpose.
Mohini Govender closed the session with lessons from Youth by Youth, a now-closed but still-active community of youth activists she described as having organized around a single recognition: that “over 1.8 billion young people… are coming of age inside” a time of real collapse, inheriting crises they didn’t create. She read a passage from Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass on how mycorrhizae connect trees underground, redistributing resources so that “all the trees in a forest are connected… all flourishing is mutual.” And she closed with a line from adrienne maree brown that seemed to gather the whole session together: “We are living in the ancestral imagination of others, with their longing for safety and abundance, a longing that didn’t include all of us.”
