“How do we do power differently, not extract, exploit…how do we be regenerative?”
With this call to action, Marisol Jiménez, MSW, concluded her remarks for how social workers can lead through times of change for our first webinar in the Jordan Institute Leadership Initiative. A National Association of Social Workers – North Carolina Chapter (NASW-NC)-award-winning social worker, Marisol shared how she has been using her MSW degree to support her community in Western North Carolina and work for liberation. She has done this through the founding of two organizations, Tepeyac Mountain Sanctuary and Spiral Path Consulting. Through Tepeyac, she hopes to “create sanctuary wherever we gather” through healing practices in community. Much of her liberation work began in community at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. She immediately started rolling out webinars and Zoom gatherings – DJ nights, karaoke nights, time with family therapists – to help the community understand the new reality.
This work continued following Hurricane Helene in September of 2024. The mutual aid responses included “distro” hubs to get needed resources to places that were going to be forgotten – public housing, migrant camps, and mobile homes. This response also included liberation libraries for the children directly impacted, even to the point of homelessness, by the storm. Offerings involved trauma-informed facilitators and therapists, organizers, and storytellers to address the crises the community was (and is) facing – deportations, homelessness, and hurricanes.
As a social worker activist, Marisol’s work led to the implementation of Entre Compas (compas means comrades in Spanish) following Helene to build on the history and stories from decades of community connection. Their lesson – “nobody is coming to save us or they don’t know how” and “the only ones who know how to love and protect us is us.” Compas is an effort to organize across Western NC through a rapid response system, including recent strategies for responding to threats of raids and deportations in their local communities. Resilience Hubs across the region provide a constellation of services: Bail funds, legal aid, healing therapy, and responding to child separations and foster care, with the goals of coordination, collaboration, and capacity building together.
Marisol’s work through Spiral Path Consulting focuses on creating intersections between trauma, survival, and liberation work in response to systems that extract resources, exploit labor, exclude communities of color from spheres of power, enforce compliance, and erase stories and cultures– ultimately contributing to the erasure of entire communities through state-sanctioned violence. Both individuals and organizations respond to these systems in our fight for survival through four common reactions: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. These instinctive reactions predicate our survival (or are rooted in our drive to survive) . Marisol described that for survival, we need to be in right relationship. What does it mean to be in right relationship with our survival? We must reflect on ways we’ve learned to survive, remember our North Star (those things that we are surviving for), and work to stay purpose driven in alignment with what we are trying to do in the world. How do we envision the future where we win the fight for community liberation?
Click here to hear Marisol’s talk.
You can learn more about what Marisol shared at these links – The Children’s Liberation Library and Resources from Spiral Path Consulting
Cover photo attribution: “Lotus Rising – An Ode to Women” by Mayanthi Jayawardena, photo by Allison De Marco
Marisol Jiménez, MSW, is the founder and principal of Tepeyac Consulting, Inc. a national consulting practice based in Asheville, North Carolina. She began her path twenty-five years ago when finding her home within the immigrant justice movement as an activist and advocate. Her work in North Carolina includes co-leading a statewide advocacy organization working on public policy issues at the local, state, and national levels, eventually co-leading statewide mass demonstrations for immigrant justice in 2006 and 2007. The National Association of Social Workers North Carolina Chapter (NASW-NC) awarded Marisol the 2025 Myrna Miller Wellons Advocate of the Year Award because of her commitments to immigrant justice, racial equity, and for her organization’s outreach to people in Western North Carolina impacted by Hurricane Helene.
