Meet Rachel Wyley, Founder and CEO of Culture Kinesis
Rachel began her career as an educator in East Oakland; an experience that she credits with her commitment to and love for community. Since then, she has held many entry- to executive-level positions in nonprofit organizations.
As an executive leader, Rachel led teams to co-create a culture that achieved optimal results for communities while reimagining traditional approaches to pursuing internal and external equity.
As a fundraising leader, she dislodged revenue practices that relied on status quo donor archetypes, installed equity and inclusion as key fixtures of board culture, tripled representation of board members of color, and secured the largest single gift in the history of her region (due to her authenticity and candor with funders).
As a program leader, she strategically empowered her team to lead authentically and to adhere to a commitment to keep communities paramount.
As an educator, she built reciprocal relationships of respect with students and families, and cultivated intentional communities of support within her classroom and among her colleagues.
As an artist, Rachel knows creativity to be the solution to inequity, not simply its mirror and megaphone.
By leveraging the African music tradition of call-and-response as a facilitation tool, Rachel deliberately disrupts the power dynamic that exists between artist and audience, and requires all present to offer their own emotional collateral as a critical part of the creation process. Rachel’s art and her work are both earnestly and unapologetically anti-performance.
RACHEL’S LEGACY STATEMENT
I will leave behind creative, disruptive frameworks for how we embrace our inherent humanity to build communities ready to dismantle systems of racial inequity and to engage in the work of cultural reimagination. I will leverage my gifts to engage others in the reimagination of a society liberated from oppressive ideological and institutional influences. I will leverage my gifts to encourage idealism as a function of and precursor to rewriting harmful social narratives. I will leverage my gifts to galvanize individual and collective audacity to embrace vulnerable and authentic (and often difficult) exchanges. I will wield ancestral approaches (e.g. call-and-response tradition) to engender empathy as a tool to create containers to (re)build intentional community, engage in critical unlearning, and receive radical re-education.