By Kwayera Archer

“We do not rush the roots. We learn to listen to the soil.”

– Baobab Leadership™, Module 1

Opening Letter: Ancient Roots, Expanding Light

My people,

There are certain thresholds we cross that do not announce themselves with fanfare; they arrive in whispers. This New Year began not in flashing lights, but in breath. In water. In silence. I welcomed 2026 while walking the shorelines of West Africa, not to escape, but to return. To pulse in rhythm with a land that remembers me. A land I remember.

In this season, I am choosing to rise from stillness, not from urgency. We are not here to “catch up” to anything. We are here to calibrate. This year, I’m standing in alignment with what has taken decades to build across continents, generations, and movements. 

Global Ase Enterprises™ (Soulful Joy Retreats™, Global Ase School of Conscientious Leadership™, Global Ase Consulting™, & Her Iwa Pele) is not a business. It is a living ecosystem of leadership, wellness, restoration, and culture-rooted practice. And this newsletter is our gathering space. 

In 2026, I am moving forward with renewed clarity and spiritual maturity. This year marks over ten years since the seismic shifts of 2014 that shaped me, stretched me, and reformed everything I knew about legacy. Moving through resignation after a 25-year career, to landing in Jamaica, and now expanding to Nigeria.  My current decisions are born from that journey.  A Gogo (grandmother) now. A woman who has led across three continents. A dancer who still finds choreography in the structure of boards and budgets. I am not new to this work. And I am just getting started. 

May this year be a call toward principle-centered leadership. Toward wisdom not merely earned, but embodied. And toward a collective canopy where we all belong. 

In deepest respect,

Kwayera 

A Tribute to Dr Martin Luther King Jr.

Some days are commemorations. Others are thresholds.The remembrance of Dr Martin Luther King Jr. is a threshold day. Not because of ceremony, but because it asks a question that does not loosen with time: What is a life oriented toward? Dr. King, born January 15, 1929, is often remembered for his voice. Less often for what his life revealed about gathering – about how people come together, stay together, and locate meaning together across difference, exhaustion, and time. That question has followed me for years – not abstractly, but through practice. For six years, every Dr. King holiday, we opened a cultural institution and offered African dance classes freely, from morning through evening. Fifteen or more classes in a single day. No registration. No cost. Adults arrived carrying weeks of labor, grief, hope. Drums began early. Bodies remembered what they had forgotten. As night came, African dance companies from across New York City gathered – Mamadou Dahoué, Marie Basse Wiles, Youssouf Koumbassa, and many others whose names live not only in programs, but in muscle memory. They arrived without hierarchy, without contracts, without spectacle. The community came. Elders. Children. Vendors. Artists. Not as an audience. As participants. At the same time, Mamadou was honoring an ancestral remembrance day rooted in the continent.Two remembrances unfolding side by side. One shaped by African cosmologies of continuity. One shaped by a Black American life devoted to moral vision. This was not coincidence. It was alignment.Dr. King understood something that remains difficult to articulate but easy to feel: that transformation does not begin with persuasion. It begins with orientation – with how people understand their relationship to one another and to time itself. He returned again and again to a question that refuses sentimentality: “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is,’What are you doing for others?’” This is not a call to self-erasure. It is a call to placement.Where does your time go? What do you make accessible? What do you hold in common rather than control? Those gatherings taught me that community is not created by intention alone. It is created through return – by showing up again and again, without spectacle, without extraction, without needing to be seen as exceptional. Dr. King warned against postponement, against the temptation to believe that meaning can be deferred: “We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.” This urgency is not loud. It is steady. It lives in the choice to open doors. To make room. To gather without agenda.He also named the quiet drift that pulls societies away from one another – the slow substitution of accumulation for relationship – and offered a clear counterpoint: “We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.” This shift does not announce itself with language. It reveals itself through practice. Through free offerings. Through collective movement. Through circles where no one is elevated above another.The dance floor became a form of study. The drum became a measure of time. The circle became a living text.On this new moon, on this day of remembrance, I am not taking stock of accomplishments. I am listening for alignment. For whether my work has strengthened relationship, widened access, and honored continuity. Dr. King’s life reminds me that purpose is not discovered once. It is clarified through repetition.And that gathering, real gathering, is not symbolic. It is structural. It is ethical. It is formative.Today, I offer no instruction, only remembrance, held with care. Because what calls us together is not memory alone – it is responsibility.

“Leadership is not what we carry on our backs. It is how we return to the circle.”-  Baobab Leadership™, Module 3

 Highlights from the Past Season 

 Cultural Leadership Forum at Yale

Kwayera presented on ancestral frameworks for contemporary leadership. 

 Museum Collaboration in Côte d’Ivoire

Working with brilliant curators and cultural stewards redefining how we preserve, reclaim, and activate African cultural heritage. 

 Board Retreat at Ladekoju Foundation

Deep governance recalibration and planning in the sacred city of Osogbo. 

 Ifetayo Partnership with Yeye Chief Princess Adedoyin

Generational alignment and celebration of community healing and wisdom. 

 Oṣun Festival Participation

Honoring the sacred river and joining leaders in ritual and future-facing dialogue. 

 Partnership with MoCADA (April 2025)

Collaborative cultural event exploring diaspora identity and artistic legacy. 

 60th Birthday Gathering (now called Ageless Celebration)

Joy-filled ceremony surrounded by elders, children, and co-creators of the future. 

Last year, I had the opportunity to go to Ghana and visit my childhood friend, Patricia Wilkins, whom I’ve known since we were 14 years old. She now leads an incredible nonprofit in the U.S. and an NGO in Ghana, West Africa, Basics International. Through their work, they are actively addressing child labor, abuse, trafficking, illiteracy, and hunger, while also working to improve the quality of life and protect the environment. Their focus is especially on women and children living in unsafe conditions and navigating circumstances that hinder healthy development, well-being, and long-term stability. I’m deeply proud of Patricia and the work being done through Basics International, which goes beyond treating symptoms to seek a reduction in the long-term and traumatic impacts of poverty, all with care, dignity, and consistency. I encourage you to learn more and support this important mission.