Spotlight: Inside Brianne Patrice’s Fight for Dignity, Rest, and Resources for Black Women and Femmes

At Women for the Culture, our spotlight interviews uplift the women who are reshaping how we understand healing, leadership, and liberation. In this conversation, we sit down with Brianne Patrice, a woman whose lived experience has become both her purpose and her protest.

Brianne’s journey, marked by resilience, truth-telling, and a powerful return to self, has shaped the healing ecosystems she now builds for Black women and femmes. Through this interview, Brianne takes us inside the experiences that transformed her, the wisdom she carries, and the mission behind the spaces she’s creating so that others can access the care, dignity, and support she fought so hard to reclaim.

The Black Healing Collective was born from a need to support Black women and femmes dealing with trauma and under-supported motherhood. What was the moment or experience that inspired you to create this space, and how has it evolved since its inception?

The Black Healing Collective wasn’t born from theory, it was born from my life. Motherhood, especially Black motherhood, radicalized me. I quickly learned that the fairytales we’re sold about raising children don’t match the reality of mothering inside systems built to surveil and punish us.

When my daughter was diagnosed with a kidney disease and went into renal failure, my world collapsed. Someone I trusted weaponized CPS against me, and a custody battle rooted in bias, control, and anti-Blackness tore my stability apart. I lost my job, my home, and my sense of safety while being labeled “unfit,” even as the same people attacking me admitted they couldn’t depend on my child’s father. I was paying child support while fighting just to speak to my own daughter.

My life didn’t have to be this hard and neither do the lives of Black women. We deserve to be resourced, supported, and believed.

Healing for me began in 2016 through embodiment, sensuality, and returning to myself. I waited to speak publicly until I was grounded in clarity, not rage. And when Spirit said “now,” the purpose became clear: what happened to me is not uncommon. Black families are separated at higher rates not because of neglect, but because of need and this country punishes need instead of meeting it.

The Black Healing Collective is the world I needed but didn’t have. A place where Black women, femmes, and families can be held with dignity, supported without surveillance, and given the resources to breathe beyond survival mode.

This is my offering a refusal to let what happened to me continue happening to us. Every Black woman deserves stability, softness, and the chance to return home to herself.

Reference link: https://www.theblackhealingcollective.org/newsroom/brianne-patrice-motherhood-journey-unromanticize-maternity-cps

Your work intersects sensuality, sexuality, healing, and spirituality, elements that are often taboo in mainstream conversations, especially for Black women. How do you approach breaking down the stigmas surrounding these themes in your community work?

Pleasure has such a sexual undertone to it. Whereas for me, pleasure is a tool. It’s a ritual. It’s something to be practiced daily, not for performance, not for seduction, but for enjoyment. For regulation. For remembering. Life is delicious and it is meant to be lived as such. It’s funny, because I’d usually start an answer to a question like this by saying, “I’m a Southern girl.” And it’s true, I was raised in the South, and I LOVE the South down. I am ten toes down about my southern roots. BUT I’m also an East Coast girlie, born right here in New Jersey. And coming back to the place where I was birthed unlocked a different kind of truth-telling in me. It reconnected me to the version of myself that existed before people tried to make me smaller, quieter, more palatable. It’s like it gave me permission and a freedom to explore in ways that I could no longer find in the South.

I was raised Southern Baptist as a preacher’s kid, so conversations around pleasure, embodiment, the body, mental health, joy, none of that was on the table. And add to that a stepfather who was the first narcissist I ever encountered, the first man to physically harm me… pleasure, safety, and self-expression were not things I was taught. They were things I had to fight for. Growing up, I was always the “different” one. The one who felt deeply. The one who cried openly. The one who questioned things. The one who couldn’t fold myself into the family’s version of acceptable daughterhood. I’ve always had a natural curiosity for the world, for emotions, for the body, for Spirit. And when the stakes shifted, that’s when embodiment stopped being a concept and became a lifeline.

So when I talk about breaking stigmas, I’m not talking theory. I’m talking lived experience. I’m talking about dismantling and disrupting systems that profit off our pain and the amnesia we inherit about our own brilliance. In my work, whether through TWENTY NINE THIRTY or the Black Healing Collective, I bring all of that with me. I don’t talk about sensuality or sexuality as something salacious or taboo. I talk about them as birthrights. As spiritual technologies. As portals. As freedom songs because they are these things. They are pathways to our collective and individual liberation.

TWENTY NINE THIRTY connects the dots between sensuality, sexuality, healing, and wellness. What does a fully embodied, spiritually aligned life look like in practice, especially for women navigating trauma or systems of oppression?

A fully embodied, spiritually aligned life is not some far-off aesthetic. It’s not perfection or enlightenment or a soft-life fantasy with no bruises on it. For Black women, who are navigating trauma, systems of oppression, or the everyday weight of being unseen, an embodied life looks like coming home to yourself again and again, no matter how many times the world has tried to evict you.

For me, embodiment has always started in the body. In sensation. In honoring what I feel before I rush to override it. We’re taught from childhood to disconnect: to survive instead of feel, to endure instead of choose, to perform instead of inhabit. TWENTY NINE THIRTY exists because I know what it’s like to live in a body carrying too many stories, too many expectations, too many scars that were never mine to begin with.

With features in key platforms like Essence, XoNecole, and Keys Soulcare, your reach is expanding but your message remains deeply rooted in service. What’s the legacy you’re building through your work, and what impact do you hope to leave on Black women and femme-identifying communities for generations to come?

My legacy is rooted in remembrance, remembering that Black women and femmes deserve lives that are soft, abundant, resourced, and held. Everything I create, whether at the Black Healing Collective or TWENTY NINE THIRTY, is about building an ecosystem where our wholeness isn’t up for negotiation and our healing isn’t contingent on proximity to pain. I’m not interested in being the face of anything; I’m building infrastructure. I’m building systems that care for us when institutions fail us. I’m building pathways to joy that aren’t performative but embodied. I’m building community care models that outlive trends, algorithms, and the nonprofit industrial complex. For generations to come, I want Black women and femmes to inherit a world where they are believed the first time. Where their needs are centered. Where their sensuality and spirituality aren’t treated as contradictions. Where they have access, to therapy, to rent support, to communal joy, to safety, to pleasure.

This conversation with Brianne Patrice reminds us why our stories matter and why speaking them aloud is an act of liberation. Brianne’s voice offers both mirror and medicine, challenging us to consider what healing looks like when it is embodied, honest, and rooted in community care. As Brianne continues to lead and build, her work stands as a testament to what becomes possible when Black women are fully supported and fully believed. Women for the Culture is honored to hold space for her story, and we hope this interview inspires you to lean deeper into your own healing, your own power, and your own becoming.