Who We Are
Nicole Castro
Co-Founder
Nick/Nicole T. Castro, MA (she/they) is a genderqueer, bisexual, biracial, polyam, neurodivergent trans queerling who brings a lens of embodiment and mindfulness to study violence-used-as-communication. As a relational communication expert with @RAD.Talk, Nick helps individuals and groups align their intention & their impact in the world. They seek to make the revolution sustainable through co-created spaces that invite and teach people how to practice new, nonviolent forms of self-expression across their relationships and community organizing. They delight in finding spirituality and magic in all things. In her rest time, she reads sci-fi & fantasy, practices Tai Chi, and rides her motorcycle, Ghost.
Emily Graham
Co-Founder
Emily, or Em, (they/them) is a white, nonbinary, queer, polyamorous, neurodivergent, abolitionist therapist living on occupied Cheyenne, Arapaho, Ute, and Sioux land (a.k.a. Denver). Emily has a passion for learning and creating a better world for everyone, especially through their work with individuals and relationships in their therapy practice as a licensed clinical social worker at Seeds of Liberation Counseling. Emily is committed to liberation as their North Star in all things. When Em isn’t working with clients or creating badass courses, they enjoy spending their time learning, doing witchy things like practicing tarot, foraging for mushrooms, collecting cool rocks, and snuggling with their four cats and two nesting partners. @seedsofliberationcounseling
Start Your Liberation
Our Story
This beautiful and forever evolving collaboration started in early 2021 when Em and Nick matched on OkCupid. A blossoming friendship evolved, and in winter of 2022, Nick sent out a classically-late winter holiday letter, expressing hopes for their new company. Emily read this and immediately realized Nick would be the perfect project partner for an idea they’ve been cooking up.
The core vision for Liberated Relationships had been simmering in Em's mind for years as they saw patterns in the struggles of their nonmonogamous and abolitionist clients. Em wanted to create a resource to bring together all the themes and supportive perspectives so commonly arising in their practice.
When Em texted Nick to ask if they’d be interested in the project, Nick responded about 45 seconds later: “I’m in!” The co-creation moved quickly, as Nick and Em reached out to Chelsea Skye at LunarLilt for their logo, taking it to their first conference in spring 2023.
The name Liberated Relationships comes directly from adrienne maree brown's seminal work Emergent Strategy. Em and Nick reached out to adrienne and their team about using this name, and you can imagine the size of their fan reaction when someone from the team replied, giving their blessing for us to use it while honoring its lineage. We are so grateful!
The first cohort began in the fall of that year. They are forever grateful to this cohort for their moral support and patience, as Nick and Em were committed to practicing the same wisdom imbued in the course: honoring our bodies through alignment and rest. As two people with enthusiasm and mortal bodies, Nick and Em balanced that with the grief and protest that came with the escalation of the genocide of the Palestinian people that October.
Now in their second year, Em and Nick are delighted to offer two synchronous cohorts a year while continuing to develop companion materials and merch. They have been invited back to the Southwest Love Fest Polyamory conference, presenting two workshops in 2024, "Releasing Control: Cultivating Secure Connection" and "Liberated Accountability: Collaborative Empathy, Apologies, & Repair."
Land Acknowledgement:
Nicole and Emily live and work on the stolen land of the Tséstho’e (Cheyenne), Očhéthi Šakówiŋ (Sioux), hinono’eino’ biito’owu’ (Arapaho), and Núu-agha-tʉvʉ-pʉ̱ (Ute) tribes. The land we now call “Denver'' is a sacred convergence of rivers and fertile abundance. We acknowledge and work to build relationships with the land and the peoples it was stolen from. Land acknowledgements are only a beginning, and it is not enough to simply check this box and say we did our due diligence. Em and Nick engage in community care and mutual aid work involving those living without housing, and those without access to food sovereignty (i.e. most of us). We encourage discussion and collaboration in the continued movement toward indigenous sovereignty, and the sovereignty of all who have been marginalized and oppressed. None are free until all are free.