Liberated Educators Lab is a movement hub for storytelling, wellness & research.
We reimagine liberated futures with Black educators.
Liberated Educators Lab was created from a simple truth:
Black educators deserve to be well, to be heard, and to be supported.
For generations, the voices, brilliance, and lived experiences of Black educators have been overlooked, extracted, or erased within education systems. Through years of teaching, research, community-building, and healing-centered facilitation, we kept seeing the same pattern across classrooms, districts, and institutions:
Black educators are still carrying the weight of racism-related stress, compassion fatigue, and structural harm, often in isolation.
We created Liberated Educators Lab to change that.
We are a space where storytelling becomes data, where research honors lived experience, and where healing is a collective act.
What We Do
Liberated Educators Lab reimagines liberated futures with Black educators and their families by centering storytelling, wellness, and research. We are a movement hub where educators can be well, share their voices, and contribute to research that nurtures collective healing and generational transformation.
Our Values
Storytelling
Our stories are archives of truth. We honor the lived experiences of Black educators as both narrative and evidence, ensuring their wisdom shapes the future of education.
Liberation
We believe freedom is both the journey and the destination. Our work dismantles systems of harm and reimagines spaces where Black educators and their families can live, teach, and heal in fullness.
Curiosity-Driven Research
We ask questions that open doors. We move with wonder, inquiry, and learning, knowing that new knowledge and new worlds are created by those willing to imagine beyond the limits of what exists.
Wellness
Rest is resistance, and healing is necessary. We prioritize practices that nourish body, mind, and spirit, honoring wellness as a collective act of joy, renewal, and refusal.
Generational Healing
We acknowledge the lasting impact of racism-related stress on Black educators and creates spaces for them to rest, release, and remember themselves, breaking cycles of harm carried across generations.
Joy & Gratitude
Joy is sacred labor, and gratitude is its grounding. We honor moments of delight, rest, and connection as acts of resistance, refusing erasure and exhaustion. Through gratitude, we name what sustains us; through joy, we celebrate our survival and our becoming.
Our Work
Our storytelling work preserves the lived experiences, brilliance, and truths of Black educators across generations. Through The Exit Interview podcast, community listening circles like Podcast & Pause, and intergenerational archival projects, we reclaim narratives that would otherwise be forgotten. These stories become catalysts for healing, data for research, and living archives for the future. We honor Black educator wisdom by ensuring it is seen, heard, and carried forward.
Archival Justice and Storytelling
Speaking & Training
Our storytelling work preserves the lived experiences, brilliance, and truths of Black educators across generations. Through The Exit Interview podcast, community listening circles like Podcast & Pause, and intergenerational archival projects, we reclaim narratives that would otherwise be forgotten. These stories become catalysts for healing, data for research, and living archives for the future. We honor Black educator wisdom by ensuring it is seen, heard, and carried forward.
Digital Products & Licensing
We collaborate with districts, universities, funders, and nonprofits to build systems that honor the wellness and sustainability of Black educators. Using data, lived-experience insights, and healing-centered frameworks, we support partners in designing structures that reduce harm and strengthen retention. Our partnerships ensure that policy, resource allocation, and organizational culture reflect a commitment to educator wellness and racial equity.
Our digital tools extend healing and reflection beyond our live programs. Through self-guided journals, rest plans, curricula, and wellness toolkits, educators and institutions can integrate our frameworks into daily practice. These offerings provide accessible entry points for individuals and scalable solutions for organizations committed to Black educator wellness and sustainability.
Healing & Wellness
Our healing-centered programs create spaces where Black educators can rest, reconnect, and reimagine what liberation feels like in their bodies and communities. From Rooted RestShops to immersive Liberated Retreats, each offering is designed with cultural grounding, somatic practices, and collective care. We believe wellness is not an individual pursuit but a community responsibility, and our work helps educators cultivate sustainable practices that ripple into families and classrooms.
Consulting Partnerships
Our Approach
Liberated Educators Lab blends storytelling, research, and healing-centered practice to support the sustainability and brilliance of Black educators. We weave oral history, racial equity frameworks, somatic wellness practices, and qualitative research into spaces that honor lived experience as knowledge. Our approach recognizes that healing and liberation are intertwined — and that educator wellness cannot be separated from the systems and histories that shape their lives.
Our work is guided by frameworks such as racial battle fatigue and compassion fatigue research, archival justice, trauma-responsive facilitation, family systems theory, and healing-centered engagement. We draw on Black liberatory traditions, community care, breathwork, and reflective practice to create culturally grounded spaces for rest, reconnection, and reimagination.
We begin with story, transform insight into research, and design practices that support healing at both individual and institutional levels. This methodology shapes our programs, informs our partnerships, and drives systems change.
We don’t do wellness without justice, and we don’t do research without care.
About Dr. Asia
Asia Lyons, Ed.D., is the founder and lead designer of Liberated Educators Lab LLC (formerly Lyons Educational Consulting), where her work centers on research-driven practices, wellness, and archival justice that strengthen the sustainability and well-being of Black educators. She brings nearly 20 years of hands-on and academic experience as a former K–12 educator in the Denver Metro Area and as an adjunct professor at the University of Colorado Denver’s School of Education and Human Development. She earned her doctorate in Leadership for Educational Equity, where she examined the profound effects of racism-related stress and racial battle fatigue on Black educators and their families.
Dr. Lyons collaborates with national research institutes and universities to explore the intersections of racial battle fatigue, educator wellness, and systemic change. As a consultant and speaker, she shares strategies and insights to help Black educators and their families recover from racial battle fatigue. She supports institutions in creating environments that retain and uplift their Black staff. She has presented at SXSW EDU, Harvard Graduate School of Education, the National Education Association’s Conference on Racial and Social Justice, and the National Board of Certified Counselors Symposium.
She co-founded the Black Educator Wellness Cohort, which offers free monthly wellness sessions for Black women and non-binary educators in the Greater Denver Area. She also co-founded Black Teacher Recess, an initiative that creates joyful spaces for Black educators to gather, heal, and thrive. Dr. Lyons is also the host and producer of The Exit Interview: A Podcast for Black Educators. Finally, Dr. Lyons is the host and producer of The Exit Interview: A Podcast for Black Educators. This award-winning podcast highlights stories of former Black educators and explores why they left the profession. Through the podcast, she aims to inform school districts, teachers' unions, families, and others about how to better support and retain Black professionals in education.
