About KinJour Gathering
Shared Transformation in Intentional Spaces
My dissertation begins with three words: I am not alone.
I wrote them as a statement of solidarity — a recognition, grounded in research, that the experiences I had accumulated in over 25 years in predominantly white organizations and institutions were not personal failings or isolated incidents. They were systemic. They were documented. They were shared by Black women leaders across the country who were navigating the same isolation, the same code-switching, the same daily calculus of how much of yourself to bring into a room that was never quite designed for you.
But I also wrote them because I needed to hear myself say them.
Because for a long time, I felt alone. Not for lack of colleagues or professional networks or people who meant well. Alone in the particular way that comes from spending years in rooms where you are the Only — the only Black woman, or one of very few — where the performance of professional belonging is so constant and so refined that you start to forget it's a performance. Where you code-switch not just at work but socially, sometimes even at home, until the managed version of yourself has taken up so much space that you can't quite remember what the unmanaged version sounds like.
The research confirmed what I already knew in my body: that the conditions that allow people to grow into their fullest selves — to build confidence, clarity, and the kind of self-trust that does not depend on external validation — are almost never those provided by the institutions we work within. They are the ones we build for each other. In community. In circles. In gatherings where the performance drops and something real can happen.
I built KinJour Gathering because I needed it. And because I knew that I was not the only one.
If you are here, you probably know the feeling I am describing. The exhaustion of performing belonging in spaces that were not built to hold you. The hunger for a room where you can be honest. The slow realization that becoming who you are — fully, freely, without managing it for someone else's comfort — is not something you can do alone.
You are not alone. The kin you need are already gathering.
What We Believe
Every decision made inside KinJour Gathering — the programming, the facilitation approach, the community agreements, the pacing, the way we open a circle and close a retreat — is rooted in a set of convictions that do not change:
That becoming who you are is one of the most important and undervalued forms of work a person can do.
That this work is not meant to be done alone. The research is clear. The lived experience of anyone who has ever been held in genuine community is clear. We grow faster, heal more fully, and sustain more lasting change when we do not go it alone.
That the people you need are not as far away as they feel. They are gathering. They were gathering before you found this page. Your arrival is not the beginning of the story — it is the moment you join it.
That a well-held space is not a luxury. For people who have spent their lives showing up for others — holding institutions, teams, families, communities — a space that holds them is not optional. It is essential.
That equity is not a program or a tagline. It is the baseline. Every person who walks into a KinJour Gathering deserves to be fully seen, genuinely heard, and treated as the expert on their own experience.
The Name
Kin — your people. Not just by blood, but by choice. The ones who know the version of you that the world doesn't always get to see. The ones who walk beside you through the hard and beautiful terrain of a life being lived with intention. You may not have found them yet. You will.
Jour — the journey. The daily unfolding. The winding, nonlinear, sometimes exhausting and sometimes luminous road of becoming. (And inside that word, if you listen closely: sojourn. A meaningful dwelling. A rest along a longer road. A place where you catch your breath and remember why you are walking.)
Gathering — the act. The ongoing choice to show up for each other. Not a one-time event. Not a program with a start and end date. A practice — of presence, honesty, and the particular kind of courage it takes to let yourself be known by people who are not yet your kin but are becoming so, step by step, in the gathering itself.
I Am Not Alone — And Neither Are You
About Dr. Kim Davis
Dr. Kim Davis is the founder of KinJour Gathering and the President of Five/6teen Consulting LLC — but before any of those titles, she is someone who knows, from the inside, what it costs to carry too much alone.
She has spent more than 25 years working inside nonprofit organizations, higher education institutions, and municipal settings — leading, building, advising, and developing the people and cultures that make mission-driven work possible. She has walked into organizations in crisis and helped them find their footing. She has developed leaders who didn't yet know they were ones. She has sat in circles where people said things they had never said out loud before — and watched what happened to them when they did.
KinJour Gathering is the convergence of everything she has learned in those rooms.
Dr. Kim holds an Ed.D. in Leadership and Innovation and is a Certified Life, Leadership, and Executive Coach. Her original research on the Arts-Based Sister Circle Model — and its impact on self-efficacy and empowerment — is the scholarly foundation for the community circle practice at the heart of KinJour Gathering. Her active research on Black women's leadership in arts and culture organizations informs the equity-centered lens she brings to all of her work.
She is also a practitioner in embodied and arts-based facilitation — which means that when she creates a space, she draws on her whole self: the scholar, the coach, the artist, and the person still walking her own winding road of becoming.
What She is Building
KinJour Gathering is the community Dr. Kim wished had existed when she needed it most. It is built for people who are serious about their own becoming — and who have learned, or are learning, that becoming is not a solo endeavor.
It is also an expression of her deepest professional conviction: that the work of developing people — truly developing them, not just training or managing them — requires the kind of honest, skilled, sustained human connection that most institutions are not built to provide.
KinJour Gathering is built to provide it.
What I want you to know about why I built this.
For most of my adult life, I was fluent in a language that was not my own.
I don't mean that literally — though language was part of it. I mean the broader fluency of code-switching: the daily, often unconscious process of adjusting yourself to fit the dominant culture of whatever room you're in. Softening your edges. Moderating your register. Deciding, before you speak, whether this version of the thought is the one they will receive.
I did it at work, where I spent 25 years as one of the only Black women in rooms where decisions were made. I did it socially, in professional networks and community spaces where I learned early that certain parts of me were welcome and certain parts were better left in the car. And if I'm honest — truly honest, the way I am asking you to be in this community — I did it at home too. The managed version of myself had become so habitual that I sometimes couldn't find where it ended and I began.
I was exhausted in a way that had no clean name. I was successful by most measures. I was competent, credentialed, accomplished. And I was slowly disappearing inside my own life.
What changed was not a single moment. It was a slow accumulation of recognitions, and then — finally — a community.
I found, in circle with other women who were navigating their own version of what I had been carrying, something I had not known I was looking for. A room where the performance could stop. Where I could say the real thing, not the managed version of it. Where I could be uncertain, struggling, still becoming — and be held in that, rather than fixed or evaluated or professionally managed.
I found my kin. And I found myself.
Not the version I had been performing. The one that had been waiting underneath it — the one that knew things, wanted things, had a voice worth listening to.
I built KinJour Gathering because I know I am not the only one who needed this. I have met too many people — too many brilliant, capable, quietly exhausted people — who are performing belonging in spaces that were not built for them, while the person they are actually trying to become waits patiently for a room where it is finally safe to show up.
That room is here.
You do not have to have it figured out. You do not have to arrive already whole. You just have to be willing to stop performing long enough to find out who you actually are — and to let the people in this gathering become the kin who help you get there.
— Dr. Kim Davis
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