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Tracey Lenhardt

@tlenhardt2021

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✨ Tomorrow evening, I'll be sharing something very close to my heart.

I'm honored to be one of the featured readers at the Diverse Gaithersburg Poetry Reading & Open Mic, where I'll be reading selections from my emerging collection, Archetypes in Ecosystems.

These poems ask a question that has become central to both my writing and my life:

What force enters the world simply because a person exists?

This collection explores the ecosystems we create through witnessing, courage, belonging, generosity, and love.

If you're in the DC/Maryland area, I'd love to see you there. Stay afterward for the open mic if you'd like to share a poem of your own.

Thank you to the organizers for this invitation. I'm looking forward to sharing the evening with poet Claudia Gary.

📖 Event details are in my bio/link and comments.

#Poetry #Writers #Maryland#Archetypes #Storytelling#Love#Speak by @tlenhardt2021

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2 months ago

I've been thinking a great deal about culture, memory, and repair.

This piece was created by my daughter as she explored what Blackness means, weaving together history, family photographs, education, power, and inherited stories.

Looking at her work reminds me that culture is not simply what we celebrate.

Culture is also what we remember.

What we forget.

What we preserve.

What we pass on.

Repair is not only about acknowledging harm.

It is also about telling the truth, honoring our ancestors, and leaving behind something more honest and more loving for the generations that follow.

Perhaps that is one way we begin to heal.

#Black#BlackHistory#Ancestors#Culture
#History#Belonging#Education#Identity #Community#Social#Roots#Society #Humanity#SPEAK by @tlenhardt2021

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4 months ago

As Memorial Day gives way to Juneteenth and the nation prepares for another Independence Day, I find myself returning to a question that has occupied much of my recent writing:

Who legislates culture?

Before Independence Day, there were Indigenous nations.

Before federal holidays, there were communities preserving memories, rituals, and histories that would later become separated from the people who created them.

As we approach the nation's 250th anniversary, I have been reflecting on the season of remembrance itself.

Whose stories become national traditions?

Whose memories become public rituals?

Whose histories remain unfinished?

Perhaps every holiday contains two histories.

The story that became official.

And the story that still waits to be fully told.

My latest essay in *The Second Body Problem: Culture* explores the historical origins of remembrance, colonization, slavery, and the ways Indigenous peoples, African Americans, immigrants, and other communities have fought to preserve memories that dominant cultures often transformed into something else.

Because a healthy culture is committed to historical accuracy, collective accountability, and meaningful repair.

🔗 Link in comments.

#History #Leadership #Education #Healing #Culture #Truth #IndigenousHistory #AfricanAmericanHistory #Social by @tlenhardt2021

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4 months ago

In this week's Substack, I wrote about the Second Body Problem: Culture and how cultures reveal what they value through the stories they preserve, the stories they teach, and even the holidays they place on the calendar.

Calendars matter.

Public rituals matter.

Culture communicates what deserves remembrance.

That is why I was struck by something I learned from @isabelwilkerson regarding the origins of Memorial Day.

In Charleston, South Carolina at the end of the Civil War, and after Confederate troops evacuated, black residents cleared the site of a mass grave containing 257 Union soldiers and gave them a proper burial.

On May 1, 1865, nearly 10,000 people, most of them formerly enslaved Black Americans, joined by Union troops and northern white missionaries, gathered to dedicate, honor, sing, and lay flowers at the burial ground of the fallen Union soldiers who fought to end slavery.

Among them were 3,000 Black children, many of whom would become among the first African Americans permitted to attend school in the South through the Freedom Schools.

These newly freed Americans claimed their place in a country that they and their ancestors had helped build without compensation.

What becomes invisible over time does not disappear, even under monuments.

It simply becomes embedded.

Culture scaffolds onto such monuments.

Then cultures build stories around the monuments.

Eventually, generations inherit the symbols while forgetting the labor, sacrifice, and suffering beneath them.

A shared future cannot be built upon selective memory.

What stories have we inherited that deserve to be remembered more fully?

#Culture #History #BlackHistory #AmericanHistory #Race #Education #Democracy #Memory #Story #Monument by @tlenhardt2021

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4 months ago

Who decides what we remember?

The stories we celebrate, teach, memorialize, and carry forward shape more than our understanding of the past. They influence how we understand ourselves, our communities, and the possibilities we imagine for the future.

The more I've explored culture, the more I've found myself returning to questions of memory, accountability, and repair.

What do we choose to remember?

What do we choose to forget?

And what responsibility do we have to act on what we remember?

This week's essay explores culture through the lens of memory, repair, and the stories we carry forward.

What story do you think society needs to remember more honestly?

#Culture #Belonging #Education #History #Community #Leadership #Identity # Social #Roots #Humanity #Society #Disability #Speak by @tlenhardt2021

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4 months ago

For a long time, I kept my lived experience separate from my professional work.

I thought the personal challenges belonged in one category.

The professional expertise belonged in another.

I'm beginning to realize they were never separate.

Many of the tools, frameworks, and pathways I build today came from navigating systems as a mother, advocate, patient, educator, attorney, founder, and human being.

They came from moments when I needed answers that were difficult to find.

Support that was difficult to access.

Pathways that did not yet exist.

The tools I build are often the tools I wish I had.

Not because I have all the answers.

But because I know what it feels like to move through complex systems while carrying realities that others cannot always see.

The work I do today is deeply personal because I am still living it.

Still learning.

Still adapting.

Still becoming.

And perhaps that is why I believe so strongly that people should not have to erase parts of themselves in order to thrive.

✨ What is one life experience that changed the way you see the world?

#Change #Journey #Disability #Culture #Accessibility #Leadership #Agency #Founder #Adapt #Speak by @tlenhardt2021

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4 months ago

Perhaps the most important question is not whether people belong.

Perhaps it is whether they are able to belong without disappearing.

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Culture shapes us long before we learn to name it.

It teaches us what is expected.

What is rewarded.

What is considered normal.

What is considered different.

Sometimes those expectations create connection.

Sometimes they create conformity.

The challenge is learning to recognize the difference.

What parts of yourself have you worked hard to preserve while remaining connected to others?

#Culture #Belonging #Education #Community #Leadership #Identity #Social #Roots #Humanity #Society #Disability by @tlenhardt2021

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4 months ago

When does adaptation stop being a survival skill and start becoming self-erasure?

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Most systems require adaptation.

Schools.

Workplaces.

Communities.

Institutions.

The question is whether people are adapting in ways that help them grow—or in ways that require them to disconnect from themselves.

Sometimes the greatest cost of belonging is not visible.

It is the gradual normalization of silence.

Of shrinking.

Of becoming smaller than we are.

I wonder how many things we call resilience, professionalism, or fitting in are actually adaptations we no longer recognize.

What adaptations have become so normalized that we mistake them for identity?

#Culture #Belonging #Community #Leadership #Social #Identity #Education #Humanity #Roots #Society #SPEAK by @tlenhardt2021

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4 months ago

What kind of culture allows people to belong without disappearing?

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We often think about culture as identity.

I've been thinking about culture as something else:

A network of stories, expectations, norms, and assumptions that shape who belongs, who is heard, and what is considered normal.

Sometimes culture creates connection.

Sometimes culture asks people to adapt, accommodate, or erase parts of themselves in order to belong.

The question I've been sitting with is:

Can we create cultures that allow people to remain connected to themselves while remaining connected to one another?

My latest Substack explores this question through the lens of culture, systems, and belonging.

Link in bio.

What helps people belong without requiring sameness?

#culture #belonging #community #leadership #social #education #identity #humanity #roots #society by @tlenhardt2021

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4 months ago

I spent seven days listening to my body before listening to my to-do list.

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This week I realized I had spent much of my life confusing survival with capacity.

Many of us were taught to keep carrying.

Keep adapting.

Keep pushing.

Keep fitting in.

Until we became so skilled at reading expectations that we stopped hearing ourselves.

I thought I needed more strength.

What I needed were containers.

The issue was never how to carry more.

The issue was that too much weight had been placed on one body.

Healthcare is this week’s stop in my 10,000 Steps / Three Body Problem series—an exploration of the subtle ways we learn to override ourselves in systems that were never designed with all bodies in mind.

If this resonates, save it.

If someone you love is carrying too much, send it to them.

Link in bio for this week’s Substack.

#healthcare #specialneeds #disability #healing #change #caregiver #accessibility #chronicillness #speak by @tlenhardt2021

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5 months ago

Many families are trying to navigate educational systems while overwhelmed, exhausted, neurodivergent, caregiving, medically complex, or carrying layers of institutional harm no one fully sees.

And still being expected to understand systems they were never taught to navigate.

That is part of why I created SPEAK™ and the Educational Records Intelligence Review ™ System inside Strategic Pathways Studio.

Not simply to talk about systems.
But to build practical tools for navigating them.

Educational advocacy.
First-generation college pathways.
Financial literacy.
Neurodivergent support.
AI-supported navigation tools.

Limited Educational Records Review sessions are now open while the Strategic Pathways Studio ecosystem prepares for launch.

Comment REVIEW or message me directly.

#Education #EducationForAll #Neurodivergent #SpecialEducation #Disability #DisabilityAwareness #DisabilityInclusion #DisabilityAdvocacy #College #ADHD #ADHDAwareness #Autism #AutismAcceptance #AutismSupport #Parent #SPEAK by @tlenhardt2021

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5 months ago

Ever the horseman. My firstborn. Thank you for making me a mother the first time. May peace, joy, and love always find you.
#Mother by @tlenhardt2021

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5 months ago