Meet your life coach
My name is Joana Dos Santos. I use she/they pronouns. I’m a cisgender woman with light skin, straight brown hair, and blue eyes. I was born in a small country in South America called Uruguay (the land of the Charrúa people).
My life experiences inform my journey. I grew up as a Latinx woman immigrant, undocumented, and poor. Not white in the U.S. (like I was in Uruguay), but I experienced privilege relative to other people of color because of how I look. My own identity was shaped by the experience of losing it in the first place, of feeling between social identities, between lands, ni de aquí, ni de allá (not from here, nor there.)
A formative part of my experience came when I worked at a community center. I was learning about social and racial justice, which helped me understand and own my identity as a person of color. As I learned more, I felt I wanted to do something to make a difference, given that historic oppression had also impacted me and directly resulted in my migration to the U.S.
My name is pronounced SHO-AH-NA and after 20 years of anglicizing it and through the support of my friends and colleagues, I reclaimed it and started sharing it with others.
As an organizer, I learned to bring people together affected by a decision to the decision-making. I was successful in this role, leading actions that resulted in real social change, and I even was arrested fighting for what I believed in. I continued my activism well into my tenure as a 24-year-old executive director but saw many times through this experience that something felt missing from the movement towards racial and social justice.
After 10 years of activism without taking a break,
I burnt out.
During that time, I studied the role of social identities as a part of my formal education, resulting in a thesis on how immigrant women (like me) go through a process of identity change due to the trauma of migration. This experience helped me align with my true purpose of making the world a better place, one person at a time, because I learned through the course of my thesis that healing and restoration were needed. I deeply valued the “mind-based work,” the social/racial justice work focused on changing the policies and practices that advance a group of people at the expense of others. But I had a longing for what I call the “heart-based work,” where one examines their values, beliefs, assumptions, and behaviors to figure out if they perpetuate systems of oppression. And work to change them in alignment with love, liberation, and joy.
Something within me called me to explore spirituality and its connection to social/racial justice. The more I did this work, the more I was drawn to creating one-on-one spaces of healing and growth. I was called to train as a transpersonal spiritual psychology coach (in the psychosynthesis lineage.) Reconnecting with my inner self and spending many hours in reflection (alone and with others) helped me remember what gave me a sense of purpose and identity. And also helped me get clarity on how to help others like me, who have been lost and afraid, but committed to being the best people they can, thrive – even when the odds seem against us doing so.
This inspired me to start cosyn, where I live my purpose and values through coaching. Our systems of advantage and oppression can inhibit us from living a purposeful life in harmony with others, because we are so focused on just getting by day to day.
My hope is that our work together leads to personal transformation so that together, we can create social change for everyone.
Master of Science in Applied Communication, which included that thesis on immigrant women’s identity that I mentioned before.
Bachelor of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies (remember that “in between worlds” part? Yeah, my studies, too.)
Certificate in Nonprofit Leadership and Management because it turns out it is very hard to run an organization with extremely limited amounts of resources.
Certified Appreciative Inquiry Facilitator, where I learned how to center what people are already good at and how they can do more of it.
Psychosynthesis Life Coach, filling in the spiritual and individual gap of liberation and justice work.
My qualifications include
Life experience that qualifies me
Knowing how to make do with extremely limited resources as a non-profit executive.
Taking what I learned running a whole organization to nimbly translate purpose, to outcomes, and how to act on it.
Years as a racial justice community organizer, the ups and downs that come with people telling you that you are illegal and don’t belong.
I worked in an academic setting to advance DEI. Not quite getting arrested for immigration reform, but there are unique learnings here as well with the academy.
Many, many hours being lost, staying very lost, and finally getting coaching myself that transitioned into me also coaching others.
Invested in my own process of figuring out what gave me joy and was purposeful and how I can live from that place every day.
Are living a life based on my purpose and dream (and can show you how to do that too!)
Being between worlds as a light-skinned, undocumented Latinx immigrant and the social identity cluster f@#! that comes from this (yep, I did write a whole thesis on this).
I love astrology (let me know if you want us to include basic astrology in our coaching). I watch anime daily and wake up and fall asleep reading novels (love paranormal romance). My favorite place to be is outside (preferably hiking a mountain). I lived in the land of the Wabanaki Confederacy (in Massachusetts), in the land of the People of Three Fires: Ojibwe, Odawa, and Bodewadmi (in Michigan), and now I live in the land of the Muwekma Ohlone (California). I was a vegetarian for two years. I need lots of alone and quiet time. In addition to being a coach, I’m a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) consultant working with organizations to develop strategies to create institutional change rooted in equity and justice.