United Kingdom
Embodied Redistribution brings the Resilience Toolkit to wealth holders confronting how fear and false safety live in the nervous system, building resilience and trust so money, power and care can flow toward liberation.
Ideation
1 - 6 months
Last update: October 05, 2023
Wealth inequality endures not because wealth-holders lack awareness, but because fear, denial, shame and complicity have become embodied as wealth defense. Many people with social-justice values long to redistribute, yet under conditions of polycrisis—climate collapse, rising authoritarianism, and systemic oppression—fear of precarity and instability keeps resources locked in place.
For those with inherited wealth, money is often entangled with trauma, loss, and unprocessed grief. For others who also hold marginalized identities, experiences of personal and systemic harm make financial accumulation feel like the only path to safety. These somatic defenses—clutching, controlling, withdrawing—are attempts to secure belonging and dignity through wealth when community safety feels impossible.
As Iris Brilliant (2021, July 12, “How to Create Safety and Security Without Accumulating Wealth,” Medium) notes, the accumulation of wealth as a strategy for safety isolates holders from reciprocal relationships and deepens collective unsafety. Recent research confirms this pattern: Wernick et al. (2024, “Moving Money to Support Social Justice Movements: A Spiritual Practice,” Journal of Community Psychology) found that participation in healing communities or embodied practice was the single strongest predictor of how much money young inheritors gave to social-justice movements.
The Resilience Toolkit directly addresses this dynamic by teaching participants how to attune to their bodies so they can generate safety without accumulation—creating the internal conditions for generosity, interdependence, and flow.
Embodied Redistribution uses the Resilience Toolkit—a trauma-informed framework for cultivating physiological stabilization and adaptive regulation—to disrupt the somatic patterns of hoarding, control, and fear that keep wealth immobilized. The Toolkit cultivates felt safety that is not contingent on wealth, control, or insulation from risk. Through body-based practice, participants learn to down-regulate stress responses and locate stability in connection rather than accumulation—replacing the false security of hoarding with the real security of self-attunement, relationship and collective care.
This behavioral hack will pilot a three-part Resilience Toolkit for Wealth Holders immersion, followed by an eight-week community of practice. Approximately 12-24 participants will engage in guided somatic learning, reflection, and peer accountability. Across the arc, participants will:
Recognize how stress, trauma, and social conditioning show up in their relationship to money and power; Build embodied resilience to stay present with fear, loss, and responsibility; Explore the physiology of privilege, shame, and surrender; Practice redistributive action from regulated, connected states; Reflect on individual and collective shifts in relationship to money, power, and care as they cultivate their embodied resilience.
The eight-week practice group will deepen integration, sustain accountability, and observe how embodied shifts influence real redistribution choices. Recruitment will use a champion model, inviting trusted wealth-holders from existing Lumos networks, recommendations by advisors, and the Hacking Wealth team to seed participation through their peers. This leverages relational trust to normalize embodied experimentation with wealth.
The program’s financial design also functions as an embodied learning tool. Participants will contribute to program costs, with a minimum 15% of each contribution redistributed to grassroots partner organisations. Redistribution begins at the point of participation: Wealth-holders practice releasing money while expanding capacity for regulation and trust. Participants may choose to increase contributions at the end as their window of tolerance grows.
Rather than a philanthropic tool, this project intervenes at the micro-behavioral level—the body states that drive decision-making. It tests how small shifts in nervous-system capacity can unlock withheld capital, connection, and possibility.
Challenge funding of approximately £22-25k will support a six-month prototype cycle:
Curriculum adaptation (Dec 2025–Jan 2026): Translate the Resilience Toolkit for wealth-holder contexts and integrate class- and privilege-specific content;
Program delivery (Feb–April 2026): Facilitation of the three-part series and eight-week practice group, participant coordination, and reflection support;
Evaluation and dissemination (May–Jun 2026): Analyze embodied and behavioral data, share findings, and contribute learning to the Hacking Wealth cohort.
All sessions will be conducted virtually to ensure accessibility and minimize environmental impact. In addition to Challenge funding, participant match funding will supplement the budget and embed redistribution as practice. Each contribution includes a built-in gift to grassroots partners, allowing participants to experience giving as part of their regulation process. This structure supports sustainability while expanding collective impact.
The facilitation team will hold this as a collaborative inquiry into how inner work and nervous-system regulation transform participants’ felt relationship to money, power and care.
We anticipate total costs in the range of £25,000, though final allocations will be shaped collaboratively with the cohort during the shared budgeting process.
Dec 2025-Jan 2026: Curriculum adaptation; recruitment via champion model
Feb 2026: Three-part Resilience Toolkit for Wealth Holders immersion
Mar–April 2026: Eight-week community of practice
May 2026: Evaluation and analysis
June 2026: Presentation and shared learning at Liberating Wealth Gathering
Justice, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion
The project explores how supremacy culture and class conditioning live in the body, shaping how wealth-holders relate to risk, safety, and control. Each session links personal regulation with structural accountability, allowing participants to experience both discomfort and belonging in service of liberation.
Recruitment will intentionally include racial, gender, and generational diversity among wealth-holders, emphasizing inclusion of BIPOC and women participants. Group agreements emphasize curiosity, consent, and repair—modeling the relational culture redistribution requires.
The work avoids individualizing guilt and shame responses and situates healing within a systemic context. As participants expand their embodied capacity, they gain access to new forms of collective, reparative action. This pilot also recognizes that some wealth-holders carry both privilege and marginalization—such as women, BIPOC, queer and/or disabled inheritors—and that their patterns of holding or releasing wealth are shaped by intersecting experiences of trauma and exclusion. This program honors this complexity as part of the collective healing field.
Lumos employs a retro pre/post mixed-methods design rooted in embodied research methodology. Participants assess change at program end, comparing their current state with their starting point after developing somatic literacy.
Quantitative metrics measure changes in: Felt sense of safety and regulation when engaging redistribution decisions; readiness and follow-through on moving money; relational trust and interdependence. Qualitative data include participant narratives, facilitator observation notes, and group reflections capturing resistance, release, and emerging joy.
The evaluation will also track shifts in participants’ relationship to money, power, and care and felt safety when releasing wealth through their match-funding contributions. All data will be anonymized and synthesized into a learning brief shared with the cohort and the wider redistribution field.
By June 2026, Lumos will have: Piloted the model with 12-24 wealth-holders; Documented measurable increases in embodied safety and readiness to redistribute; Produced community-of-practice guidelines for continued peer learning; Shared results publicly at the Liberating Wealth Gathering; Activated a live redistribution mechanism through participant match-funding, demonstrating increased willingness to move money toward grassroots partners as regulation capacity expands.
Short-term: Participants experience more regulation, clarity, and courage in wealth decisions.
Medium-term: Embodied practice integrates into giving and investing communities, reinforced through peer co-learning.
Long-term: The Resilience Toolkit becomes a replicable behavioral protocol within liberatory finance—helping wealth-holders transform not just what they fund, but how they embody power.
Lumos Transforms is a certified social-enterprise consultancy advancing embodied, trauma-informed, resilience-oriented transformation across sectors. Clients include Los Angeles County Departments of Health Services and Public Health, major philanthropic institutions, and rights-based organizations in the US and UK.
Project Lead: Nkem Ndefo, MSN, CNM, RN, Lumos Founder and creator of the Resilience Toolkit, recognized internationally for bridging neuroscience, trauma theory, and justice frameworks to shift embodied patterns that uphold inequity.
Program Manager: Juliana Nocker Ferry, Director of Partnership Development and Organizational Programs; leads program operations and strategic partnerships for complex systems-change initiatives.
Facilitation Team:
Devika Shankar, Certified Resilience Toolkit Facilitator whose work centers healing, accountability, and repair in movement and philanthropic spaces.
Gia Hasan, Certified Resilience Toolkit Facilitator and somatic coach with a background in organizational development, arts, education, and community health.
Evaluator: Eva Farah will adapt Lumos’ existing embodied evaluation instruments for this cohort.
Project Advisors:
Joy Atkinson, Resilience Toolkit Certification Trainee, Associate Director of Embodied Unlearning at Soulwork & Co, somatic coach and social change trainer. Steering Group member at Resource Justice, with a background in wealth redistribution and racial justice.
Carrina Gaffney, Resilience Toolkit Certification Trainee with two decades in philanthropy, systems change and social justice. Formerly with Lankelly Chase Foundation, she helped steward the transition of redistributing wealth and power in service of Collective Liberation.
Lumos will offer the Hacking Wealth cohort embodied grounding practices at cohort gatherings to support collective regulation, presence, and connection in decision-making spaces; Community of Practice guidelines that help participants sustain embodied peer learning and accountability after the facilitated phase ends; A peer learning lab sharing insights from this pilot’s embodied evaluation to explore how nervous-system awareness and regulation can amplify the impact of their own hacks. We aim to nurture a culture of embodied experimentation within the cohort.
Wealth defense is not merely ideological—it is a trauma response to living in unsafe systems. On a planet in collapse, no amount of accumulation can buy security; the only durable safety is relational, embodied, and collective. The Toolkit builds that kind of safety in the very people whose bodies and resources most need to move. This project uses embodied practice to pierce somatic armor, cultivating resilience as the gateway to trust and interdependence. Redistribution then ceases to be charity and becomes a practice of collective nervous-system liberation.
Projected Outcomes (Project period: December 2025–June 2026):
By June 2026, Lumos will have piloted an Embodied Redistribution Resilience Toolkit learning arc for 12–24 wealth holders, consisting of a three-part immersion and eight weeks of facilitated practice groups. The project will document measurable increases in embodied safety, regulation, and readiness to redistribute resources. Participants will also have practiced releasing wealth through an integrated match-funding mechanism, generating direct redistribution to grassroots partners. We anticipate improved relational trust and reduced fear responses around giving and investment, along with a peer-based community of practice to support continued reflection and accountability.
