Shawnee Benton Gibson, LMSW / FLDC is the CEO of Spirit of A Woman (S.O.W.) Leadership Development Institute and the Co-Founder of the ARIAH Foundation. She has over 32 years of administrative, clinical and executive coaching experience and expertise in women’s leadership, youth development, reproductive justice, racial equity, individual and group counseling, trauma and bereavement. These skills, combined with her spiritual and artistic gifts, allow Shawnee to guide individuals as they navigate the stages and phases of their lives. Shawnee employs a holistic, cultural and spiritual approach to her work and utilizes a social justice lens as a foundational principle for her service to community.
Her primary healing tools consist of spiritual counseling, vision coaching, psychodrama, sociometry, sacred rituals, energy work, the performing arts and storytelling as mediums to ignite transformation and initiate catharsis.
Shawnee is the subject of the Emmy nominated documentary “Aftershock.” The film follows her and her family as they fight for reproductive justice in the wake of the tragic and preventable death of Shawnee’s eldest daughter, Shamony Makeba Gibson, due to a birth related pulmonary embolism.
According to Shawnee, “activism is a labor of love and liberation.”