ABOUT

Mission 

Marronage Collective rejects the myth that burnout is your fault. We help justice-minded workers, collectives and organizations interrogate the systems creating unsustainable work conditions and build practices that sustain human flourishing.

Vision

Marronage Collective envisions workers, collectives and organizations where radical rest and vital direct service work and organizing are not in tension, but essential to each other.

Marronage Collective Theory of Change

The Problem

Burnout is treated as an individual failing requiring personal solutions—better boundaries, more resilience, self-care. This myth obscures the truth: burnout is systemic design meant to extract labor while denying humanity, particularly from those navigating intersecting racial, imperial, ableist, and cispatriarchal capitalisms.

Ongoing burnout produces political desiccation—the slow drying of vitality, meaning, and spiritual access caused by sustained extraction and unmet human need. You notice it when you stop offering ideas in meetings unless directly asked. When your children are safe and fed, but there's no room left for playfulness and imagination. When personal goals feel impossible or irresponsible. When the work that once connected you to purpose now only exhausts you.

Our Belief

Burnout isn't a personal failing. It's political. Research from Modern Health (2025) revealed that 66% of workers faced burnout.

The personal failing narrative says:

  • You need better time management

  • You should set stronger boundaries

  • You lack resilience or self-care skills

  • If you were more organized/efficient/balanced, you wouldn't be exhausted

  • Your burnout means you're not cut out for this work

Structural conditions make burnout inevitable:

  • Nonprofits operate on scarcity funding models that require doing more with less

  • Staff, workers are expected to absorb budget cuts, increased caseloads, and expanding responsibilities without additional compensation

  • "Passion for the mission" becomes justification for unsustainable workloads

  • Organizations and movements praise martyrdom while punishing self-preservation

Burnout disproportionately impacts marginalized workers

  • Women of Color are paid less than their White or male peers; even with higher levels of education, Black, Native, and Latine women earn less than their male and White counterparts.

  • Disabled workers are forced into productivity standards designed for able-bodied people, that carry overwhelming physical and emotional labor.

  • Queer and trans workers perform additional emotional labor navigating hostile workplace cultures

If our movements for justice cannot sustain the people building them AND do meaningful work concurrently, we risk replicating the very systems we seek to dismantle.

Our Approach

Named for enslaved people who escaped to build free communities on their own terms, Marronage Collective helps organizations and individuals understand, interrogate, and move from extractive workplace practices to structures that sustain human flourishing.

Grounded in Black radical rest frameworks, critical theory, disability and healing justice, decolonial psychology, and somatic trauma theory, our work is both intellectual and spiritual: examining how systems design burnout while co-creating practices where dignity, ease, and collective care become foundational rather than aspirational.

The Change We Seek

Individual level: People recognize burnout as political, not personal, and reclaim their right to rest, boundaries, and wholeness without guilt.

Organizational level: Workplaces shift from extractive practices that consume workers' commitment to structures that sustain ease and excellence simultaneously—retaining staff, deepening impact, and modeling liberation.

Movement level: Justice work is redefined as sustainable and life-affirming, not martyrdom. Movements stop replicating oppressive systems internally and build cultures where human flourishing is prerequisite to collective liberation.

How We Get There

  • Workshops and training that name systems creating burnout and provide more concrete tools for building sustainable practices.

  • Consulting and facilitation that help organizations interrogate extractive structures and co-create liberatory alternatives

  • Curriculum design rooted in fugitive pedagogy, centering those most impacted by racial, imperial, abliest and cispatriarchial capitalism

  • Community building that connects organizers, workers, across sectors to share strategies for sustainable justice work

  • Systems Change Work that analyzes burnout culture and martyr ideology through evidence-based case studies and research, establishing why current organizational and systemic structures must be fundamentally restructured. All proposed interventions depend on systemic transformation to achieve lasting impact.

Lead Facilitator

Aysa Gray, MA is a racial justice praxis consultant, researcher, author, mutual aid organizer, and curriculum designer specializing in the political nature of burnout within racial and intersecting capitalisms. With over a decade of experience in racial and social justice praxis, organizational development, economic justice, and abolitionist organizing, Aysa works with individuals, organizing spaces, and nonprofits to build liberatory practices that sustain both people and impact.

Aysa's approach is personal: both maternal grandparents died before retirement as Black public servants, and their mother worked 60-hour weeks across three jobs for 35 years.

As former Director of the DEI Incubator Village at CUNY, Aysa retained 75% of staff for five years by holding the duality of ease and excellence. Drawing from fugitive pedagogy and over ten years creating leadership development and critical race praxis theory, Aysa helps organizations interrogate extractive systems and co-create structures where human flourishing is foundational.

Aysa's scholarship on white supremacy and professionalism has appeared in the Stanford Social Innovation Journal (2019) and Princeton RRAPP Diversity Journal (2020).