Today we’d like to introduce you to Annie Holmes.
Hi Annie, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
FOUNDER. SCHOLAR. LIBERATOR.
Annie P. E. Holmes,
DPS (hon.)
Before I was any of the titles that follow my name, I was a little girl in Newark, New Jersey, sitting in the pew of my family’s church, watching everything in my community. Watching how adults swallowed their pain in silence. Watching what happened when people were never given words for their own experience. And quietly, in that small and sacred space, I made a decision: when I grew up, I would be the bridge. I would help people find joy in their purpose. That little girl became me. And I have never stopped believing that my liberation is my healing. I knew then that I had a perspective that needed to be explored.
Being a pastor’s daughter meant growing up inside community in a real and embodied way. I saw what it looks like when people show up for each other. I felt what it costs when they don’t. I watched my community be one of the most powerful institutions in our lives while also learning, slowly and painfully, that it sometimes asked for silence as the price of belonging. I learned early how to hold two truths at once.
Education was always the air I breathed. I was dangerously curious, the kind of child who asked “why” until grown folks got tired of hearing it. I never stopped asking. I became an educator because I believe deeply that learning is not academic alone. Learning is liberation. It is the act of seeing yourself clearly enough to choose the best alignment for you.
For over two decades, I worked in nonprofit and public sector spaces. I served as a Chief Diversity Officer for nearly a decade, from 2013 to 2022, at a time when that work was misunderstood, underfunded, and quietly undermined. I built thriving structures inside institutions and watched my accomplishments get reframed as threats to people who had never had to share the table. I watched brilliant Black women burn out to keep organizations running. I watched systems designed to help people quietly hollow those same people out instead.
And I kept showing up. Because I believed, and still believe, that we deserve better. Not just better systems. Better lives. Eventually I stopped waiting for institutions to get it right. I started building what I couldn’t find.
That is how Elevated Levels Foundation™ was born and how Elevated Labs LLC™ came to life. Not from a business plan, but from a burning question: What would it actually look like if we built for liberation instead of compliance? And I centered the answer around the most marginalized and most brilliant people I know…Black women.
As the founder of two entities with one heartbeat. Elevated Levels Foundation™ is the nonprofit anchor, centering healing, community, and access. Elevated Labs LLC™ is the innovation arm, building digital tools that put agency, dignity, and clarity into the hands of Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities. Everything I build lives inside the Elevated Liberation™ ecosystem, a suite of platforms grounded in the World Health Organization’s Social Determinants of Health framework. We are not just building apps. We are building infrastructure for liberation. Right now, that looks like:
Liberation Compass™ — a geographic mobility decision engine helping people figure out where in the world they can actually thrive, not just survive.
CapacityOS™ — a health capacity and sustainability modeling tool, because you cannot build a movement on a depleted body.
LiberatedSync™ — a spiritual wellness and nervous system regulation platform, because healing is not optional. It is foundational.
I also co-authored Black Women Beyond Borders™ with my sister-friend in Suriname, Ruth L. Sinkeler, a book that maps what it looks like when Black women claim global mobility as a liberation strategy. And I am writing the next book from the Elevated Liberateration Series: “I Got You, Sis!, A love letter to chronically ill Black women”, because too many of us are suffering in a silence the world has been calling strength.
I refuse to separate the personal from the professional. My lived experience is my methodology.
What sets me apart is this: I believe liberation is not a destination. It is the daily, deliberate act of choosing yourself, wholly, unapologetically, and out loud. Every product I build, every word I write, every initiative I launch is an extension of that belief.
I am not building a brand. I am building a movement, and I am building it the way I wish someone had built it for me. With love. With rigor. With joy. With grace. With alignment of consciousness as my compass.
If you encounter my work and feel seen, that is intentional.
If you encounter my work and feel challenged, that is also intentional.
Elevated. Liberated. Together.
Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I have learned that the most sacred roads are rarely smooth and straight.
The most honest answer to this question does not begin in a boardroom, or in a grant application, or inside a strategic plan. It begins in my own body.
Since 2022, I have been navigating complex, compounding health challenges that have fundamentally reshaped how I live, how I lead, and what I build. What started as symptoms I kept pushing through, because that is what we do, isn’t it, we push, became something I could no longer outrun, outwork, or out-perform.
For a high-achieving Black woman who had spent decades being the one who holds everything together, being stopped by my own body was one of the most disorienting experiences of my life. Everything I thought I knew about productivity, about showing up, about what it meant to be strong, all of it had to be renegotiated. From scratch. In real time. While still being a loving mother and a wife trying to birth something the world hadn’t seen yet. That is not a small thing to carry.
What made it harder, and what I know is not unique to me among Black women, is the way our pain is routinely dismissed, minimized, and mismanaged by the very systems designed to help us heal. I have sat in medical spaces and felt unseen. I have had to advocate loudly for my own body in rooms where I should have been able to simply be a patient. I have experienced the particular exhaustion of having to be articulate and composed about my own suffering just to be taken seriously.
That experience did not break me. But it taught me something I will never un-know: the systems built to support my healing were not built with me in mind. And if they were not built for me, for us, then someone needed to build something different. That someone turned out to be me.
I am not broken. I am transformed. In the middle of navigating my own health journey, through the uncertainty, through the hard days, through the moments when getting out of bed is its own act of courage, I started building. Not in spite of what I was going through. Because of it. As an educator, I knew that learning is a scientific strategy for healing. This healing strategy is medically supported by my specialists. So I chose to learn about AI. Every tool in the Elevated Liberation™ ecosystem has my lived experience embedded in its architecture.
I want to be careful here, because I do not want to package my healing journey into something tidy and triumphant when the reality is that I am still very much in it. Overcoming, for me, has not looked like being cured. It has not looked like returning to who I was before 2022. It has looked like:
Learning to work with my body instead of against it.
Building rest into my business model, not as an afterthought, but as a structural commitment.
Telling the truth, in my work, in my writing, in conversations like this one, about what it actually costs to build something meaningful while your body is asking you to slow down.
Choosing, every single day, to believe that my life and my work have value even on the days when I cannot be productive by the world’s standards.
Saying “No.” Full stop. Unapologetically unashamed about prioritizing my body because there are not enough paid leave days in any workplace that will foster an environment that values me at my best.
We are doing something extraordinary. And we deserve tools, community, and infrastructure built for us, not adapted from systems that were never designed with our survival in mind. That is exactly what I am building.
For you. For us. For the women who come after us.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
I build what I couldn’t find when I needed it most as an executive leader, as a performer, and as just me when there is no need to choose what mask to wear to find safety.
As the founder of two entities with one heartbeat. Elevated Levels Foundation™ is the nonprofit anchor, centering healing, community, and access. Elevated Labs LLC™ is the innovation arm, building digital tools that put agency, dignity, and clarity into the hands of Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities. Everything I build lives inside the Elevated Liberation™ ecosystem, a suite of platforms grounded in the World Health Organization’s Social Determinants of Health framework. We are not just building apps. We are building infrastructure for liberation. Right now, that looks like:
Liberation Compass™ — a geographic mobility decision engine helping people figure out where in the world they can actually thrive, not just survive.
CapacityOS™ — a health capacity and sustainability modeling tool, because you cannot build a movement on a depleted body.
LiberatedSync™ — a spiritual wellness and nervous system regulation platform, because healing is not optional. It is foundational.
I also co-authored Black Women Beyond Borders™ with my sister-friend in Suriname, Ruth L. Sinkeler, a book that maps what it looks like when Black women claim global mobility as a liberation strategy.
I refuse to separate the personal from the professional. My lived experience is my methodology.
CapacityOS™ was born directly from my own reckoning with the limits of my body, because I needed a way to model my health capacity honestly, to stop lying to my calendar about what I had to give. It is a sustainability and health capacity tool, yes. But it is also a love letter to every high achiever whose body has been trying to tell them something their ambition refused to hear.
LiberatedSync™ exists because nervous system regulation is not a luxury. It is survival infrastructure. When I was in the depths of my hardest health seasons, I needed something that met me where I was, spiritually grounded, trauma-informed, designed for a body and a spirit that had been through something. That tool is now being built for every woman who needs what I needed and couldn’t find.
Liberation Audit™ emerged from my own process of taking stock, of asking hard, honest questions about what was actually sustaining me and what was slowly depleting me across every dimension of my life. It is grounded in the WHO Social Determinants of Health framework, yes. But it is also grounded in the very personal experience of realizing that your health does not exist in isolation from your housing, your economic stability, your relationships, your sense of purpose. Everything is connected. My body taught me that.
I Got You, Sis! is the most personal thing I am writing. It is the book I desperately needed when I was sitting alone in the dark of my hardest nights, feeling like I was failing at my own life. My journal became my confidant. I am writing it so that no chronically ill Black woman has to feel that alone again.
Any big plans?
“Liberation, Designed.” is not a tagline. It is the operating system I live by, and everything I am building next is proof of that in motion.
My future plans are rooted in one conviction: that liberation is not a destination you arrive at, it is a daily practice you design on purpose. On the personal side, that looks like continuing to model what it means to build a life that centers rest, healing, and joy as non-negotiables, not rewards earned after productivity. It looks like showing up honestly in public spaces, through my writing, my speaking, and my platforms, as a chronically ill Black woman who refuses to let her limitations define the ceiling of her contribution. It looks like building out access to liberation across the African diaspora, not as a tourist, but as a practitioner deepening her understanding of what global liberation actually feels like in the body.
On the professional side, I am emptying out my journals to finally implement what I have been building for the past decade, preparing to co-create social impact tools on a global scale, expanding the Elevated Liberation™ ecosystem into markets across Africa and the CARICOM region, where the need for liberation-centered infrastructure is not theoretical but urgent as communities build together. I am building toward a future where Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities have access to tools designed by and for them, grounded in the Social Determinants of Health framework and powered by ethical AI. And I am actively developing the content, curriculum, and community that will allow me to teach others how to thrive on their own terms, not by replicating my path, but by finally having the language, the tools, and the support to design their own.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://anniepeholmes.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mamaexec/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mrsholmes
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annie-holmes-executive/
- Other: https://elevatedlabs.studio
Image Credits
Goodes Vision Photography
