Florence Aliese Development group is a private consulting firm founded by Alisa Orduña to transform distressed and marginalized neighborhoods into beloved communities within inclusive societies where all residents thrive. It is our mission to prepare cities for the transformation from nation-states into global citizenship through equitable development, as modern stressers such as climate change, conflict, and formation of extreme poverty push migration across previous man-made borders.
The firm specializes in community conflict mitigation, development and project management of community-driven solutions, facilitation of participatory community engagement processes, and salon convener to host of difficult conversations on race, privilege, and other social barriers to social inclusivity and economic equity.
Our expertise is in reclaiming public and semi-public spaces to address homelessness, preservation of African American cultural practices and contributions, empowerment of women and girls of color, healing communities after trauma, and fostering dialogue for self-affirmation.
We deliver our services through trauma-informed care and cultural sensitivity within the framework of liberatory art practices that restore cultural amnesia, honors stories, and holds safe spaces to tend to the collective wounds created by former and current acts of rupture, containment, violence, and forced dislocation.
Our praxis is research based and we strongly believe in the co-production of knowledge with communities served.
Alisa Orduña is a Afro-American Diaspora scholar and beloved community mid-wife with over twenty years of experience in the nonprofit and government sector. She is a seasoned community development practitioner with expertise in homelessness and affordable housing policy, asset development, cultural conflict mitigation, community building, and anti-poverty advocacy. She is a graduate of Xavier University of Louisiana and the University of Pittsburgh where she earned a Master Degree in Public and International Affairs with a concentration in Economic and Social Development. She recently earned a second Master Degree in Depth-Psychology with a specialization in Community, Liberation, Eco-Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. She is currently pursuing her doctorate degree in the same field focusing on a phenomenological approach on the essence of homelessness as experienced by African Americans in Los Angeles and the significance of feminine liberatory art interventions. Alisa is an Ifá practitioner and resides in Los Angeles where she enjoys a good cup of coffee, Afro-Brazilian dance, and long-walks in nature.
Florence and Aliese are Alisa’s paternal and maternal grandmothers. They represent resilient women who valued God, family, excellence, and the upliftment of community as tools of survival against the ongoing discrimination and violence projected onto African Americans since the nation’s conceptional acts of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and conquest of the Indigenous people. Now in the waters of the ancestors, these women bring forth the wisdom of the Iyami as part of the egbe egun, or circle of women ancestors, and whom are calling forth a profound shift in human relations as a precautionary warning to prevent further destruction of Mother Earth.
Please email FlorenceAliese@gmail.com for more information.
Alisa's thoughts on Beloved Communities 