Mo Better Wellness: Mother/Daughter Cofounders Offer Mental Health Tools to Black Women

A year into the pandemic, Darcell Dance and her daughter, Aasha Benton, cofounded Mo Better Wellness, Connection & Facilitation to better support Black women.

Both Dance and Benton hold their masters in social work, and both work for Multnomah County: Dance as a behavioral health supervisor and Benton as a mental health consultant. At the Oregon Association of Black Social Workers, Dance serves as president and Benton as vice president. 

“We really wanted to provide connection for Black women in particular, because people feel pretty isolated in their jobs when they feel like the only Black woman, and being the Pacific Northwest, and Portland, it just feels like it’s really hard to find community unless you’re intentional about it, especially with gentrification now – the community isn’t really what it used to be,” Dance told The Skanner.

“So we would hear about people coming to Portland and trying to figure out, where are the people at? How do I even find out about where to get haircare products, or where is there to go? And it’s hard to even find that if you don’t know someone to connect with. And we hibernate, too, just being in Portland.”

The Skanner spoke with Dance about the ways Black women are under-served in Portland, and how she and her daughter plan to grow Mo Better WFC (https://mobetterwcf.com/).

The Skanner: What programming do you provide?

Dance: We’ve been doing Relax, Reflect, Refill. I wouldn’t quite call it a workshop; we provide an event. We’ve been doing that for four years, so we’ve been doing them every September. We do one for the community, and we provide opportunities where we let women ease into the day. They come in, they have breakfast, and they can chit chat with other women. Then we go into the program, which is basically telling them about who we are, what we do, why we’re doing it, and then doing relaxation – breathing exercises, mindfulness. We do mix and mingle, where they get around and meet the other women. We do that so everyone feels a little more comfortable and relaxed, so when we get into deeper discussion later in the day, they’ve already pretty much met everybody who’s in the room.

Then we have larger group discussions, we do some prompts and journal-writing, and also some goal-setting for things that they want to do.

A lot of it is incorporating relaxation: if they’re not doing it naturally, how are they going to incorporate that into your schedule?

What are the goals during these events?

Basically providing connection and focusing on wellness too. Because we all, as women, we’re taking care of everybody else – at work, in our family life, and then we don’t prioritize ourselves. This time is for us to come together without kids, without anybody else, and we can focus on our wellness and just take that time out, because we don’t always do that. 

We’re providing them some breathing techniques around that, and just making people feel like they’re not alone, with other people who are experiencing the same things people can really resonate with what people are sharing with them. Like oh yeah, what you just said, I’ve gone through that before – we have intergenerational groups of women.

How do you feel Portland fails Black women?

We’re not really thought of. I think that we’re invisible a lot of the time. Just even as you’re navigating spaces, I don’t feel like people really see you, and because our community is so dispersed right now, it’s really hard. And people are moving in from other places, so we don’t really have that community unless we actually build it. 

And for Black women in particular, because we’re caretakers – we have a lot of people that are in that sandwich generation – so people want you to just keep going and keep doing, because you’re good at it and that’s what you do, just keep doing it and take care of everyone else but not really taking care of yourself. And no one’s going to tell you to do that, and a lot of times you don’t feel like you can, because you’re always striving. Just being able to unplug and be able to do that, it doesn’t come naturally. We have to make time for it. 

Mo Better also plans to facilitate workplace programming, correct?

Part of that is making sure those workplaces are ready for those conversations, and I know right now because of the state of the world, people are kind of backtracking on diversity and equity and all of that. But when we started this business, everybody was all about that – or they said they were. 

And even with that, when people are talking about equity, it’s kind of like a checkbox: Can you just do a training? And you’re not really embedding that into your practices and your policies and procedures.

Before we really dive into that part of our business, we wanted to make sure any business we work with already has that in place. You have to start with that first before you can really make, I feel, a safe place for Black women. 

I don’t want Black women to be harmed. It’s harmful if you haven’t really thought through why we’re having those conversations.

As Black women, a lot of times we feel invisible, even in leadership roles – where you’re a leader but you aren’t really given that power to make decisions because everyone’s questioning whether you really belong there…

I hear people say things like that, because they can’t fathom that they got passed over. 

You’ve mentioned there can be a resistance to therapy in the Black community. How do you try to counter that?

I think that turned a lot during Covid, people really started to think about needing help. Telehealth really helped that as well. It broke down a lot of barriers. But before that, people didn’t want people in your business, and that image of being a strong Black woman in particular, that superwoman image, like we can do anything and we don’t want people to see us as weak. It’s not even about being weak, because you’re taking on so much. You’re a caretaker. 

Where do you see Mo Better in five years?

We really want to do retreats locally and even out of the country, so that women can just really relax. With Relax Reflect Refill we have limited time with the ladies, but being able to have a longer period of time that we can really get into wellness and connection, and they can really get to know each other, see other parts of Oregon, other parts of the world, I think would be amazing.

Also: connecting with businesses who really want to better their practices. We really want to work with them. 

For more information about upcoming events, visit (https://www.instagram.com/mobetter.wcf/).