Adrienne Troy-Frazier

Adrienne Troy-Frazier is an educator, organizer, cultural worker, and builder of beloved community whose work explores how we accompany one another through life’s great crossings—birth, caregiving, healing, migration, grief, and transformation.

Raised on Chicago’s South Side and rooted in the stories of the Mississippi Delta, Adrienne was shaped by generations of Black women who taught her that community is built through care, courage, integrity, and showing up for one another. Her first classroom was her grandmother’s kitchen, where no one left hungry and there was always room for one more chair. There she learned that ordinary people carry extraordinary wisdom and that caring for one another is among our oldest forms of resistance.

Her time at Spelman College deepened that foundation through a tradition of Black women scholars who understood education as liberation, leadership as service, and imagination as a political act. The work of Gloria Wade-Gayles, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Dr. Asa Hilliard, and fellow South Sider Gwendolyn Brooks helped shape convictions she has carried throughout her life: every child arrives brilliant, every community holds wisdom, and culture is one of our oldest technologies for liberation.

For more than thirty-five years, Adrienne has worked alongside children, families, educators, artists, organizers, and birthworkers, weaving together early childhood, birth justice, healing justice, cooperative economics, arts and culture, and community organizing. She is co-founder of The BEE Collective, Southern BEE Alliance Cooperative, and Tri-County Play Collaborative; founder of Nurturing Freedom Saturday Academy; and steward of Nsoromma House, a community home where children, families, birthworkers, artists, and elders gather to learn, create, heal, and imagine together.

Together with her partner, Herb Frazier, she also co-founded Crossing the Sea Cultural Consulting, creating cultural learning journeys rooted in the African Diaspora, Gullah Geechee traditions, and the power of story, place, and memory.

Her areas of expertise include:

• Cooperative economics and worker ownership
• Birth and maternal health equity
• Full-spectrum carework—birth, postpartum, adoption, end-of-life, and child care
• Early childhood systems and inclusive practice
• Healing-centered community practice
• Community health and perinatal care navigation
• Outdoor and nature-based learning
• Strategic partnerships and grant development

Adrienne finds restoration where land and water meet—paddling quiet rivers, tending her family’s homestead in Central America, and sitting beneath their beloved mango tree. Drawn to Indigenous ways of knowing and Afrofuturist imagination, she sees land as both teacher and archive and beloved community as a daily practice of reciprocity, imagination, and collective care.

Daughter. Mother. Grandmother.
Keeper of stories. Steward of place.
Still crossing seas. Still building beloved community.

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