🎉 Enrollment is open — Join The CEO Collective® today →
She teaches organizations how to share power. The CEO Collective taught her how to use her time.
MIA HENRY · FREEDOM LIFTED
Mia Henry
Freedom Lifted
A justice leadership pioneer — who spent two decades building power in organizations and needed to build the business behind the mission.
Mia Henry is the founder and CEO of Freedom Lifted, which supports justice-centered leadership development through online learning, training, and coaching. Her work is rooted in a powerful conviction: that the same organizations fighting for equity in the world often struggle to practice it within their own walls and that understanding the connection between identity, power, and liberation is how you change both.
Before founding Freedom Lifted, Mia served as Executive Director of the Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership at Kalamazoo College and as founding director of the Chicago Freedom School. Her signature framework – the Power Flower – has become a foundational tool for hundreds of private, public, and nonprofit organizations learning to bring power to more people. She’s a historian, a trainer, a coach, and now: a CEO who knows exactly where she needs to spend her time.
To stop doing everything herself, build a business that could grow without requiring her to be in every role at once, and find a community of business leaders serious enough to give real feedback - not just encouragement.
The mission was clear. The business infrastructure wasn’t.
Mia came in knowing her work was transformational. She had decades of experience in organizational leadership, a proven framework, and clients who believed in what she was doing. What she didn’t have was a business model behind the mission — one that could grow without her doing everything herself.
01
Fingers In Every Pot
Before joining the CEO Collective, Mia was doing all of it herself. No clear division between the work she should be doing as the CEO and the work she was doing because no one else was there to do it. She knew her way around organizational leadership – but running a business required a different set of decisions, and she was making them all, often poorly resourced for that specific task.
02
Too Much Time on $10 Tasks
She was working – working hard – but without a clear framework for what actually moved the needle. Which tasks had the highest value? Where should her time go? She hadn’t yet connected time to impact in a structured way. The result: busyness without the momentum her business deserved, and a mission too important to let that continue.
03
The Wrong Room
Mia had been in a mastermind before – and watched it prove hollow from the inside. “Not as solid on the inside” was how she put it. She had done her research before joining the CEO Collective: read Racheal’s work, listened to the podcast, observed the community carefully. She wasn’t looking for cheerleading. She needed a room where serious leaders told the truth.
01
Fingers in Every Pot
Before joining the CEO Collective, Mia was doing all of it herself. No clear division between the work she should be doing as the CEO and the work she was doing because no one else was there to do it. She knew her way around organizational leadership – but running a business required a different set of decisions, and she was making them all, often poorly resourced for that specific task.
02
Too Much Time on $10 Tasks
She was working – working hard – but without a clear framework for what actually moved the needle. Which tasks had the highest value? Where should her time go? She hadn’t yet connected time to impact in a structured way. The result: busyness without the momentum her business deserved, and a mission too important to let that continue.
03
The Wrong Room
Mia had been in a mastermind before – and watched it prove hollow from the inside. “Not as solid on the inside” was how she put it. She had done her research before joining the CEO Collective: read Racheal’s work, listened to the podcast, observed the community carefully. She wasn’t looking for cheerleading. She needed a room where serious leaders told the truth.
mia henry · freedom lifted
What the system actually built for Mia.
Mia did her homework before joining. She had been part of a mastermind that looked good on the outside and wasn’t on the inside – and she wasn’t going to make that mistake again. Once she decided The CEO Collective was the right room, she went all in. The 90-Day CEO Operating System gave her something she hadn’t had before: a business framework to match a mission she’d been building for years.
Phase 01
CEO Dates: Planning as a Practice vs Weekly Panic
One of Mia’s most-cited takeaways from the CEO Collective is the CEO Date – the protected, recurring block for working on the business rather than in it. For someone who had been running at full speed in every direction, this structure was a revelation. The rhythm of intentional planning gave her a way to step back, assess, and decide with clarity instead of defaulting to urgency.
“I love our CEO dates. I love the methodology you teach around the value of the task and where I shouldn’t be spending my time.”
Phase 02
Time vs Impact: Knowing What Moves the Needle
The 90-Day OS framework gave Mia a new lens for her calendar: every task has a value, and her time should follow the highest-value work. Before, she was doing everything. After, she had a rubric. Where should the CEO of Freedom Lifted be spending her energy for maximum impact? Now she could answer that question and let go of the tasks that weren’t hers to hold anymore.
“How I spend my time is directly related to the impact and the success of the business. Before I was just trying to do everything. I had my fingers in too many pots.”
Phase 03
Community as Infrastructure: The Room That Tells the Truth
Mia teaches organizations that power is built in relationship and The CEO Collective proved that to be just as true for business owners as for anyone else. Being in mastermind with serious, humble, values-driven women gave her the sounding board she needed: people who would give real feedback, share openly, and hold each other accountable to the work. Not just the wins. The hard parts too.
“Being in community with other really serious, focused, and humble women business leaders – I just felt very held and welcomed. I’m not alone.”
What it means to finally lead the business the way she leads everything else.
I spend my life teaching organizations about shared power – about what it looks like to make sure everyone in a room is seen, heard, resourced, and safe. I’ve done that work in nonprofits, in civic institutions, in movements. And I came to the CEO Collective because I needed to apply that same quality of thinking to my own business, and I didn’t yet have the framework to do it.
Before I joined, I had been part of a mastermind that looked very solid from the outside. And once I was in it, I could tell it wasn’t. That experience made me very deliberate. I read Racheal’s work. I listened to the podcast. I observed the community. I was not going to step into another room that didn’t have integrity on the inside.
"The biggest lesson I learned from The CEO Collective is how I spend my time is directly related to the impact and success of the business. Before, I was just trying to do everything."
The task value framework changed how I make decisions about my own calendar. I had been carrying too much myself, and not trusting the people around me to take on more. I give this advice all day in my work – let people lead, distribute the power, trust the team. And here I was, not taking my own medicine in my own business.
What the CEO Collective gave me alongside the framework was a community of people I could actually be honest with. Not just about the strategy. About the fear. About the rollercoaster. About what it really feels like to be doing this work when it’s hard. There’s no feeling powerful in isolation. The community wasn’t a bonus. It was the infrastructure.
What’s different now
Mia’s biggest wins.
Result 01
Revenue Nearly Doubled in Year 1
Result 02
Time Finally Connected to Impact
“I take the time I spend so seriously – not that I didn’t before, but before I was just trying to do everything. Now I know what the highest-value work is and I protect my time for it.”
Result 03
Trusting Others to Lead With Her
Result 04
Launched the Shared Power Podcast
“Being in community with other serious, focused, humble women business leaders – I just felt very held and welcomed. And not alone. That’s what made the next thing possible.”
Result 01
Revenue Nearly Doubled in Year 1
“My revenue has increased a great deal. It really actually almost doubled since I started. That’s not the only indicator but it’s a nice one.”
Result 02
Time Finally Connected to Impact
“I take the time I spend so seriously – not that I didn’t before, but before I was just trying to do everything. Now I know what the highest-value work is and I protect my time for it.”
Result 03
Trusting Others to Lead With Her
“I was not trusting people to help me as much as I do now. I give my clients the advice every day to distribute leadership and trust the team. Now I’m finally taking it myself.”
Result 04
Launched the Shared Power Podcast
“Being in community with other serious, focused, humble women business leaders – I just felt very held and welcomed. And not alone. That’s what made the next thing possible.”
Featured Episode · Promote Yourself to CEO®
Building Just, Equitable Cultures Inside Your Small Business
Mia joins Racheal to talk about the paradigm shift happening in leadership – from top-down control to shared power – and what it practically looks like to build that kind of culture inside a small business. Including the Power Flower, why apology is a justice practice, and what it means to bring power to your team and your clients at the same time.
MORE MEMBER STORIES
CEOs Building Unshakeable Businesses.
There is no feeling powerful in isolation.
If you’ve been building alone – doing everything, stuck in every role, carrying more than any one person should carry – you already know this. The CEO Collective is the room where serious, values-driven women business owners get real about what it takes to grow. Come find your people.