“Find Your Light” a community-driven organization focused on fostering wellness for Black Women founded by award-winning vocalist Valerie Troutt, Rashida Chase, and Emanuel Ruffler, has released its new “SongCare” album - a selection of songs used to inspire, empower, and deepen one’s connection to love and self worth.

The timing of Find Your Light’s new release is perfect because the times we are currently living in filled with social unrest, police brutality, massive unemployment, and a pandemic leave people longing for self care. As the world has literally been set on fire, Black Women in particular are desperately in need of a soothing balm that FYL provides.

Originally, Troutt and Chase met in their early teen years in the Oakland Youth Chorus. When Troutt moved to New York City to study Jazz vocal performance at the New School, she ran into Emanuel Ruffler, an award-winning pianist whom she decided to collaborate with on various projects. Chase, on the other hand, pursued a career path as a nurse before returning to her roots in exploring her passion for music.

Troutt, a Bay-area born and bred jazz and gospel trained artist had previously gained quite amount of international acclaim after spending time in New York. However, as a daughter and now aunt of an Oakland-based family of artists, activists, teachers and spiritualists, both by blood and by community, Troutt ended up back in the Bay teaching music at the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts and performing for two years with the Grammy-nominated Linda Tillery and the Cultural Heritage Choir where she was a featured soloist on their latest album “Still We Rise, Still We Sing.” Valerie has done extensive work with dance company embodiment project in collaboration with Destiny Arts Center addressing the issues of systemic racism and the sanction murders of black bodies. Currently Troutt is a resident artist at “Zoolabs” in West Oakland.

When Troutt reconnected with Chase in Oakland, they realized that they wanted to create a safe place for Black women in the Bay Area to help promote wellness, mental health, and music therapy in a church-like setting. In conjunction with a Guided Journal, they developed SongCare, songs that allow Black Women to experience a safe spaces both digitally and physically. Find Your Light became a movement that could help reaffirm Black Sisterhood through intergenerational conversation, holding Gatherings, providing Wellness tips, and developing workshops and curriculum to help our community become more sustainable.

Troutt describes her inspiration for creating Find Your Light: “I'm a black woman, I don't feel safe in this country. We are being disenfranchised at disproportionate rates… Where are the safe spaces? Where can a woman be a woman without the lens of white dominance? There aren't too many places. So we've started to create them. I want there to be a place I can go where I feel safe and know I can smile, cry, build, perform, eat, pray, swim, layout, eat, have a baby, live and rest easy... knowing that the white gaze can not harm me.”

By 2024, Find Your Light plans on having its first Garden & Residency in the San Francisco Bay Area. The group is currently looking for funds, and a performance art studio (or house) with kitchen and garden to explore these efforts. FYL is also looking for a donor to gift them a house with a yard or 2-3 acres of land in the East or South Bay, Richmond, or Oakland Area.