Our Vision
We envision a liberated world where communities care for one another, honor each other's dignity, and work together to heal and transform. A world where our relationships with ourselves, with each other, and with the land are rooted in justice, compassion, and collective power.
Liberation is not something given. It’s something we co-create.
Our vision is a future where healing is communal, care is reciprocal, and everyone has what they need not just to survive, but to thrive.
Who we are
Soul Space Studio is a values-led social enterprise grounded in healing and social justice. We exist to nurture healing, dignity, and liberation: for individuals, for communities, and for our collective future. We believe everyone deserves access to care, joy, rest, and purpose.
Through heart-centered offerings, we address emotional wellness, spiritual grounding, and the urgent need for systemic change. We reinvest a portion of our profits into free community programming that centers those often left out of traditional wellness spaces and those navigating systems of oppression.
At our root, we seek to transform both people and systems through care, reciprocity, and love.
We’re not here to replicate the toxic, individualistic, and fragmented versions of healing that dominant systems push on us. We’re here to break those chains.
Soul Space Studio dares to be different.
This is a space that disrupts. That resists. That refuses to separate healing from justice, and care from liberation. We reject the norms that isolate us and embrace a radical, community-rooted approach to healing. We challenge Western, white-dominated paradigms that frame healing as a solo journey, one that ignores our interconnectedness, our ancestral knowledge, and our relationship to land and spirit.
This is our space, where we come together to heal, to imagine, and to build something new.
Where we remember that healing is political, care is collective, and liberation is a practice we embody every day.
Meet the Team
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Meet the Team *
Karina Alvarez Espinoza, MSW, LSW
Owner, Founder, and Facilitator
I’m Karina: a healer, artist, and radical dreamer.
I was born in Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico and raised in struggle. My early experiences with mental health weren’t just about me, they were rooted in trauma, displacement, generational wounds, and the violence of systems never meant to hold us.
That pain became my teacher.
It lit a fire in me pushing me toward healing, toward truth, toward justice.
I studied social work not because I believed in the system, but because I believed in our people. I wanted tools to understand the conditions we live under and ways to disrupt them. I’ve worked across nonprofits, community orgs, and institutions. But I kept hitting the same walls: bureaucracy, tokenism, systems more invested in power than transformation.
So I stopped asking for permission.
I originally started a community care project alongside trying to build a business that could support me and my family. But I quickly realized I couldn’t do both separately. That’s when Soul Space Studio was born.
Soul Space Studio is my offering. My act of love. My rebellion.
It’s a space where we don’t just survive, we gather to heal, to organize, to dream, and to imagine something freer.
I believe that healing is political.
That care is resistance.
Inspiration & Credit Statement
Our work is possible because of the wisdom, labor, and vision of those who came before us in liberatory, healing, and justice movements. We honor and credit the thinkers, educators, and organizers who inspire us, including Angela Y. Davis, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Paulo Freire, adrienne maree brown, and many others.
Their commitment to love, liberation, healing, and justice continues to guide our work. We recognize that we are students of their wisdom and that our role is not to replace or claim ownership of their ideas, but to carry them forward in our practice. If we ever fall short in giving proper credit or inadvertently cause harm, we invite accountability and commit to repair.
Land Acknowledgement & Accountability
As a values-led social enterprise grounded in healing and social justice we believe it is important to honor the land in which we work, live, and play in. Lake County, IL is the traditional homeland of the Potawatomi and other Indigenous nations, including the Ojibwe, Odawa, Miami, Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sac, Fox, Kickapoo, and Peoria peoples. We acknowledge the enduring presence and sovereignty of these nations, and we recognize the deep harm caused by colonization, forced removal, and ongoing systems of oppression.
This acknowledgement is not a replacement for action. It is a commitment to remembering, honoring, and learning from Indigenous communities, past and present. We strive to align our work with values of care, repair, and liberation, so that healing and justice are not afterthoughts, but central to the way we live, teach, and build together.
We are learners on this journey. Our hope is to share what we know while continuing to grow, unlearn, and listen. If we ever fail to credit where credit is due or cause harm through our words or actions, we invite you to call us in and hold us accountable. Our commitment is to repair, learn, and do better, always centering care, justice, and liberation.
Inspired by Oumou Sylla