HELLO, I’M SIRIUS.
Get to know Sirius Bonner, strategist, educator, writer, and leader at Body Trust.
LIBERATION REQUIRES MORE THAN BETTER RULES.
For more than 20 years, I have worked at the intersections of equity, culture, leadership, and social change, helping people and organizations reckon with the systems that shape who belongs, who holds power, and what becomes possible.
As a strategist, educator, facilitator, writer, and organizational leader, I am interested in what it takes to build something different inside systems that were never designed for all of us to thrive.
My work has moved through reproductive justice, healthcare, higher education, gender justice, violence prevention, organizational transformation, and body liberation. Across all of it runs the same question: How do we create conditions where people can belong to themselves and to one another without having to disappear parts of who they are?
At the Center for Body Trust, I bring this lens to our work and help steward the organization’s strategy, growth, culture, and evolving vision alongside Dana and Hilary.
I BELIEVE body liberation is inseparable from the larger work of liberation. Our relationships with our bodies are shaped by race, gender, sexuality, disability, class, capitalism, medicine, beauty, violence, and power. Reclaiming body trust asks us to contend with all of it.
“Our bodies do not exist outside of culture. Neither can our liberation.”
“When we dumb food down and reduce it to the sum of its nutritional components, we miss out on the connections between food and culture and the layers of nourishment food and eating offers.”
A few facts about me
This is who I am and what I believe
- ★This is who I am and what I believe
- ★I am a Black, fat, queer, cis woman, and my work is deeply informed by what becomes visible from the intersections. I’m also a mom to a wildly creative kid.
- ★I’m a strategist by nature. I’m usually looking for the pattern underneath the problem and the possibility beyond it.
- ★I am deeply obsessed with film, television, and pop culture. I think the stories we tell for entertainment reveal an awful lot about who we are, what we desire, and what we fear.
- ★Tarot, astrology, and divination are part of how I make meaning, access intuition, and ask better questions.
- ★I believe pleasure, desire, imagination, and joy belong in liberation work.
- ★I’m suspicious of any solution that requires people to become smaller, quieter, more compliant, or less themselves.
My story
My path to Body Trust did not begin in eating disorder treatment or nutrition. It came through decades of work examining power
I have spent my career working across movements and institutions, from reproductive and gender justice to healthcare, higher education, philanthropy, organizational equity, and survivor advocacy. I have led organizations, built equity strategies, facilitated difficult conversations, supported leaders through change, and helped people imagine what might exist beyond systems that are failing them
I have also spent my life in a Black, fat, queer body in a culture with plenty to say about what bodies like mine should mean, do, want, and become
Those experiences taught me that the body is never separate from our politics. Neither are pleasure, safety, desire, belonging, or freedom.
My awakening.
Body Trust gave language and structure to something I had understood for a long time: oppression does not only live in institutions. It gets carried into our relationships with ourselves.
My relationship with Center for Body Trust grew through conversations with Dana and Hilary about fat liberation, race, power, GLP-1s, survivorship, desire, and the complicated realities of living in bodies under systems that want to manage them. Those conversations became collaboration, including co-hosting The Body Trust® Podcast, co-facilitating the Body Trust Certification program, and helping shape the organization’s evolving work.
What became clear was that Body Trust is not separate from the liberation work I have spent my career doing. It is another doorway into it.
Today, I work alongside Dana and Hilary to help carry Body Trust forward: protecting the depth and integrity of the framework while imagining how its ideas, practices, and community can grow, evolve, and meet this moment.
IMAGINE SOMETHING FREER
Outside of the Center for Body Trust, I am the founder of Sirius Bonner Consulting, where I help organizations and leaders navigate change, culture, power, and possibility. My consulting work asks what becomes possible when we stop pouring all of our energy into preserving systems that are no longer serving us and begin building what comes next.
Currently, I am the Interim Executive Director at Call to Safety, a regional hub for supporting survivors of domestic and sexual violence to get them connected to local resources.
I am also the creator of Freedom & Desire, a journal of essays and cultural criticism about power, care, pleasure, and imagination in collapsing times.
Across all of this work, I keep returning to the same possibility: that liberation is not simply something we fight for. It is something we practice.
Let’s Connect
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