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Monica Garcia reflects on four years of Las Vegas’ Love Yourself Foundation

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Monica Garcia
Enrique Malfavon / Courtesy

Whether it’s the community’s well being or mental health, positive change has to start with the individual. That was the seed for the Love Yourself Foundation (LYF), which celebrated its fourth anniversary in July. The Las Vegas nonprofit, which gained 501(c)3 designation in 2021, provides a digital platform and runs events designed to open up conversations about mental health and self-care.

“It’s time to focus more on the person, and start there. And then from that point, allow it to just ripple and connect the dots,” Founder and Executive Director Monica Garcia says. “If we’re feeling better, then that can help us be more active in our community and more conscious of our relationship with the Earth.”

Since its creation in 2018, LYF has coordinated open-mic nights, which provide and accessible and welcoming platform for creatives to express themselves and be vulnerable about their experiences and emotions. Garcia says the conversation doesn’t always have to be heavy.

The Good Lyf, another events series, launched in March, blending nightlife with mental-health discourse and advocacy. The nonprofit also hosts monthly Love Your Self Expression nights Downtown, which include group meditations and feature open-mic performers.

Programming is aimed at the 18-30 age group but is “open to everyone,” Garcia says.

The Weekly caught up with Garcia to talk about the significance of her nonprofit’s fourth birthday and its impact thus far.

Tell us more about the goals for LYF’s ongoing events. At the Love Your Self Expression event, we always start with a meditation with a sound component or “sound bath,” typically done with singing bowls or other instruments that can help a person’s meditation be a little bit deeper. And then we have our open-mic,[where] we always feature a couple of up-and-coming artists from the community. It’s been incredible to see the evolution of a lot of our frequent open-mic performers.

We’ve produced the Good Lyf twice. It highlights DJ artists from our community and showcases funk music. Folks who frequent more nightlife … don’t always know where to go when it comes to self-care or finding mental health resources.

We always take a little break from our events, because we’re doing events nine, 10 months out of the year. July was our wrap-up for the season, and then we’ll be coming back in the fall with our events.

Why mix arts with mental health? I really believe that art and expression have such a high capacity to help a person in their journey of healing. One thing that we try to achieve at our events, and also in our social media presence, is to do our best, even for the difficult topics, to make it inviting to talk about—just having that safe space, making it feel like it’s safe to share and that [they’re] not alone.

Adding the art and music component can add a certain level of lightheartedness to [sad topics]. We can come together in music and experience that feeling together and know that it might be hard right now, but we can get through it. And we have each other.

What do you hope people take away from these events and digital content? No matter what, to know that it’s OK to ask for help ... You’re not alone, and things can actually get better … A big thing that I always like to say, too, is that everyone has a gift, a very special gift that’s unique to them … It’s important for people to believe in themselves, to believe in whatever makes them shine, and to not be afraid to pursue their passions and find their purpose in life.

The first few years after starting a nonprofit can be shaky, when it comes to establishing leadership structure, new operations and funding. Where would you say LYF is in that journey? For nonprofits, it takes about four or five years to be able to have paid staff. … Right now, everything is 100% volunteer, including myself. We would really want to start having paid staff, so we can start building out the programming, start doing more outreach and just grow it more. We’ve got the team, we’ve got the infrastructure, now we need the funds.

What’s the secret to building a good team? Our organizational structure follows the holacracy model—more of a team-minded structure. Zappos made this well-known. I like Tony Hsieh’s philosophy when it comes to organizing and creating community within your organizational structure. And I really looked up to that ideology, because I think that’s how people work efficiently—when they feel like the people that they work with care about one another.

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Shannon Miller joined Las Vegas Weekly in early 2022 as a staff writer. Since 2016, she has gathered a smorgasbord ...

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