Hold nothing.
Receive everything.
Elena Brower
A non-profit project raising funds to support education, leadership training, creative development and healing for women and children.
Causes You're Supporting
Selected for their consistency, creativity and vision in their care and training of women and children, these are the causes you're supporting when you give to Hold Nothing.
Girls on Fire Leaders
Since 2014, Girls on Fire Leaders has run a five-year program for early-adolescent girls in Kenya, built around education, leadership, health, and community service. The model is simple and multiplying: one girl, given the tools, teaches ten others within a year. Graduates have spoken at the UN in Kenya and been recognized by the Obama Foundation; several now attend high school in the U.S.
Free Food Kitchen
Free Food Kitchen began in 2019 in Lotus River, Cape Town, after the founders of a local yoga community noticed the women and children in their classes were arriving hungry. What started as one kitchen has grown into a network feeding families across Khayelitsha, Hazendal, Philippi, and several other townships.
On The Inside
Founded by Nikki Weaver in 2020, On The Inside brings art, writing, yoga, and trauma-informed practice into women's prisons across the U.S. and abroad. Its six-month mother-child program works toward reunification; its facilitators, several formerly incarcerated themselves, teach dozens of weekly classes worldwide. Women move through the program and, in time, return as leaders and teachers.
Women for Women International
For over thirty years, Women for Women International has supported women rebuilding after war, working across seventeen countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, and South Sudan. Its program pairs a monthly stipend with skills training, rights education, and a network of other women in the same passage. Nearly 700,000 women have moved through it since the beginning.
Every Mother Counts
Every Mother Counts was founded by Christy Turlington Burns after she experienced a childbirth complication. After learning that hundreds of thousands of women die preventable deaths every year, Christy dedicated herself to advocating for change. Since then, we have invested tens of millions of dollars to advance solutions and policies to transform global maternal health and save mothers’ lives. Along the way, we have maintained an unwavering commitment to one thing: A world where every mother truly counts.
Dhamma Pasava
On 256 acres outside Lava Hot Springs, Idaho, Dhamma Pasava offers ten-day Vipassana courses in the tradition of S.N. Goenka and Sayagyi U Ba Khin. Established in 2016, the center runs entirely on volunteer service and the donations of students who came before, with no charge to those who attend. Set in the Intermountain region between Salt Lake City and Jackson Hole, it holds sixty students in winter and up to seventy-two in the warmer months, growing toward a planned capacity of one hundred twenty.
Elena Brower is an author, artist, and student of meditation devoted to the practice of presence, care, and living with integrity. She is the author of Art of Attention, Practice You, Being You, Softening Time, and Hold Nothing, her latest bestselling project with Shambhala Publications. Rooted in Soto Zen and shaped by two decades of studying and offering meditation and yoga worldwide, Elena’s work bridges spiritual inquiry and everyday life. She is a volunteer in hospice and penitentiary settings, and her non-profit project is now raising funds to support women and children in several countries.