Spirit of a Woman Leadership Development Institute

Learn More About Shawnee Renee Benton, SOW Leadership Development's Co-founder and CEO 

Shawnee Benton Gibson, LMSW / FLDC is the CEO of Spirit of A Woman (S.O.W.) Leadership Development Institute and the Co-Founder of the ARIAH Foundation. She has over 33 years of administrative, clinical and executive coaching experience and expertise in women’s leadership, reproductive justice, racial equity, individual, couples, family and group counseling, trauma and bereavement. These skills, combined with her spiritual and artistic gifts, allow Shawnee to guide individuals as they navigate the various stages and phases of their lives. Shawnee employs a holistic, cultural and spiritual approach to her work and utilizes a social justice lens as a foundational principle for her service to community. Her primary healing tools consist of spiritual counseling, vision coaching, psychodrama, sociometry, sacred rituals, energy work, the performing arts and storytelling as mediums to ignite transformation and initiate catharsis. 

Shawnee is the subject of the Peabody Award winning and Emmy nominated documentary “Aftershock” which is streaming on Hulu. The film chronicles the journey of Shawnee and her family as they fight for reproductive justice in the wake of the tragic 

and preventable death of Shawnee’s eldest daughter, Shamony Makeba Gibson, due to maternal mortality. According to Shawnee, “activism is a labor of love and liberation".