About Florentina

My name is Florentina Staigers Cruz. I am a mixed Salvadoran and white Latinx social justice attorney, healer, and writer, and the founder and sole owner of Insight-Out Development, L3C.

My work lives at the intersection of systems change, healing, and storytelling. I am interested in exploring the relationship between inner transformation and social transformation—and in what becomes possible when we refuse to separate the two.

My Story

In 2008, I was working in immigration rights as an attorney when I experienced a profound life shift that changed not only how I lived, but how I understood social change. During a difficult period in my personal life, I began searching for a more balanced and meaningful way of being. I started therapy, explored spiritual teachings, and developed practices of meditation and yoga. For the first time, I began to understand that creating a more just world also required me to turn inward—to attend to my own healing.

I quit my job, closed my accounts, gave away my possessions, and said goodbye to the people I loved. I moved to Cameroon, where I spent two years establishing a women’s rights organization and teaching life skills to incarcerated women. Alongside that work, I returned to another lifelong passion: writing.

When my contract ended, I traveled alone for nearly a year through Africa, Asia, and Latin America. That journey introduced me to a kind of freedom I had never known was possible. It also clarified a commitment that has continued to shape my life: I would not ever give up my freedom again, and I would dedicate my work to helping create the conditions in which others could experience theirs.