This series creates space for healing from white supremacy culture and transforming anti-Blackness within ourselves, toward healing our webs of relationships, organizations and societal structures. In this series participants will practice a creative combination of healing practices ranging from embodied awareness to movement, reflection and writing. Join this series to rediscover, relearn, and reimagine in our current crisis-driven reality.
Two series are offered: one for BIPOC (Thursdays) and one for white folks (Wednesdays). Information about the facilitators is below.
Dates
The training will meeting virtually on Zoom monthly: February 2/3, March 2/3, April 6/7, May 4/5, June 1/2, July 7/8 from 3-5 pm EST.
About Registration
This registration process is your first invitation to reflect on healing from white supremacy culture. Give yourself time to answer the questions below. If you’re completing the registration form on someone else’s behalf, answer n/a to the questions and we’ll follow up with the registrant. Thanks! When you sign up, please choose the sliding scale fee that fits your budget. Those coming from organizations with professional development budgets are encouraged to pay more than if you're paying out of pocket. The speaker’s compensation is not dependent on revenue generated by the workshop.
Why Caucus Spaces?
Racial Equity Tools writes, "To advance racial equity, there is work for white people and people of color to do separately and together. Caucuses provide spaces for people to work within their own racial/ethnic groups. For white people, a caucus provides time and space to work explicitly and intentionally on understanding white culture and white privilege and to increase one's critical analysis around these concepts. A white caucus also puts the onus on white people to teach each other about these ideas, rather than placing a burden on people of color to teach them. For people of color, a caucus is a place to work with peers to address the impact of racism, to interrupt experiences of internalized racism, and to create a space for healing and working for individual and collective liberation." These resources elaborate on the intention of using caucus spaces: Racial Equity Tools and Caucuses as a Racial Justice strategy from Just Lead Washington.
BIPOC Series (Thursdays)
Space in this series is reserved for farmers, farm, food, and garden-based educators, and those who work with land who identify as BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color). Our healing focused series will center the reclamation of, and reconnection with, our bodies, our places, our ancestors, our beyond-human kin, our cosmologies, and each other through the mirror of natures. Our space will root, and grow, from the themes of stillness-movement, cyclical living, regeneration, adaptation, collectivity, and vision. Together, we'll move with radical hospitality, and toward radical imagination.
For White Folks: Why healing, and why the body?
There are many components of movement work, including blocking harm, building alternatives, and being together in beloved community. In all of these components, elements of white supremacy culture and domination logic more generally interfere profoundly with white folks’ ability to show up and act helpfully in collective work toward liberation and racial justice.
These elements of white supremacy culture have been trained into our bodies. Into our muscles, our motions, our conditioned responses. And in times of intense collective stress, like the one we are all living through right now, those conditioned responses can show up more strongly, leaving us less choice about how we show up in collective movement.
So, for us as white folks, much of this work of healing is the work of repatterning: the embodied practice of awareness of conditioned tendencies, re-centering, and trying something different so our bodies actually learn how to act differently in the moment, under pressure. We’re not just learning to be anti-racist cognitively, we’re learning to act differently in our bodies, from our bodies. We are learning to have more choice, so that we can move with alignment for racial justice.
Domination logic and white supremacy dehumanizes all of us, for white folks it is in service of us maintaining the oppressive, unequal status quo. So much of our healing work as white people is also to reconnect with our bodies, our hearts, our spirits, the earth, sources of strength that create an incredible sense of abundance. For many of us, we are reconnecting with our ability to truly feel our lives.
While reconnecting with relationships, the earth, aliveness, can feel really incredible, in healing for white people, we are also reconnecting with our ability to feel the pain of the oppression and violence of the systems in this world. As white folks, one of the ways whiteness impacts our lives is anesthetizing us to the horror of the world. So we’re here to practice feeling more, not necessarily better.
Without those foundations of connection with relationships, with earth and ancestry, there’s no way that we can have the resilience to be with the depth of horror of racialized capitalism. Without that foundation, we move from a place of scarcity and we are fragile: Without practice, when we are faced with the depth of this violence and pain and our complicity in it, we crumble, we fall apart because we don’t know how to center in resilience, take responsibility without ownership, and keep moving with radical imagination.
And so we’re learning to reconnect with our sources of strength, to transform from scarcity to abundance, from fragility to resilience, to be able to actually commit to and live into liberating, mutually supportive ways of being together. We want to develop the capacity to let go of our fearful clinging and hoarding, and step into new behaviors that are necessary to do something different. If we connect to the power of life, we don’t need to cling to power. If we connect to our centers of life energy, we don’t need to center ourselves in the world.
About the Facilitators
Julia Metzger-Traber (she/hers) is a facilitator of creative, healing, and culture-shifting processes and trainings for social transformation and racial justice. She brings her backgrounds in performance, embodiment, and conflict transformation into her work with communities and organizations as they grapple with themselves and each other and the systems they're embedded in, toward more whole and regenerative ways of being. Since 2017 she has lived at Potomac Vegetable Farms, in Virginia, where, in addition to her external facilitation, coaching and consulting, she is learning to be in reciprocity with land, and co-create beloved community. She is currently training in Somatic Experiencing and has previously trained with Generative Somatics. She believes that communities, like bodies, hold the wisdom needed for their own healing and transformation, if attended to with curiosity, compassion and awareness. She is a mother and a dancer and practicing leaning into ancestral wisdom and spiraling time.
Rebecca J. Mintz, MSOD has been facilitating organizational change and transformative dialogues for over 15 years. She loves facilitating organizational processes, including but not limited to strategic planning, culture shifts, conflict transformation, and board development. Rebecca supports community organizations to become more values-aligned and effective by holding space for teams to celebrate their core strengths, and to determine how to build on those strengths. Through these dialogues, she supports organizations to collaborate in ways that allow them to truly live into their values, and to become microcosms of the world they are working to build. Part of this is work includes supporting clients to integrate their commitment to social and racial justice into their mission, strategy, and practices. In addition to her passion for organizational change, Rebecca is a mindfulness practitioner who believes deeply in the relationship between spiritual liberation and social liberation.
Richael Faithful (Rish-elle, they/them/theirs pronouns) is a folk healing artist from the African diaspora tradition of the U.S. South, called conjure. Faithful supports spirit-work for and with land, nature, and meaning of place through ritual, storytelling, and other majik. In their role as a community lawyer, Faithful helps land sovereignty efforts for Indigenous and Black especially within food and land justice movements. Faithful, who was raised in Centreville, VA, and whose maternal line is from Texas/Alabama/Georgia, is excited to share about ancestral land healing with young people in this region.