Public Classes & Events
Offered Through Embody Equity:
Follow Embody Equity on Humanitix to keep up to date with new events as soon as they’re published. Or check out my Instagram, LinkedIn or Facebook for more resources.
Mediation & Communication:
“Civil dialogue is claiming and caring for my identity, needs & beliefs while not degrading yours.” — Brené Brown
Saying “Ouch!” In Public: Calling In, Out, On and Off
Is fear of Cancel Culture hijacking your environment?
Workshop can be configured for adults, young people or multi-age communities.
When you hear someone say something harmful, what should you do? Individually? As a community? Based on the notion that not everything that deserves to be said is best said in public, this workshop looks at ways to draw people into a more inclusive culture, looking at questions including:
• When is a public Callout a bad idea, and when might it make sense, strategically?
• Are you the best messenger for this?
• How else can you stand up for yourself or others?
• What are some healthy boundaries to protect your own emotional wellbeing?
“Sometimes Calling Out offers the possibility of saying ‘ouch!’ loudly enough that someone can hear it.” — Sonya renee taylor
Learn and practice techniques of Calling In and Calling On, as well as when to Call it Out or Off, and bring home tools to help you decide strategically which action to take, when.
Building Internal Transformative Justice
How can we do this work internally so we don’t hit an impasse again?
This half day workshop can be configured as one, 4-hour or two, 2-hour sessions.
Engaging in a mediation session or facilitated conversation with an outside expert can feel freeing as people move past where they’ve been stuck. Can you equip your team to do this work internally? Yes. But there is an unwelcome guest to watch out for: the punitive model of justice itself. This model is what most of us grew up with, and while it may provide clarity, it fails to build a positive, proactive culture that could minimize future harm.
Drawing upon Restorative, Transformative, and Loving justice models, this course centers on identifying shared values, then building a system that fits them. Along the way, participants learn and practice models of listening and dialogue that allow learning, empathy, accountability, clear boundaries, and co-creation of positive next steps.
Fog on the Lens of Dominant Culture Series:
“My job is to put a little fog on the lens so that you can see it’s there.” — Bushra Aziz, filmmaker & Teaching Artist
stepping into a new paradigm of Leadership & Expertise
Available in person or online
Can be configured for White affinity or mixed groups
*Prerequisite: Either Letting go of Urgency and Individualism in Leadership OR Unlearning Individual Competitiveness and Action Bias in Leadership
*This intermediate workshop can be combined into a longer offering with either prerequisite offering.
"We have experienced what it's like to release any assumption that one person has all the skills needed to lead and support the work." — adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy
“Leadership is not a role or a set of traits, but a zone of inter-relational process: Step in; Step out.” — Nora Bateson, Leadership Within the Paradox of Agency
Let's face it: Unlike flocks of geese that famously trade the lead position, our society has normalized Hierarchy. The new paradigm of leadership described above is a radical departure from what we've grown up with. Rankings of our status by title, education, age, gender, race, ability and many other social constructions are so common that we hardly think to question them. At the root of all of this is the ranking of our heads/minds/thoughts over our bodies/feelings/intuitions.
This intermediate workshop guides participants to integrate thoughts, feelings, and intuitions in order to dismantle the transactional roles of leadership. We will investigate body practices that encourage collaborative action, yet don’t get mired in endless process. Join us as we learn to recognize the right thing to do in the moment, as well as how to support each other as we step into and out of leadership.
Letting Go Of Urgency & Individualism In Leadership
Available in person or online;
Can be configured for White affinity or mixed groups.
Have you ever thought to yourself, “Sure, I want to collaborate, but by the time I figure out how to delegate all of this I could get the whole thing done myself!” Our common norms around time and individualism combine to push us out of group work and into our siloes - even when we mean to be inclusive. This deprives our projects of the benefits of multiple perspectives, snubs our colleagues from collaborative cultures, and can leave us exhausted from trying to do it all ourselves.
“To become American and to be American is to be individual.” — Marc Anthony Neal, Professor, Duke University
This introductory workshop looks at the cultural norms that keep us siloed, as well as alternate norms common in other cultures and ways to embody them. Join us as we expand our understandings of time and relationship, and come away with increased stamina for holding complex truths, tools to move us out of our analysis paralysis, and a keener sense of which cultural trait is most beneficial to enact in the moment.
“We’re trained from a very early age not just to be independent, but to be better.” — Michele Gelfand, Professor, Stanford University
“I find that White groups tend to use action as a bandaid to avoid sitting with the pain of what has happened.” – Jim Bear Jacobs, Co-Director for Racial Justice, MN Council of Churches
Unlearning Individual Competitiveness & Action Bias In Leadership
Available in person or online
Can be configured for White affinity or mixed groups
We’ve all felt them: the urge to DO something about a situation and the need not to share our methods - from family recipes to successful work strategies. These come from dominant cultural norms that operate on a subconscious level. In leadership positions, there’s also external pressure to act fast and be the best. Yet, neither of these ways of being helps us build a new, inclusive culture. Beyond learning the skills of collaboration and reflection, we must unlearn what holds us back.
In this introductory workshop, we will move our head-learning about collaboration and time for pause into embodied learning so that we can operationalize the things we’ve intellectualized. Join us to expand cultural understandings, and come away with increased stamina for holding difficult emotions, tools to move out of stuckness, and a keener sense of which cultural trait is most beneficial to enact in the moment.
Embodied Healing & Wholeness:
“. . . We’re all embodied in one way, shape, or another. But the question is, are we embodying liberation? Are we embodying our wholeness? Are we embodying our healing?” — Thérèse Cator, EmbodiedBlackGirl.com
Spontaneity, humor & lightness in community are part of our human birthright, and they are essential to our liberation. No matter our ancestry, we’ve been exposed to the division and isolation that are the primary tools of colonization. We’ve been taught to idealize independence and individualism, and overlook interdependence and wholeness - starting at the level of our own body and mind. This can make liberation and healing seem like DIY “fixer-upper” projects that we’re responsible for, leading to a culture of burnout and sniping in White antiracist communities.
"The last place the colonizer leaves is your mind.” — Hari Kondabolu
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Join us as we cultivate these qualities of interdependent wholeness. Using simple, gentle movement practices we will quiet our busy, bossy minds to better integrate the quiet voice of our embodied wisdom. We’ll then extend our awareness from our personal bodies to the group "social body," as a step toward reconnecting in true community.
Embodied Facilitation Training
“The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervener.” –Bill O’Brien
Sacred Ground Facilitator Workshop, National Episcopal Church, 2023
"Social Field awareness is the only paddle or rudder available to the small boat of our current situation as it moves out into the unknown.” — Arawana Hayashi
"The body is where we fear, hope, and react; where we constrict and release; and where we reflexively fight, flee or freeze.” — Resmaa Menakem
The beauty of the Sacred Ground film-based curriculum is that anybody can fit in. The personal storytelling approach provides multiple onramps that suit people from a wide variety of racial and cultural groups and lived experiences.
Yet this breadth of participants can present a volatile mix. How can you help everyone in your Sacred Ground Dialogue Circle feel seen and supported? What can you do if things get tense or emotional? Or what if you find yourself getting emotionally tripped up by an unexpected comment? In this session we’ll learn simple embodied facilitation techniques to help you tune in to your own sensations, as well as to nonverbal cues of participants. We’ll also practice descriptive responses to statements and body language that help the speaker feel seen and often open up deeper understandings of their own insights.
Children & Race:
“If we give all children dignity and richness, everything changes on the administrative and political level.” - L. Malaguzzi
Session at Overcoming Racism 2022
How can we incorporate multiple perspectives into a design process? How can we see and sense the system of early childhood education as a whole? And how can we de-center white narratives of “developmental appropriateness” and support teachers to co-construct a universal story that honors children’s experiences?
Research shows that children as young as 6 months recognize race; that by age 2 they take race into account in decision making; and that by 5 years they prefer the white doll and, if exposed to white imagery of God, they prefer white leaders. The false narrative is already ingrained.
Where better to find multiple narratives and truths than in a classroom of young children? Yet, in practice many white adults wait for the subject of race to come up to talk about it. The problem with this is that white-bodied adults often experience bodily tension when race does come up, so even very young children can sense that it is a taboo subject - without a word said. The consequence? Race simply does not come up in many white-centric early childhood programs, leaving white children unconscious or dys-conscious about our shared racial history in this country. The false narrative lives on, and is played out daily in playgrounds and other less intensely supervised settings. Our workshop reveals all of this.
Documentation Lab: Looking at Student Work
90-120 minute format can be configured online or in-person.
Appropriate for teachers and caregivers of any age of students.
How do conversations about human differences really happen in early childhood classrooms?
How can the environment, the teacher, & the group of children extend each others' thinking?
Join us for a collaborative conversation where we’ll look at the traces of student work: photos, recordings, snippets of conversations, etc., then share our impressions & questions, and talk about next steps.
The Doc Lab is a great way to build a community of equitable practice, and for individual educators to feel seen, supported and even prompted to explore new avenues in their work.