Dismantling Racism Workshop with Michelle C. Johnson

We will deepen our understanding of the History of the Race construct, define personal, cultural and institutional racism as well as learn an analysis to better understand white supremacy, racism, privilege, and power.

Michelle C. Johnson is an author, yoga teacher, social justice activist, licensed clinical social worker and Dismantling Racism trainer. She approaches her life and work from a place of empowerment, embodiment, and integration. With a deep understanding of trauma and the impact that it has on the mind, body, spirit, and heart, much of her work focuses on helping people better understand how power and privilege operate in their life. She explores how privilege, power, and oppression affects the physical, emotional, mental, spiritual and energy body.

To learn more about Michelle, please click here: https://www.michellecjohnson.com

Ian Manuel

Ian Manuel is a poet, activist and recent MacDowell Fellow. Ian’s poetry was featured in Bryan Stevenson’s bestseller, Just Mercy. In 1990, Ian was living in Tampa in one of the poorest, most violent housing projects in the state. At 13, he was involved in a shooting which left him one of the youngest prisoners condemned to die in prison in the United States. He was so young that he was put in solitary confinement, where he remained for the next 18 years.

While in solitary he discovered a special gift. The ability to compose words in ways that move people. In 2006 The Equal Justice Initiative took on Ian’s case as part of their fight to end excessive punishment of children, hoping to ban life without parole for children who were convicted on non-homicides. Ian was released after 26 years in prison. Since his release, he has spoken at NYU, Butler University, Florida State University, The School of Visual Arts, Horace Mann, and many more prestigious colleges & organizations. He is Living in Brooklyn, and writing an innovative memoir that will make you believe in his mantra “The impossible is obtainable.”

Whiteness: Unnamed and Unmarked with Amy Burtaine

Amy is an equity trainer with over 20 years of experience leading training, workshops and facilitated dialogues on equity, inclusion and social justice. She works with trainers, organizers and community and institutional leaders across the U.S. to educate, activate, and promote change. As a white person in racial equity work, Amy is committed to exploring whiteness and the ways that racial divisions have kept whites from organizing for racial justice and engaging in the work of collective liberation. Amy is trained in the work of the Theatre of the Oppressed and uses interactive engagement techniques when facilitating with groups. She is a trainer with the Racial Equity Institute, out of Greensboro, NC and has an equity consulting practice in the Pacific Northwest.

• framing of racism as structural and institutional
• understanding how structural and institutional advantage has been cumulative for whites in the US
• how culture is set up to validate, include, and give whites “belonging”
• exploring white dominant culture and how it becomes the expected “norm” for “professional” culture
• understanding white fragility and how it gets in the way
• how white dominant culture lives in, and harms, our psyches and bodies
• the spiritual costs of white supremacy culture

To learn more about Amy and her work, please click here:

https://www.amyburtaine.com

Christian Picciolini

Christian Picciolini is an award-winning television producer, a public speaker, author, peace advocate, and a former violent extremist. Christian chronicles his involvement and exit from the early American white-supremacist skinhead movement in his memoir, WHITE AMERICAN YOUTH. He now leads the Free Radicals Project, a global extremism prevention and disengagement network, and has helped over 300 individuals leave hate behind. He showcases his disengagement work in a second book, BREAKING HATE: Confronting the New Culture of Extremism, published in February 2020 by Hachette Books, as well as the MSNBC documentary series of the same name.

To learn more about Christian and his work, please click here:

freeradicals.org
christianpicciolini.com

Afriye We-kandodis

As the co-founder of By the River Center for Humanity a mixed use creative incubator located in Selma, Alabama, the creator of “Soul Prints of Our Ancestors and Ourselves Interactive Experience and Heart to Heart, Soul to Soul, Conversations of Truth, Love and Hope, storyteller, song-writer and performance artist Afriye We-kandodis uses the arts of sound, movement and performance to create unconventional healing spaces.

She challenges all participants of her performances to see and embrace their own greatness and choose to remember that we are all beautiful, magnificent spiritual beings created through, by, and with the divine wisdom of the Almighty Creator.

Her performances are full of words of wisdom, mixed with drama and some humor as she addresses the issue of self-love, self-empowerment, healing, forgiveness, and unconditional love for others. Sister We-kandodis perceive that all of her performances, lectures and workshops are gifts from the Almighty Creator, directed by the Holy Spirit and inspired and witness by the Spirits of her Ancestors.

James Fox, MA

James Fox is the founder of the Prison Yoga Project. James began teaching yoga and meditation to prisoners at San Quentin Prison in 2002. His years of experience as a facilitator of victim/offender education, violence prevention, and emotional literacy classes for prisoners informed his work with prisoners and the eventual founding of Prison Yoga Project. Since then he’s led practices and inspired the establishment of yoga programs in prisons and jails across the U.S. and internationally. James has trained thousands of teachers who have replicated PYP’s methodology in correctional facilities in 28 states, India, Mexico, Norway, Sweden, the U.K. and The Netherlands.

He is the author of Yoga: a Path for Healing and Recovery, distributed by request, free of charge to prisoners. James was a Reviewer for Best Practices for Yoga in the Criminal Justice System and a Contributor for Best Practices for Yoga with Veterans published by the Yoga Service Council. James is on the faculty of Loyola Marymount University’s Yoga, Mindfulness, and Social Change Certification Program, and has served as an advisor to the National Institutes of Health-sponsored Chicago Urban Mindfulness Program. In 2015, Yoga Journal honored James with a Karma Yoga Award for their 40th Anniversary Issue.

To learn more about James and his work, please click here: https://prisonyoga.org

Vivette Jeffries-Logan

Vivette is a Founding Partner of biwa|Emergent Equity Consulting. For 10 years, Vivette was a trainer with Dismantling Racism Works (dRworks). She served as the Director of Training and Technical Assistance at the NC Coalition Against Domestic Violence for over 5 years. She currently serves on the Advisory Board for the American Indian Center at the University of North Carolina. Vivette also served as Curriculum Designer and Instructor for the Working Effectively with Tribal Government course for the Centers for Disease Control and as Core Faculty with the William C. Friday Fellowship for Human Relations. She is a citizen of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation (OBSN); the Indigenous people of Orange, Alamance and Caswell counties in North Carolina. She served her People as an elected member of the Tribal Council and as Founding Director of the OBSN Tribal Health Circle.

Vivette is the recipient of numerous awards and accolades. In 2012, she was recognized as an Honoree at the Women’s Honor Ceremony during the American Indian Women of Proud Nations Conference. In 2010, United Tribes of North Carolina also honored her with the Distinguished Service to Indian People Award. Vivette earned a B.A. in Psychology and Community Studies from Guilford College and an Associate Degree (A.A.S) in Hospitality Management from Alamance Community College. She is a graduate of the North Carolina Native Leadership Institute of the American Indian Center at the University of North Carolina.She is also a Certified Executive Chef with 17 years’ experience in Hospitality Leadership and Management. Human Rights, Civil Rights and Social Justice are her purpose. She is passionate about dismantling all oppressive systems and replacing them with an equitable system that ensures all voices are heard and all cultures are valued and integrated.

To learn more about Vivette and her work, please click here.

Resmaa Menakem

Moving from race to culture to creation is important, transformative, and takes work. And a lot of reps. I help people, communities, and organizations find strength in healing that is holistic and resilient. Together let’s set a course for healing historical and racialized trauma carried in the body and the soul. I am a healer. I help people rise through the suffering’s edge. I am a cultural trauma navigator. I am a communal provocateur and coach. I consider it my job in this moment to make the invisible visible.

To learn more about Resmaa and his work, please click here.

RW Alves

RW Alves (she/they), C-IAYT, SEP, E-RYT 500, is a social justice educator, certified yoga therapist, yoga teacher trainer, and Somatic Experiencing Practitioner based in Seattle. Her work in the world and in yoga is informed by her experience as a fat white queer femme with a lifelong involvement in social justice and activism.

She works at the intersections of social justice and spiritual practice by developing curriculum, training and mentoring yoga teachers and yoga therapists, facilitating spaces for self-care and community-care for activists, and teaching about body positivity, body diversity, and body liberation, inclusive languaging and teaching, trauma-informed yoga, nervous system resilience, accessible asana, justice, privilege, and spiritual practice.

RW serves as Faculty for Off the Mat, Into the World and The Yoga Service Conference, teaches trauma-informed yoga through a social justice lens with Collective Resilience (www.collectiveresilienceyoga.com), and is a co-founder and trainer for Bending Towards Justice (www.bendingtowardsjustice.org), which provides anti-oppression, equity, and social justice trainings for yoga teachers and practitioners around the country. She is a contributor to the Yoga Service Council’s forthcoming book on Best Practices in Yoga for Addiction and Recovery, and serves on the Diversity Equity and Inclusion Task Force of the International Association of Yoga Therapists.

She sees yoga, somatics, and embodiment and spiritual practices as tools for social justice, trauma healing, resilience, community building, and personal and community transformation, and believes deeply in the power of practice to ground, sustain, align, and inspire us in our important and world-changing work. Learn more at rwalves.com

Sonya Renee Taylor
Sonya Renee Taylor is the Founder and Radical Executive Officer of The Body is Not An Apology, a digital media and education company promoting radical self-love and body empowerment as the foundational tool for social justice and global transformation. Sonya’s work as a highly sought-after award-winning Performance Poet, activist, and transformational leader continues to have global reach. Sonya is a former National and International poetry slam champion, author of two books, including The Body is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love (Berrett-Koehler Feb 2018), educator and thought leader who has enlightened and inspired organizations, audiences and individuals from board rooms to prisons, universities to homeless shelters, elementary schools to some of the biggest stages in the world.

Believing in the power of art is a vehicle for social change, Sonya has been widely recognized for her work as a change agent. She was named one of Planned Parenthood’s 99 Dream Keepers in 2015 as well as a Planned Parenthood Generation Action’s 2015 Outstanding Partner awardee. Bustle Magazine named her one of the 12 Women Who Paved the Way for Body Positivity and in September 2015, she was honored as a YBCA 100, an annual compilation of creative minds, makers, and pioneers who are asking the questions and making the provocations that will shape the future of American culture; an honor she shared alongside author Ta’Nahesi Coates, artist Kara Walker, filmmaker Ava Duvernay and many more. In 2016, she was named a Champion of Women’s Health by Planned Parenthood and commissioned to write the official poem for Planned Parenthood’s 100-year centennial celebration. In the same year, Sonya was also invited to the Obama White House to speak at their forum on the intersection of LGBTQIAA and Disability issues. In 2017, Sonya was awarded the Quixote Foundation’s “Thank You Note, a $25,000 award for leaders and artists working in the field of reproductive justice. In the fall of 2017, Sonya was named one of 28 global changemakers selected into the inaugural cohort of the Edmund Hilary Fellowship, a 3-year international fellowship of world-leading entrepreneurs and investors, innovating purpose-driven global impact projects from New Zealand.

Sonya’s work has been seen, heard, and read on HBO, BET, MTV, TV One, NPR, PBS, CNN, Oxygen Network, The New York Times, New York Magazine, MSNBC.com, Today.com, Huffington Post, USA Today, Vogue Australia, Shape.com, Ms. Magazine and many more. She is a regular collaborator and artist with organizations such as Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Advocates for Youth 1in3 Campaign, Association for Size Diversity and Health, Binge Eating Disorders Association (BEDA), Greater than AIDS Campaign, Yerba Buena Cultural Art Center and numerous others.

With a B.A. in Sociology and an M.S.A. in Organizational Management, Sonya continues to use her work to disrupt systems of inequity from an intersectional, radical self-love and global justice framework. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for Split This Rock, an organization calling poets to a greater role in public life and fostering a national network of socially engaged poets. Additionally, she serves on the Board of Directors for SisterSong, a pioneering Women of Color reproductive justice collective. Sonya continues to be engaged in issues of racial justice, police brutality, mental health, reproductive rights and justice and much more.

In 2011, Sonya founded The Body is Not An Apology, as an online community to cultivate radical self-love and body empowerment. TBINAA quickly became a movement and leading framework for the budding body positivity movement. In 2015, The Body is Not An Apology developed a digital magazine, education and community building platform to connect global issues of radical self-love and intersectional social justice. Today, TBINAA is a digital media enterprise reaching nearly 1 million people per month from over 140 countries with. Sonya resides between the California Bay Area and Aotearoa New Zealand. Sonya continues to tour globally sharing lectures, workshops and performances focused on radical self-love, social justice and personal and global transformation.

Learn more at https://www.sonyareneetaylor.com