Intermediate/ Advanced
This is a multiracial space for folks who have been through an ERJ course.
The first-ever ERJ reunion. Come for the community, the practice, the songs and to make meaning of this political moment and how we can turn and face it together.September 25-28, 2025
Upstate New York
Between 2020-2025, ERJ trained over 600 people online and in person. For the first time, we’re offering a time to get together with other members of the ERJ community. This four-day retreat will be in beautiful upstate New York, and we’ll have a chance to explore some of the most pressing political questions, practice together, share resilience practices, and build relationships across ERJ.
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Dara Silverman (she/her) is a white queer Jewish consultant, somatic coach and trainer with over 20 years with organizations and movements for social, racial, economic and gender justice. She partners with trainers of color to lead organizational change and leadership development initiatives centering racial justice, equity and liberation. Dara partners with white trainers to lead caucuses and trainings specifically for white organizers and leaders on dismantling white supremacy in ourselves, organizations and movements. Previously, she was the founding Director of Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) and the Executive Director of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) in New York City.
Dara has been studying Somatics with the Strozzi Institute and Generative Somatics since 2011. She became a Somatic Coach in 2013 and was trained as a Somatics teacher to lead courses by the Strozzi Institute.
Dara lives in the Hudson Valley on Wappinger and Lenape land where she lives on a third of an acre where she grows eight kinds of berries. Dara founded Mutual Aid Beacon in March of 2020 to meet the needs of those most impacted by COVID-19. The group organizes more than 800 volunteers and prepares and delivers meals to 650+ families a week in Beacon, Fishkill and Wappingers in the Hudson Valley.
Cari Caldwell (she/they) catalyzes life as a facilitator, executive coach, consultant and entrepreneur committed to using her privileges and 20 years of experience to co-create better relationships, systems and communities. Cari integrates a wide variety of liberatory methodologies and practices that open new possibilities for equity, relationship, and performance.
A taste of her work includes teaching embodied racial justice for white leaders, facilitating multi-stakeholder social innovation labs, supporting executive and team collaboration, relationship, resilience and repair, producing a childbirth education film, and co-founding five organizations across the US and internationally.
Cari has trained and/or certified in ontological and somatic coaching, organizational and family constellations, Theory U/social innovation, psychodrama, Art of Hosting, Barrett Cultural Values, sacred sexuality and intimacy, and somatic leadership with organizations including the Radical Resilience Institute, Strozzi Institute for Somatics, Visions, the BIPOC Alliance. She lives on unceded Arapahoe, Cheyenne and Ute territory in Colorado with her beloveds and two sons, and loves the exquisite torture of hot yoga.
Michael Strom (they/them) is a facilitator and somatic practitioner living in the Northwest Bronx, NYC. They feel most at home when they can put their body in the sea, nerd out on a big idea, or find something to giggle about.
Michael came to life as an organizer through queer, feminist, and anti-war student organizing and driving predatory developers out of the Bronx with the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition in the late 2000s. In the wake of the housing crisis, they helped bring together Organizing for Occupation (O4O) and Occupy Wall Street to blockade evictions and shut down foreclosure proceedings with song. After the Ferguson Uprisings in 2014, they founded the NYC chapter of Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), a national network organizing white people to undermine white supremacy. Until 2021, Michael was a faith leader at New Day Church, a Bronx-based faith community confronting injustice with the compassion and abundance of God. From 2015-2024, they were a Director at The Wildfire Project, supporting social movement organizations to build healthy group dynamics, have hard conversations, turn toward generative conflict, and step further into their agency to reshape our world.
Michael brings 14 years of facilitation, a decade of somatic training, and a faithful delight in human beings to their work. Outside of work, they’re finding tremendous sweetness in reconnecting with the faiths and lifeways of their Sicilian and Irish ancestors (they’re still trying to figure out how to have hobbies that don’t involve healing). They firmly believe that wherever we're going, it'll be easier if we can laugh on the way there.