Focused on Movement Organizers
Beginner/ Intermediate Locations: Pacific Northwest
In-person somatic retreat especially for movement organizers, activists and workers to build resilience to fuel your ongoing work. With a track for climate/ environmental organizers.
Four-day courses typically focus on:
Deepening your ability to feel what is happening in your body, build your toolbox of somatic practices, and growing your capacity to learn from the body up
Bringing your body into action in your work and life
Creating a community of practice that will support you to keep exploring, letting your body reveal more depth, and unearthing your longings
Building your commitment to racial justice and your capacity to confront racial capitalism
Four-day courses are typically taught by a three-person teaching team, including a song leader. The teachers are experienced in teaching politicized somatics, in community building and organizing efforts, and in the ongoing fight to end racial capitalism.
In the course, you will build your capacity, embodiment, and understanding of each other inside of liberation movements in the US at this time. You’ll get a chance to explore the role our bodies, the land, and our lineage(s) play in building a different future and world. You’ll get to feel your feelings - maybe anger, grief, rage, numbness. And you’ll return home with more tools and practice to meet this moment. These skills feel essential in this political moment.
The course will infuse a combination of neuroscience, physical movement, song, connection to nature as well as practical and theoretical grounding materials into a unique curriculum customized for changemakers. For example, we will sing songs like this one by Samara Jade.
You can expect the course to focus on:
Deepening your embodied awareness, practice, and learnings from the body up
Bringing your body into action in your work and life
Creating communities of practice that will support you to keep exploring, letting your body reveal more depth, and unearthing your longings
Deepening and building your commitment to racial justice and understanding and confronting racial capitalism
Right now, we know that lots of people could benefit from community and practice as well as the ability to feel possibility through uncertainty. We will need those supports and skills for the coming months and years.
No prior somatics experience is needed. However, participants do need to be ready to deepen their connection to their body in a group, explore their feeling selves, and move toward their longings and visions for the future. The typical course size is 12-25 people.
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Dara Silverman is an embodiment teacher and social change consultant whose work is based on their 25 plus years of community experience in environmental, social, and racial justice movements, 35 years of facilitation practice, and embodiment training at the Strozzi Institute and generative somatics.
Cari Caldwell 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.
Babatunde Azubuike, pronouns Xey/Xem (ZAY/ZEM) and Dhey/Dhem (DAY/DIM), is a Black-Tsalagi, queer, Two-Spirit, healer, writer, and disabled organizer currently practicing on unceded Chinook territory, so-called Portland, OR.
Babatunde is a somatic bodyworker, somatic coach (ICF Certified), and recently completed the Train-The-Trainer cohort with Strozzi Institute for Somatics (SIS). Xeir training is guided by a Politicized Somatic framework rooted in the profound connection between trauma, collective consciousness, social justice, and communal well-being.
Dhey are uniquely positioned to support those living at the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and disability. Babatunde specializes in utilizing a Black queer feminist lens, paired with Politicized Somatics, to support leaders, organizations, artists and healers in embodying their values through ongoing practices and sessions. Babatunde welcomes partnerships, projects, collaborations, and clients who are ready to decolonize our present, honor our past, and make choices in service of future generations.
In dheir free time, xey enjoy cooking, reading, and murder mystery games. When not recharging at home, xey are likely enjoying a delicious meal with my chosen family, watching horror movies with my boyfriend, playing with pets or at the gym.
Becca Meredith (she/they) brings over 14 years of social justice organizing, non-profit laboring, embodiment, meditation and more recently, ancestral practices to her somatics offering. She has organized locally and nationally with white anti-racist communities in multi-racial movements and continues to deepen her understanding of the ways personal and collective experiences of resilience, trauma and oppression shape our bodies & our lives.
Becca is a white, queer, femme and is a descendant of Western European colonizers and immigrants. She is clear on her role in dismantling systems of privilege and oppression, redistributing resources, and wholeheartedly organizing for collective liberation. She believes that healing work is intergenerational, nonlinear and woven together with families, the land, and movements for justice. Becca offers grounded healing that supports increased access to interdependence, dignity, agency and joy.
Becca lives, parents her two kids, and organizes on unceded Duwamish and Coast Salish lands, otherwise known as Seattle, WA.
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This course is offered on a sliding scale. The true cost per participant is $3,000.
Organizational: $2,500-$4,000: for those who have an organization paying for their registration, we invite you to a registration tier based on your organization’s annual budget.
$4,000+ per registrant if the budget is above $20 million
$3,500 per registrant if the budget is between $10 - $20 million
$3,000 per registrant if the budget is between $5 - $10 million
$2,500 per registrant if the budget is below $5 million
Individual: for those who are registering as an individual, we invite you to base your registration based on your income and wealth.
Sustainer $3,500-$4,500+: for those who have generational or inherited wealth
Supporter $2,500-$3,499: for those who have a regular income and are comfortably paying their rent or mortgage
Grounded $1,500-$2,499: for those who are paying their mortgage or rent
Equity $1,000- 1,499: for those who are challenged to make ends meet
This infographic includes more about the sliding scale tiers for consideration.
All of this only works if everyone pays at the level they are able - not at a level lower than what they can pay. Together we can create financial balance when we each pay in alignment with our abilities.
Your registration fee covers your on-site lodging and 12 meals from Wednesday dinner through Sunday lunch. It also pays facilitators a living wage, allows us to redistribute funds to local Black and Indigenous groups as well as Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity, and includes paying the ERJ Practice Manager for organizing and administrative fees associated with the course.
Donations and sponsorships to offset the course cost for other registrants are always welcome.