Multiracial
Beginner/ Intermediate Locations: Southeast, Midwest, Northeast, Northwest
In-person somatic retreat especially for organizers and movement workers to build resilience to fuel your ongoing work
Four-day course 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.
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.
Sarah Abbott (she/her) is a somatic coach and social movement practitioner with 15 years of experience in movements for racial, economic, climate, and gender justice as an organizer and an organizational leader. She is a white, bisexual, raised-Christian, chronically-ill woman with class privilege. Sarah grew up on Dakota and Anishinaabe land in a college and farming town in Minnesota, and recently returned home to Minneapolis after living for 8 years on Lenni Lenape land in Brooklyn, NY. She was first introduced to somatics by Susan Raffo in 2011 in Minneapolis through her somatic workshops on dismantling white supremacy. She has participated in generative somatics courses since 2013, and is a graduate of the Strozzi Institute Somatic Coaching Program.
Tyler Grillo (he/him) is a somatic coach, bodyworker, and teacher. He started practicing somatics in 2015 when he began working on staff at Strozzi Institute, completing his somatic coach certification in 2018, and has been teaching with Dara Silverman through Embodied Racial Justice since 2022. Tyler also served as Director of Programs and Operations for Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness (David Treleaven), and Project Manager for The Politics of Trauma (Staci Haines), training with these teachers as well. He also teaches for Strozzi Institute and continues to leverage his organizational skills to support teachers and organizations working for a more just world. He is the founder of Whole Heartwood, where his coaching and healing practice focuses on weaving individual and collective transformation.
Tyler is an organizer with STAND Bay Area, a collective that leverages folks with white and male privilege to support social justice initiatives led by those most marginalized by systems of oppression. He also stewards a small urban farm and The Little Free Farmstand, offering free produce and encouraging home growing as a part of the movement for sustainable food systems and rematriating the Ohlone land (Oakland, CA) where he lives with his partner and cat community.
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 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.