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.
Rachel Berliner Plattus is from New Haven, CT and currently lives in Boston, MA. She is Co-Creator of Beautiful Solutions, a storytelling and popular education project supporting people to imagine and create community-controlled solutions to the problems they face. Rachel has worked with a national network of women religious and millennials through Nuns and Nones, and with Jewish organizers and spiritual leaders through Taproot. She is a graphic artist, a street medic, and a trainer with PeoplesHub. She likes to explore how to make meaning and support healing on big paper, in the dance studio, in the kitchen, in wild places, and in spaces that bring us into conversation, connection, and collective action with one another. Find out more about her work at rachelbp.com.
Misty Perez (she/her) is an organizational leader, somatic coach and bodyworker, with over 25 years of organizing and advocacy experience with organizations dedicated to social, racial and gender justice. She has worked with youth in residential and school based programs, survivors of domestic and sexual violence, organizers, policy advocates, executive leaders, caregivers and change makers. She partners with organizational leaders to work on organizational change and leadership development initiatives grounded in equity. She’s a skilled organizational leader with a focus on building up the people, operations and organizational culture needed to ensure a just future with a thriving multiracial democracy.
Misty has been studying Somatics with the Strozzi Institute since 2018. She became a Somatic Coach and Bodyworker in 2023 and is currently training as a Somatics teacher with Dara Silverman. Misty is a Somatic Coach and Bodyworker with a practice on Nipmuc land in central Massachusetts. Misty works with people to develop greater awareness and presence, reveal their purpose and live into the life they long for. She’s guided by love and lives a life grounded in authenticity and purpose.
Misty has a Master’s Degree in Community Development and Planning from Clark University. She also has a Bachelors of Science in Human Services and Counseling and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology. She understands that for many organizers and changemakers who dedicate their lives to policy and social change work we are also engaged in the politics of trauma, which requires resilience, presence, openness, connection and a deep grounding in purpose.
She offers healing and transformation through coaching and bodywork for individuals and groups as we collectively move towards the futures we long for. Her joy and resilience practices include spending time with her Loves, gardening, walks in the woods, meditating and managing a small farm.
Adaku Utah
Born in Baltimore and raised in Festac Town, Nigeria, Adaku comes from a long lineage of organizers, farmers, and healers. This inheritance grounds their work as a grassroots strategist, somatic abolitionist healer, movement facilitator, coach, and ritual artist. Their work is both political and deeply personal—an act of love and commitment to their communities.For over twenty years, Adaku has worked alongside movements for gender, reproductive, racial, youth, and healing justice, supporting leaders and organizations in cultivating strategic, sustainable, and liberatory ways of working together. They believe in building movements that not only change systems but also deepen our capacity to care for one another, remain connected, and stay alive and present in the work.
Adaku currently serves as the Director of Movement Building Programs at the Building Movement Project, where they work with movement-building organizations on both short-term rapid-response efforts and long-term power building ecosystem strategy. They also co-host and uplift narrative power through the Solidarity Is This podcast, facilitate transformative trainings and gatherings, and develop tools and practices to strengthen solidarity across movements.
Previously, they served as the Organizing Director at the National Network of Abortion Funds, where they helped build collective power with 90+ member organizations, thousands of members, and movement leaders across the country.
For the past ten years, Adaku has also co-facilitated Harriet’s Apothecary, an all-Black collective of healers, cultural workers, and organizers committed to carrying forward Harriet Tubman’s legacy of abolition and healing justice as core strategies for liberation.
They are a Senior Teacher and Coach with BOLD (Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity), and a teacher and practitioner with Generative Somatics, supporting movements in their work to transform the conditions that shape our lives—by transforming the body, the collective, and our possibilities.
At the heart of their work is the belief that liberation is something we practice together: through relationship, through the body, through spirit, and through how we choose to show up for one another.
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This course is offered on a sliding scale.
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.