April–December 2026
Midwest and NortheastFor white racial justice leaders
Intermediate/ Advanced
In-person and online training program for white racial justice organizers and movement workers to build community, capacity and courage to fuel your ongoing work.
Opening to Freedom, a nine-month somatics training that combines in-person retreats, one-to-one coaching, and virtual group sessions.
The yearlong program is focused on applying somatic practice and principles to your organizing and everyday life. The curriculum is not focused on learning to teach somatics, but rather bringing the principles of somatics into your life, your organizing, and how you show up in the world.
Participants will develop:
The ability to align your body, words, and actions with your longings in the world
A community of practice and relationships with peers who are in it with you
Practices that deepen your embodied physical awareness and ability to be present, open, and connected
Understanding of embodied anti-racist frameworks
The structure of the program includes:
Monthly one-to-one coaching with a member of the teaching team
Three in-person retreats spread across seven months
Monthly practice & methodology calls in between retreats to stay in practice together and go deeper on concepts and political analysis
Virtual small groups with members of the teaching team
Practitioner track for those who have completed more than 12 days of in-person courses
Peer-to-peer groups to go deeper into topics and practices based on interest and experience
Prerequisite- a four-day somatics course or the equivalent in this lineage, like Embodied Leadership
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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.
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.
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.