A guided practice using words, drawings and objects, to create what you may need to facilitate growth, healing to nourish and support yourself in the new year!
A guided practice using words, drawings and objects, to create what you may need to facilitate growth, healing to nourish and support yourself in the new year!
Come try this self-healing system of exercises combining the two ancient healing systems of Acupressure and Hatha Yoga.
Come try this self-healing system of exercises combining the two ancient healing systems of Acupressure and Hatha Yoga.
A conversation with guided somatic practices for Black diasporic people. Somatics is a healing modality that is a combination of movement theory, psychotherapy and bodywork. This particular practice aims to reconnect the mind-body split, and the feelings-spirit split.
A conversation with guided somatic practices for Black diasporic Queer, Trans, and Non-binary people. Somatics is a healing modality that is a combination of movement theory, psychotherapy and bodywork. This particular practice aims to reconnect the mind-body split, and the feelings-spirit split.
Mindfulness builds clarity and fortitude in community work for activists, therapists, lawyers, parents, social workers and all. Being mindful increases our ability to recover from stress, avoid being reactionary, and ultimately be more present and productive in service of your life, family, clients and teams.
This is an affinity group space for people who identify as women of color or are on the margins of many forms of gender identity. Mindfulness builds clarity and fortitude in community work for activists, therapists, lawyers, parents, social workers and all. Being mindful increases our ability to recover from stress, avoid being reactionary, and ultimately be more present and productive in service of your life, family, clients and teams.
These sessions will combine the Feldenkrais Method and Qigong to embody the process of finding new pathways for movement and our right relationships to history.
(This session will take place mostly laying on the floor on one's back. Those who are interested but may not be able to start on the floor, please be in contact with lauren@bethechangeconsulting.com who will get you in touch with the practitioner for support)
This is an affinity group session for folks who identify as a woman of color. These sessions will combine the Feldenkrais Method and Qigong to embody the process of finding new pathways for movement and our right relationships to history.
(This session will take place mostly laying on the floor on one's back. Those who are interested but may not be able to start on the floor, please be in contact with lauren@bethechangeconsulting.com who will get you in touch with the practitioner for support)
Come learn how to use simple poses as a powerful tool to practice self acceptance and increase awareness. Learn moves that are easy to follow and yet have been shown to reduce stress and blance moods. No previous yoga experience necessary - all levels welcome!
An Unapologetically Black, Indigenous, and persons of color space! Come learn how to use simple poses as a powerful tool to practice self acceptance and increase awareness. Learn moves that are easy to follow and yet have been shown to reduce stress and balance moods. No previous yoga experience necessary - all levels welcome!
We are living and working in challenging times. Some of us are carrying that stress in our bodies. Additionally, we all relate to our varied bodies differently as the world does and need to recognize how that shows up in an able-bodied world. Identify and name specific muscles in the body that may be causing symptomatic muscular pain. Use practical tools to reduce/alleviate said pain. Sections of the body that can be massaged via virtual space: Neck, Shoulders, Upper arm, Lower arm, Jaw & Face area.
This session is an affinity space for those who identify as Black, Indigenous, or a person of color. We are living and working in challenging times. Some of us are carrying that stress in our bodies. Additionally, we all relate to our varied bodies differently as the world does and need to recognize how that shows up in an able bodied world. Identify and name specific muscles in the body that may be causing symptomatic muscular pain. Use practical tools to reduce/alleviate said pain. Sections of the body that can be massaged via virtual space: Neck, Shoulders, Upper arm, Lower arm, Jaw & Face area.
Bring your basic art supplies and make a mess that honors all the parts of you. Rooted in the connections between racial justice and disability rights movements, we'll honor the resilience everyBODY brings to the space. Come ready to color, scribble, fingerpaint or journal and create a self-care action plan to show up for yourself with dignity and respect.
This session is an affinity space for those who identify as white. Bring your basic art supplies and make a mess that honors all the parts of you. Rooted in the connections between racial justice and disability rights movements, we'll honor the resilience everyBODY brings to the space. Come ready to color, scribble, fingerpaint or journal and create a self-care action plan to show up for yourself with dignity and respect.
Experience a blend of therapeutic movement, invigorating breathing exercises and guided relaxation in preparation for a relaxing inner journey bathed in traditional instrument sounds.
This space is an affinity group for all those people who identify as male/masculine. Experience a blend of therapeutic movement, invigorating breathing exercises and guided relaxation in preparation for a relaxing inner journey bathed in traditional instrument sounds.
Using ancient martial arts wisdom to increase focus, attention and vitality. Experience the energy created and released by these simple powerful movements.
This session is an affinity space for people of color. Using ancient martial arts wisdom to increase focus, attention and vitality. Experience the energy created and released by these simple powerful movements.
Most organizational cultures have deeply ingrained messages that one's value and success in the organization is connected to achievement, perfectionism, and fast-paced implementation of tasks with no struggle.
If that sounds like you, you're not alone! Given these messages of white dominant culture, a perpetual feeling of self-doubt, self-critique and comparison to others abounds in the inner psyche of most staff.
Developing an Antiracist organizational culture requires the deep inner work to confront imposter syndrome in one's own self-talk, and visibilize the common trajectory of learning most people face - where a series of trial and error, mistakes, false starts, and experiments ultimately combine as one makes progress in their work tasks.
The more we normalize what actually happens for all of us, the less likely we will get stuck in a shame cycle holding ourselves and our colleagues to impossible standards.
Seeking safety in groups, our brains have evolved a deep sensitivity to social hierarchy and what is happening in our interactions with others. Our social nature gives us a strong innate need to be seen and heard by others, to belong to a group and to be treated fairly compared to others.
As organizations shift towards a racial justice-centred culture, Regardless of if a conflict is task-oriented or those where social needs are violated by others, a fear of open conflict must be replaced with the strategies and skills for productive struggle.
In this session, participants will reflect on how their upbringing informs how they respond and react to conflict in the workplace, unpack how a victim-mindset may take over when the conflict overlaps with positional power differences, consider how to self-coach oneself to identify and articulate core unmet needs, and design requests to resolve tension.
Inviting, intuiting and receiving feedback is a critical muscle that an organization must develop in the journey towards Antiracism. Everyday racism persists because feedback from those with less positional power can be minimized or side-stepped. At the same time, feedback is necessary for all, regardless of positionality, to grow and develop skills.
In the first half of this session, we will unpack the role of feedback in ones own professional growth, how to separate the underlying gift any feedback offers in one’s journey towards self-knowledge and growth from the wounding or embarrassment feedback might cause, and how to receive and integrate feedback with grace.
In the second half of this session we will practice offering feedback to others through a three-part process: by sharing concrete evidence, describing the impact and making a request or proposal.
By strengthening the muscle of both giving and receiving feedback, we grow our influence.
If dominant culture thrives on individualism, an urgent pace driven by paternalistic assignment of tasks, and the stifling of conflict, then transformative culture rests on collaboration, big picture context setting, authentic grapplic and debate to arrive at collectively held decisions, and transparent implementation plans that allow for accountability. Inclusive facilitation is the key to this type of power-sharing for collective impact.
In this session, participants will learn the Be the Change methodology of layering group development principles with agenda design strategies and build the confidence and skills to hold process goals along with session outcomes.
By ensuring your meeting participants feel connected, grounded and informed, you create the conditions for a high performing team.
In this session, we will learn strategies to deepen relational trust amongst your team members, visibilize how to support various learning styles, and design meeting agreements that will allow for more transparency and inclusion.
Finally, we will practice interactive techniques to invite a debate of ideas, where the facilitator listens for and lifts up key tensions to be resolved, rather than allowing the debate to dissolve into conflict.
Working from home has offered some new dips and turns. The simple in-person reminders have turned into 3 texts, 2 emails and 1 ZOOM call. Going virtual should not result in less collaboration and flattened meetings with one-way conversations driven by PowerPoints. In this session, participants will learn how to use a range of simple online tools like Google Docs and slides to slightly advanced tools such as MURAL to gather team feedback, integrate collaborative brainstorming and support transparent planning.
80% of your budget pays for staff time—staff development is a must! How do we encourage performance, attention to timelines, and results-based thinking without replicating the extractive qualities of the dominant culture?
Through the right combination of guidance and relational support, a supervisor can develop the natural talents of their team, serve as inspiration when the going gets tough, and set high expectations for those around them to achieve transformational results using an Equity-based Framework for Staff Development. Developing these super-qualities takes dedication and a passion to invest in those around you.
Because most organizations are patterned against dominant culture belief-systems, those that work fast, write well, show up on time, prep intensely, and speak in bullet points will often be elevated as successful, while those with different learning and working styles will be critiqued and left behind. When dominant culture is de-centered, room can be made for other gifts and strengths that our organizations need.
In this session, supervisors will reflect on ways to dismantle dominant beliefs about “high performing vs low-performing employees” and translate our Supervision for Equitable Employee Development Framework into practical strategies to integrate culturally responsive techniques such as:
As our country exploded with a dual health and race pandemic, how were staff with various positional power supported to navigate a turbulent context? What are the expectations for employee performance and deliverables when one is dealing with personal, systemic, or societal trauma? In this session, we will discuss brain science on how the presence of the stress hormone cortisol- impacts one's cognitive functioning ability. We will then unpack supervision strategies to see a trauma shape impacting a staff member, name it with compassion versus pathology, and develop a plan for support and performance.
Racial constructs have long impacted our culture – what can we do about it? In this session, we will unpack a three-part framework that describes the journeys we walk to disentangle ourselves from institutionalized racism. This work requires knowledge of oneself, ability to recognize and name internalized and systematized oppression, and the courageous work to engage across cultural differences to experiment with equity and inclusion in organizations and relationships. We will combine participant story-telling with a research-backed framework to equip individuals and teams to predict and prepare for the challenges that emerge in anti-racism efforts, develop compassion for the struggle, and develop the resiliency required to persevere.
Being black in America brings unique joys as well as stress. If you identify as black, you need no further explanation of what we are referring to. This session is an opportunity to join other black identified staff to share what it means and what it takes to be black today. Join this circle-type space for connection, support and celebration of black identity.
What to Bring: Something that represents your ancestry (An object, a photo, an image… do you!).
How does our “whiteness” impact our work with communities of color? Now more than ever we need white people empowered to talk to other white people. Join us for an insiders conversation on what it means to be white, and the allyship opportunities that we can engage in to contribute to a more just and equitable society.
The term “people of color” (POC) encompasses people of diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds. In this session we will acknowledge and think actively about how each of our communities distinctly experience racism, as well as the ways Anti-blackness permeates our cultures. By developing our dual capacity to process oppression we experience while simultaneously acknowledging privilege we will strategies for solidarity in the movement towards more justice and equity for all.
In this session, organizational teams will explore the impact of dominant culture ideals (based on the work of Tema Okun) such as perfectionism, sense of urgency, and individualism in organizational practices. These beliefs pervade most of our organizations through our practices. We will define fourteen organizational practices steeped in white supremacy beliefs and reflect on areas of strength and opportunity for the organization/team. Participants will then identify transformative practices, as alternative ways of getting work done while preserving relationships, rigor and effectiveness. Finally, the group will choose one practice exercise to explore greater power-sharing, transparency, or collectivism.
Inviting, intuiting and receiving feedback is a critical muscle that an organization must develop in the journey towards Antiracism. Everyday racism persists because leaders are able to silence feedback that is constantly being sent by those with less positional power. Some ways they do this include minimizing the feedback itself (that complaint is unreasonable), making the feedback about an individual versus a systemic issue (if that person was on top of their work this wouldn’t be an issue), or becoming confused by the message (I don’t even understand what they were saying. It must not be important.). In this session we will review feedback your leadership team collected in session one, dig into generating examples and specifics of areas of opportunity, and designing transformative practices to test in the coming weeks.
Most organizational leaders are selected, promoted and valued for their ability to hold a long-range vision, turn strategic priorities into concrete next steps, manage and grow staff, and hold functional expertise in critical areas such as human resources, finance, operations, or program design. As your team engages in a process to center racial equity in organizational culture, this new North Star must be incorporated into the job descriptions of leadership team members. Studies show that while anyone can attend a training or read a book on antiracism, about 50% of current leaders will not be able to internalize antiracist values in ways that will allow them to lead from this perspective. When leadership team members are divided - some holding dominant culture ideals with others struggling to pivot towards antiracist practices - an inertia will overcome the system. In this session, leadership team members will:
This is a 90 minute bonus Coaching session!
Work with a BTCC consultant to complete the follow-up action items from the previous session. In this individualized session, your coach will take your leadership team through a process to:
Moving from strategic priorities into an action plan is riddled with opportunities for us to backslide into dominant culture practices. In this final session, it is time to wrap up what has been learned, share out plans, and develop creative strategies for ongoing support as needed. There will be time provided in this session for teams to work in small groups to share out their plans, get feedback, and plan for hurdles.
Change is hard, but not changing is harder. Systems of oppression affect our Black, brown, and indigenous communities most.
Members of boards, governance committees, and community groups: It is time to take charge within our spheres of agency—our boards and organizations. We'll work together to examine where dominant culture seeps into your board culture.
Lean into this moment to make the culture match your values. Join us for this specially designed training. In this training, we will:
The events of police brutality and racial injustice highlight that systemic and institutional racism still abounds in our country. While protests rage in the streets, what about the internal culture of your organization? How did you acknowledge the context for your staff? How were black staff supported to endure yet another wave of highly visibilized lynchings? What are the ways your organizational practices replicate dominant culture internally?
In this 2.5-hour interactive session join other organizational leaders in an exploration of how white supremacy ideals become embedded in organizational practices, and strategies to re-design both policies and practices to actively promote anti-racist culture.
We won’t get it done in two and a half hours but here’s what we will do in this introductory session: