In-Person Summit Experiences on Friday September 30 at the Monona Terrace:
MORNING INSTITUTES | 9am – Noon
Institutes will offer attendees the opportunity to dedicate three hours to be in a community of practice with peers focused on a specific area of their racial justice practice. Attendees will be led by local, regional, and/or national guest practitioners to strengthen their personal and relational practice, as well as deepen their understanding of building community and power for racial justice and co-liberation. These sessions require pre-registration.
Featured Institute: Decolonizing the Body – FULL
Offered by Kelsey Blackwell (she/they) | Audience: BIPOC Bodies
What would it feel like to get free? Are there practices we can lean into now to taste this possibility more frequently? In Decolonizing the Body we’re examining what BIPOC bodies have ingested to survive inside of systems intent on diminishing and subordinating our bodies. We’re then “trying on” new ways of being that align with our values and the truth of who we know ourselves to be. By dropping out of our heads and into our bodies, we access the wisdom of our indigenous inheritance – even if we don’t know these traditions and practices they reside in our muscles.
Our time together will center four focus areas: Re-membering, Reclaiming, Relating and Releasing and include movement, somatic awareness, creative, and play practices. Please dress comfortably, bring water, something to write in and anything else your body needs to feel attended to while, sitting, laying and moving. Chairs and cushions will be available.
Ancestral Resonance – FULL
Offered by Erika Rosales (she, her, ella) and Charisse Johnson (she/they) | Audience: BIPOC
This experience aims to be an integration of our ancient wisdom from our ancestors as knowledge keepers to heal and transform the past as we shift into the future. The integration of this knowledge is vital as we restore our relationship with one another and allow ourselves to transform our current timeline to one that is in alignment with our inner power. This session will integrate a sharing of personal ancestral wisdom with breathwork, earth medicine, and movement. Participants will co-create tools that they can take with them to carry forward their healing journey.
Coming Home to Ourselves: Embodied Practices Supporting the Inner and Outer Work of Racial Justice – FULL
Offered by Lisa Baker (she/her) and Nola Walker (she/her) | Audience: All Attendees
Commitment to the deep work of racial justice is critical and complex, and, if not tended, can challenge our health and well-being. In this experiential session, participants will: learn to recognize various characteristics and impact of compromised health and wellness; engage in embodied contemplative practices; and discover strategies that facilitate self-compassion, restoration, and healing. At the end of this Institute it is our deep intention and hope that you leave feeling heard, seen, nurtured and inspired to live not only in service to others and a better world, but most essential to yourself.
Reproductive Justice, An Organizing Strategy to Change Structural Power and Inequities – FULL
Offered by Sarah Noble | Audience: All Attendees
Reproductive Justice (RJ) is an international movement that places reproductive health and rights within a Social Justice framework. This session will introduce its core principles; a brief history of reproductive oppression; and a deeper understanding of intersectionality, as well as an emphasis on racism and the role of white progressive allies in advancing an RJ agenda.
Effective movements require a base that reflects the diversity of our communities, and the leadership and expertise of those most impacted by reproductive injustice. RJ builds on the engagement and leadership of those who experience the greatest disparities and have the most need – Indigenous and other Black and Brown People, low-income, young, rural, immigrant, incarcerated, birthing and LGBTQ People. There’s much work to do. Let’s move together, in the work, so we can ALL get free!
Weaving our Paths through Mindful Movement
Offered by Marcela Kyngesburye | Audience: All Attendees
Mindful awareness can also be experienced as we move. Explore restoration and community building through gently guided practices. During this session there will be slow physical movements, opportunities for personal space, and guided conversation. How might a mindfulness practice manifest itself in personal and professional environments and in the community?
These movements can be experienced sitting or standing. Please dress comfortably.
All are welcome! No experience needed.
Who Will You Be In This Movement? An Institute Exploring Your Gifts to Bridge to Action for Racial Justice
Offered by Abha Thakkar (she/her) and Libby Tucci (she/her) | Audience: All Attendees
Every movement for collective liberation and a more just future requires distinct contributions from all kinds of people moving within their specific passions and skills. This Institute is an invitation to bring insight to what drives you to shape change for racial justice, as well as what gifts you have to contribute. Using the Social Change Ecosystem framework created by Deepa Iyer (Building Movement Project), participants will have the opportunity to reflect on their guiding values, and map the roles they want to play within their personal and professional lives to bridge to taking action within those roles. This is also an opportunity to connect with others and begin to co-create a plan for collective action as each of us lives into the gifts we are called to contribute to the movement.
Crafting Your Compass: Reflective Practices for Sustained Engagement in Racial Justice
Offered by erica Kruger (she/her), Laurel Ravelo (she/her), and Lori Gustafson (she/her) | Audience: White People
This session offers a space for individuals who identify as white to engage in practices of reflection, dialogue, consultation and creative design in service of sustained engagement in racial justice action. Utilizing art, visualization, reflective journaling, storytelling, and mindful connection practices we will move through three cycles of exploration: exploration of beliefs and values, exploration of intentions and commitment, and exploration of action and accountability. This session will be highly interactive and will seek to provide participants with processes that they can take with them and continue to apply in support of staying aware, aligned, and engaged in shaping a more just and well future for all. Participants are encouraged to dress comfortably and bring any materials (art supplies, journal, poetry, quotes, past reflective writing, visual images) that they might wish to use in our practices.
Knowing Ourselves Outside of Whiteness — An Arts Based Co-Inquiry
Offered by Ali Brooks | Audience: White People
The intention for this Institute is to build self-awareness around what we as white people have to bring to the work of building a new world outside of domination, extraction, exclusion, exploitation and supremacy. While not bypassing the impact of our whiteness, we have a responsibility to explore what it looks like to reclaim ways of being and knowing outside of the mechanisms of white supremacy. Together we will explore how we can move away from performative activism and towards clarity around our lineages, purpose, commitment, and contribution. Methods will include somatic mindfulness, ritual, storytelling and art making.
AFTERNOON SESSIONS | 12:45pm – 2:15pm
In collaboration with local and regional practitioners, educators, artists, authors, and advocates, 90 minute afternoon sessions will be offered as an opportunity for attendees to be in community around a chosen area of their practice.
“Improv for the People: Liberating your Mind and Body”
Offered by Mouna Algahaithi (she/her) and Kelly Saran (she/her) | Audience: All People who Identify as Women
Improv is an artform of freedom. Laughter and movement are liberating and good for the soul. Explore comedy and joy by taking part in this dynamic, movement-based workshop. We will use this time to play short-form improvisational games and build community with one another. This workshop will conclude with gentle stretching, mindfulness and reflection. No experience necessary; the only requisite is that you are willing to engage and try something new! Laughter guaranteed. Dress comfortably.
Our Grandmothers’ Recipes: Foodwork as Feminist Resistance
Offered by Kristy Kumar and Missy F. Tracy | Audience: All Attendees
Food literally fuels our everyday resistance. It connects us to living histories and legacies of survival. Yet coloniality, which severs the body from the land, maintains our dismemberment with our ancestral foodways. This workshop seeks to reclaim food knowledges and practices as sites of love, creativity, joy, and resistance. Participants will sit together around a set table, share bites of food, and will be encouraged through interactive prompts to reflect on their own relationship with foodwork as resistance. We will center feminist methodologies while simultaneously uplifting our own ancestors and personal histories through collective storytelling.
Personal Practice and Organizational Equity Transformation: Reflective Dialogue – FULL
Offered by Faith Stevenson and Abha Thakkar | Audience: All Attendees
Join us for a Reflective Dialogue that focuses on what we are learning about organizational change and what it looks like to be in right relationship with ourselves in the context of the workplace. This circle-style reflective experience centers stories, feelings, and insights about what it is like for you to bring your Race and Gender Justice practice to work every day to help shape organizational change.
Returning the Sacred to Mother
Offered by Elena Terry and Alejandro Miranda | Audience: All Attendees
In Returning the Sacred to Mother, Ho-Chunk Executive Chef and Founder Elena Terry shares a life nourishing discussion with Native/Latine filmmaker Alejandro Miranda Cruz on how BIPOC stories and ways of living are shifting narratives and transforming the world. This session will also screen Decolonizing Dinner directed by Alejandro Miranda Cruz and featuring Chef Elena Terry and Mixeca Chef Anthony Gallarday on preserving traditional Native cuisines.
Story, Freedom, Art and Healing
Offered by Rudy Bankston (he/him) | Audience: All Attendees
Embracing identity and deepening our knowledge of self is critical to justice-centered work and liberation. Personal storytelling, in particular, and creating art, in general, is a potently medicinal blend that can transcend our way of seeing, understanding, celebrating, confronting, and commenting on life in this current moment. Oftentimes these unscripted and impromptu conversations elicit stories and experiences that uncover the crushing underbelly of institutional and interpersonal oppression. Yet, because of the complex nature of these moments, our stories often lie dormant. How can we claim agency to deepen awareness of injustices? How can we convert the energy from our lived experiences into tangible, concrete actions? What does it mean to assert our right to heal despite raging currents that war against our wellness and try to destroy us? In this session, Rudy will take on these themes through sharing his journey while inviting others to reflect on their own stories and ways of healing through art (poetry, music and narrative). We will gather in community, bear witness together and lean in to what’s present.
Community Connection Space for People Impacted by War, Genocide, and Displacement
Offered by Myxee Thao and Emily Yang | Audience: This space is intended for people who have been impacted by war, genocide, forced displacement, and diaspora. People who may identify within this group include refugees, survivors of war, children of war, and their descendants.
We invite people (survivors and descendants) who have been impacted by war, genocide, and displacement into our community space. In a circle process, we will explore what it means for us to come home to ourselves and each other as places of sanctuary amid our struggles and joys for co-liberation. This session will also incorporate a short soul-calling ritual from the Hmong culture as a homecoming to our interconnectedness.
Shalom! Intersectional Social Justice Affinity Space for Jews and Allies
Offered by Shahanna McKinney-Baldon (she/her) and Jill W Pfeifer (she/her) | Audience: Jews and Allies
Who are Jews? What is antisemitism? What do Jewish traditions say about social justice? What opportunities does this year’s summit provide to teach and learn on these questions? Participants will explore these issues and more in this interactive generative dialogue session led by a multiracial team of Jewish women. All are welcome.
Wisconsin’s Youth INjustice System – Liberating the Futures of Wisconsin’s Young People
Offered by Dant’e Cottingham, Emily Coddington, and Erica Nelson | Audience: All Attendees
In Wisconsin, at age 17 if you are alleged to have committed a crime, the original jurisdiction is in adult criminal court. Wisconsin remains only one of three states still sending 17yr olds into the adult system.
Members of the Raise the Age Coalition (RTA) are passionate about changing the law so all seventeen-year-olds are in the youth justice system. The Coalition works to raise awareness of this issue and engage in advocacy efforts to change the law. In this session you will hear from Coalition members, including the perspective of those directly impacted, about the harm this has had and is having on our young people. More specifically, how Wisconsin is fairing in comparison to other states when it comes to meeting the needs of our youth through services, the intense struggles many young people face prior to youth justice involvement, and its disproportionate impact on youth and emerging adults of color. Lastly, we will explore how we can work together through advocacy and awareness to make the change.
Both/And: Reimagining and Attending to the Space “In-Between”
Offered by Satya Chima (she/her/they/them) | Audience: Mixed race, Biracial, Multiracial People
As mixed race, biracial, and multiracial people, we often straddle multiple worlds at once. The third-space, the Borderlands, La Frontera, the space in-between. Our racialized bodies may collide, meld together, transform, or shift throughout our lives and depending on relationships to land, people, and culture. How do we navigate this terrain? How do we hold space for ourselves and one another to create communities of belonging? What does the space “in-between” offer us and how can we attend to our own healing if our experiences carry pain or shame? This is a space for mixed race, biracial, and multiracial people to explore what our racial identities mean to us and the possibilities they provide for striving towards racial justice and co-liberation.
Bridging the Gap
Offered by Yanci Almonte (he/him/they/them) and Daphne Angelica Lemus (she, her, hers) | Audience: LGBTQIA+ BIPOC
How often are spaces created for you where your identities as BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ can exist together and are equally valued? Often these identities are usually not acknowledged nor is the space created for them to exist, yet they are crucial parts of our beings. Thus, we are holding an intentional space to create connections amongst ourselves, and share who we are, our experiences, struggles, resilience, and vulnerability. The conversation will be fueled through a collaborative effort to ensure connection and branching between each other to sustain empathy, compassion, and love for one another. The conversation will end in a reflective format through painting to represent our vision for the future and how we feel in this moment in time. The paintings will be used to make a symbol for the session, so please feel welcome to dress comfortably and not be afraid to get dirty!
Perspective as Power
Offered by Takeyla K. Benton (she/her) | Audience: BIPOC
How you perceive things determines how you receive things and dream of things. For BIPOC women and men, intrusive thoughts run deeper than imposter syndrome. The voices in our heads are programmed by intergenerational trauma, racism, systematic oppression, personal experiences and all the sensory data our bodies experience. These voices narrate our thoughts and color the filters we use to process the world. How do your voices speak to you? How do you know the difference between the voice of trauma and your true self? How can meditation help you on your healing journey? Join Takeyla Benton, Energy Healer, Life Coach, & Mystic, for a meditative workshop to ease you into understating these things about yourself. In this workshop you’ll learn about the connections between emotions, thoughts and breath work along with a guided meditation to aid you in reprograming your thoughts and using your perspective as your power.
Restorative Justice Parenting
Offered by Bill Baldon (he, him), Eugenia Highland Granados (ella, tu, she, her) and Shirin Kestin (She/Te/Heyya) | Audience: Parents and Caregivers of Color
This experience aims to be an integration of our ancient wisdom from our ancestors as knowledge keepers to heal and transform the past as we shift into the future. The integration of this knowledge is vital as we restore our relationship with one another and allow ourselves to transform our current timeline to one that is in alignment with our inner power. This session will integrate a sharing of personal ancestral wisdom with breathwork, earth medicine, and movement. Participants will co-create tools that they can take with them to carry forward their healing journey.
Walk it Like I Talk It: The Mind Body Connection of Movement and Communication
Offered by Kyra (Kye-rah) Johnson (she/her) | Audience: Black Women/Black Femmes/Black Non-Binary People
“Only 30% of communication is spoken, the remaining 70% is nonverbal”. In this offering we will explore the spiritual and cognitive link between movement and language. The session will engage in practices of partner work, group work, using the body by standing, sitting, gestures, and more. Lastly, we will be exploring how movement communication is linked to our family/generational history. Those with physical limitations are included and encouraged to participate!
Deconstructing Whiteness through Movement
Offered by Sarah Shatz (she/her), Sasha Lasdon (they/them) , and Rek Kwawer | Audience: White People
This is an invitation to get out of our heads and back into our full bodies! As people racialized as white, we often focus on what we think and what we say, strive for perfection, and often ignore what’s happening in the rest of our bodies. How can we bring the wisdom of our bodies to our individual and collective racial justice practice? In this experiential workshop, we will explore somatically what it feels like when we bring/leave out our full selves in our racial justice practice. We will investigate kindly when we may be acting out of a need for reassurance or validation, our relationship to making mistakes, explore consent and proximity, being seen, and interrupting.
Envisioning a Multi-racial Democracy: Building the Movement Together
Offered by Nicole Safar (she/her) and Mel Barnes (she/her) | Audience: White People
Join us for a co-facilitated discussion about individual and collective change that can move us towards a true multi-racial democracy. This discussion is not a laundry list of policy changes to “fix” our democracy, for example we won’t be talking about how to abolish the filibuster or expand the courts- both of which are important to our democracy. Policy changes alone cannot build a movement and we must grapple with the role white supremacy plays at both the individual and systems level to accomplish the change we need together. Participants will leave with an action plan for how they can use their own individual power to nurture this movement.
Increasing Your Engagement in Racial Justice Work
Offered by Laurie O’Donnell(she/her), Catherine Orr (she/her), and Laurel Ravelo (she/her) | Audience: White People
This session offers a space for individuals, who identify as white, to explore their commitment to racial justice. Many of us in our community care about inequities and want a more just world. And yet, there is a gap between this wish and taking tangible steps towards making this happen. We will examine motivations, barriers, and opportunities for racial justice work. You can then become more engaged, use the skills that you already have, and ultimately weave racial justice into your everyday life.
Supported Community for White People Newer to Racial Justice
Offered by Dani Rischall (she/her), Melissa Gombar, and Nancy Wrenn Bauch (she/her) | Audience: White People
Are you attending the Summit for the first time, or do you still feel like a newcomer to racial justice work? Are you confused about your role as white person in the movement for racial justice? Do you worry about making mistakes? Do you feel unsure about how to bring what you’re learning into daily conversations and actions? Do you need a place to share your experiences and questions?
You have the opportunity to be a part of a small, supported group with two touchpoints: in the morning on September 28 to connect and orient to the invitation of the Summit experience, and then again in-person on Friday the 30th to share and process together. Wherever you are in your racial justice journey, we welcome you into community to learn, and bridge your learning into your daily life.
AFTERNOON GENERATIVE DIALOGUE | 2:45pm – 4:15pm
An Intergenerational Dialogue with Angela Lang from BLOC, Judge Everett Mitchell, Representative Francesca Hong, Missy Tracy and youth activist Stephanie Salgado
All In-Person attendees will gather to listen to this closing collective conversation with guests who are leading and organizing for intersectional justice in various arenas of change. They will share about what it will take for us all to move together to shape change for racial justice at the structural level. As they share their perspectives on what is needed in their respective arenas of practice, participants will also be invited into imagination and planning for how they will take action in their own spheres of practice and advocacy.
Pre-Summit Session for BIPOC | 5pm on Tuesday, September 27
In addition to the above, this year’s Summit will also offer a Pre-Summit Session On-Site at Troy Farm for those who identify as BIPOC and who have a desire to connect to food and the land. This session is an invitation to experience Troy Farm on Madison’s Northside which is offered as a safe space for BIPOC attendees to connect with one another, the land and share a meal. You are welcome to bring a dish to share that helps to tell your own cultural story. You can also bring a lawn chair, water bottle and a your own take home box if you would like to take something with you!
Space for this session is limited and will be filled on a first requested, first served basis.
Attendees with a Hybrid Ticket (including Emerging and Young Adult Tickets) or an In-Person Summit Experience Ticket will receive an email in September with a form to pre-register for their choice of in-person experiences.
In-Person Experiences that are Open to All Summit Attendees with no need to pre-register are:
12:30 – 4pm
- Art Exhibition and Collective Co-Weaving Invitation with Featured Artist—Isha Camara: Visit the Grand Terrace to experience Isha’s exhibition, learn more about her work, purchase a print, or engage in your own reflective processing through weaving.
- Pop Up Market featuring BIPOC Creators and Justice Initiatives: All Summit attendees are welcome to visit featured booths from local and regional initiatives in Capitol Promenade Hallway.
4:30 – 8pm
- Rooftop Party: Bring your dancing shoes and join us in the joy of celebrating our ongoing journey of deep community, practice and transformative action! More details on guest performers will be shared closer to the start of the event.
COVID-19 and the In-Person Experience of the Summit
For all of our in-person experiences, we will be following the guidance of Public Health and ask that attendees wear face coverings while gathering indoors. COVID-19 vaccinations are highly encouraged for in-person Summit attendees. Hand sanitation will be readily available, and we have adjusted our capacities and space planning to allow for more space among participants while in sessions.
Important Note: While it is our intention to offer in-person experiences for hybrid ticket attendees on the 30th, the health and safety of our attendees is our priority. Therefore, if the CDC or other Public Health officials recommend we pivot our plans for any reason, we will do so. This could mean further reducing the capacity of people per in-person session, or shifting these offerings to a virtual modality. If this alternative would not work for you, please contact Jill Pfeiffer to explore other options.