“Hope is a waking dream.”

Aristotle

Areas of Expertise

Decolonizing Pedagogies: Creating Expanded Capacity for our Classrooms

Our current educational system relies on passive learning, which often results in one-way data dumping. This kind of pedagogical practice centralizes one expert and accelerates dangerous hierarchies within teaching and learning. When we re-imagine the classroom as a space and place to decolonize our pedagogies, we also participate in the transformation of teaching. This results in an expanded capacity for those who share our classroom spaces.

Teaching is more than a data dump; it is a process of tending to all the threads of instructional design. When we leave room for embodied awareness and expand our capacity through a somatic lens, we connect the dots and deepen our shared collective analysis. Together we can participate in decolonizing practices that allow us to quickly pivot out of the hierarchies that accelerate harm and diminish transformative learning. 

Prerequisites for Effective DEI Work: Building “Networks of Trust” within White Serving Institutions

While Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) are important, we must also recognize that DEI work alone is not enough. The work of “composting” supremacy culture is a marathon and necessitates Networks of Trust. These networks have actually rapidly declined in recent years, due to the machinations of supremacy culture.

We must first work to build Networks of Trust within our institutions and systems, so that we can successfully implement DEI into our communities. When we rehabilitate Networks of Trust, we are better able to live into an ethos that can expand to include DEI efforts. Without Networks of Trust, we run the risk of tokenizing our diversity hires and subjecting BIPOC folks to a system where they are unable to flourish.

The Intersections of Queer Justice & Anti-Racism

This topic addresses the overwhelming logic of whiteness in our LGBTQ movements. It helps us imagine a way to do queer justice work, which will amplify those at the “margins of the margins,” and displaces the reasoning of dominant power structures.

Displacing Whiteness

This can be delivered at 101, 201, 301, or more advanced-level workshops. It helps folks begin talking about whiteness and the need to displace whiteness. It can help faith communities and organizations imagine restructuring their organizational framework by using anti-oppression methods and power analysis.

Gender Justice as Human Rights Work

In order to do gender justice, we need to examine the ways our religious discourse (theologies and ethics) stabilize gender into an antiquated gender binary. I help communities rethink our gender justice through storytelling and imaginative exercises, to connect our stories and expressions of gender to a larger human rights framework. 

Bridging with Difference & Rethinking Intersectionality

This workshop can be done in two ways. The first is with a sole emphasis on using storytelling to bridge difference. How can we learn to build bridges from the center of our own difference, with the variety of differences around us? How can bridging with difference be a catalyst for us to be unified in our deepest differences?

The second version of the workshop uses theories and methods of the philosophy of difference to rethink intersectionality. How do we bridge the radical differences that we encounter in our communities, schools, or churches? How do we explore our call to serve our communities when the world around us discourages us from bridging the radical differences that we encounter on a daily basis? By coming to a better understanding of the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, citizenship, and other differences that we encounter, we are better able to serve our communities from a place of radical connectedness.

DEI+ Consulting

As a public scholar and thought leader, I’ve worked with both local and national organizations (in businesses and C-Suite tiers) to help curate cultural and organizational change, with a focus on nurturing a sense of belonging. Through a REDI lens (racial equity, diversity, and inclusion), I will help you cultivate greater awareness of yourself, your organization or business, to help best execute the kind of change you want to see. As needed, I partner with a Somatic Expert to help bridge theories of racial equity with bodily awareness (adjacent to mindfulness). This work is best done relationally and is often best supported by embodied practices. 

The calling for racial equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging is in the body. Are you ready to chart the path for equitable change in your organization or business? Are you prepared to foster relationships with those who are radically different from you to help create conditions for ethical futures? I would be honored to help facilitate your process for greater awareness and change for another possible world.

This program connects the values supporting my work with the values you embody in your organization. I do REDI work that responds to your unique needs and creates a framework for actionable change in the daily life of your organization. We’ll focus on small actionable steps, which can be very rewarding both in your organization and personal life.

I am not here to judge you but rather to midwife equitable change in your organization. Our work will translate to actionable change in the lives of your employees and a culture of belonging for those who often feel marginalized.

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  • Group Coaching

  • Workshops

  • Keynote Talks

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“May this decade bring more than just solutions, more than just a future - may it bring words we don't know yet, and temporalities we have not yet inhabited. May we be slower than speed could calculate, and swifter than the pull of the gravity of words can incarcerate. And may we be visited so thoroughly, and met in wild places so overwhelmingly, that we are left undone. Ready for composting. Ready for the impossible. Welcome to the decade of the fugitive.”

Báyo Akómoláfé