About the Learning Lab
The goal of these online Learning Lab sessions is to provide you with revitalized and more expanded equity analyses and orientations for your workplace or organization. We will strengthen your capacities in key transformational areas through the practices of radical imagination, collective health-focused strategies, and creative storytelling, As above, so below: these transformational areas are both the roots and the branches needed to heal and address the collective issues of inequity and lack of imagination we face.
During these Learning Lab sessions, we will dream and organize around Marian Wright Edelman’s insightful quote: ‘… you can’t be what you can’t see.’ Through mini-modules of learning engaging the arts, our own stories, and transformative and liberatory equity questions and concepts, we will better see patterns of harm and destruction specific to our challenges while reigniting and sensing into our collective dreams and visions in order to best redesign our futures. We will find inspiration and the ability to lovingly crack open our thinking and seeing such patterns and visions through weaving in the voices of visionary artists, political activists , and scientists.
To see clearly also means seeing and feeling the ‘whole’ of the issues and the changes we are facing, emphasizing a focus on both the individual and the organizational, and both the internal-facing issues to self and group as well as the external-facing ones. This comprehensive approach calls us to center our collective health and well-being in terms of content and format. Sessions are designed with participants’ health and accessibility in mind and centered. This includes length of sessions, time for rest and breaks, spreading out sessions in doable ways, and emphasizing multiple ways of knowing and being. Through moving pre- and post-session engagements, silent reflection, small group work and large group discussions, you will learn to go deeper in your analyses and further develop an orientation to your equity work, both of which can help sustain equity efforts in such profoundly shifting and deeply challenging times.
Significant time will be spent looking at and working on the particulars of your organization/workplace. To that end, we encourage you to send more than one person to this Lab so that teams can work together and learn together.
This is an advanced Learning Lab. It assumes that attendees have a basic
understanding of:
● why and how transformative approaches (versus strictly transactional ones) address
white supremacy and structural racism;
● the need for rooting in more creative, imaginative and mindful practices in order to move us towards greater transformation;
● being aware of and having some practice in letting go of practices that keep us in siloed, top-down, supremacist and/or or internalized oppressive ways of being;
● the patterns and relationships that drive systems and structures;
● the history and ongoing presence of colonialism, white supremacy, and exploitation;
and
● how contemporary systems of inequity continue to be embedded in structures,
cultures, and collective social identity formations.
This Learning Lab will be conducted on Zoom. It will be structured to allow for significant breaks.
First person from an organization — $600
- Each additional person — $450
Facilitators
SHAKTI
BUTLER, Ph.D.
Founder & President of World Trust
Shakti Butler, Phd. Founder and President of World Trust Educational Services, a 20+ year old non-profit producing films, learning labs and trainings, and curricula offering comprehensive capabilities necessary to help you solve the most complex issues of your organization. Our work heals and transforms people, communities, and institutions. Shakti has produced 5 documentary films including the iconic Cracking the Codes: The System of Racial Inequity and Healing Justice.
Ericka Huggins
World Trust Facilitator
Ericka Huggins is an educator, Black Panther Party member, former political prisoner, human rights advocate and poet.
For 40 years Ericka has lectured in the United States, and internationally, on Restorative Practices and, the role of spiritual practice in creating social change. Ericka speaks on campuses, and in community, about the importance of inclusive grassroots movements.
Ericka was professor of Sociology and African American Studies from 2011 through 2015 in the Peralta Community College District. At Merritt College, home of the Black Panther Party, she
co-created and taught a course titled, “The Black Panther Party- Strategies for Organizing The People”.
Currently Ericka works with WORLD TRUST facilitating conversations about Race and Gender Equity. In addition, she facilitates workshops on Radical Self Care for Women of Color.