Grounded Race Equity

We have tried to teach our brains to think about race, but white supremacy culture doesn’t live in our thinking. It lives in our bodies.

We operate from the knowledge that white supremacy culture is inculcated in our systems and structures and in us. It is in the soil and the water of our lives, how could it not be in us? Our approach to race equity work begins with expanding our awareness of the ways white supremacy culture resides not just in our thinking but also our bodies. This awareness helps us understand the disconnect and challenges many of us experience as we work to align our intentions with the impact of our actions.

Our approach is rooted in the understanding that as Resmaa Menakem explains, “we will never outgrow white-body supremacy just through discussion, training, or anything else that is mostly cognitive. Instead, we need to look to the body — and the embodied experience of trauma.” The first step in our journey toward healing, wholeness, and racial equity is learning about our own neurobiology and practicing ways to settle our bodies and regulate our emotions. Without the tools for somatic and emotional regulation, it is difficult to even have the kind of courageous and vulnerable conversations we need to have with ourselves and others. We integrate the science of neurobiology and somatic practices with racial justice, decolonizing, and liberatory frameworks to help identify, honor, and ground how we as individuals and organizations enter and hold our ways of being and working in the world.

Uprooting white supremacy culture is hard work. It will be uncomfortable, painful, and even heartbreaking. We are not doing it right if it is not. But even though the work is hard, it can also be joyful and liberating. We use wisdom, love, and humor to invite folks into sacred inquiry and practice in order to remove the barriers for change.

For the last twelve years, we have helped many organizations begin and/or deepen their race equity practice. Our approach to this work

can be thought of as iterative, emergent, and evolutionary. We work closely with our clients to co-design a process that feels good and reflects wherever they are in the process in the Continuum of Becoming An Anti-racist Organization.

Book your consultation today!

Sample of our offerings

Practice. Practice. Practice. We cannot say this enough. It is critical for substantial and sustainable race equity work that everyone responsible for carrying out the organization’s mission is committed to practice individually and together – doing the work of uprooting white supremacy (and all the other connected -isms) within themselves as well as within the organization. For this reason, our workshops are often followed by practice workshops, 1:1 coaching, and/or facilitated caucus spaces in order to deepen commitment, understanding, and integrated practices needed for personal and organizational transformation.

Emotional & Somatic Justice & Liberation

This workshop is foundational to our approach to race equity/DEI work. We believe it is absolutely essential to begin with tools for emotional and somatic self-regulation in order to better hold energy in our bodies to nurture the safety, support, and connection needed to have courageous and vulnerable conversations.

In this workshop, we will explore what white body supremacy has done to all of us emotionally and in our bodies. This powerful act of decolonization remembers our heart and body as intelligences that inform our lives and the lives of those around us. Here we learn why this work is important. We get to reclaim our wholeness, our humanity.

Gifts of Conflict

We have learned that one of the biggest challenges to racial equity is fear of conflict – fear of being wrong or seen as a bad person. This fear keeps us from having the tough conversations, listening to each other with an open heart, and investigating what can be learned from the conflict.

In this workshop, we reframe conflict as a gift – an opportunity to heal, grow, and love. Imagine if we shifted our individual and cultural practice of avoiding conflict towards one that celebrates healing and growth and commitment to love and struggle together. Imagine if people were less afraid to admit their mistakes and harm to others and are more willing to face the fears that keep them disconnected.

Four Is of Oppression

Deepening our learning, this workshop explores all the ways white supremacy manifests within our culture, institutions and systems, relationships, and in us. Through collective and self inquiry we will name the ideas, values, practices, and processes that underpin and uphold white supremacy with a particular emphasis on the field your organization works in; so that we can re-story them and practice new ways of being.

Indigeneity & Colonization

We work with organizations, especially those doing work with Indigenous communities, to understand the history and impacts of colonization and the erasure of Indigenous Peoples that continues today. We offer workshops and coaching that helps organizations move beyond stereotypes — mascots, your grandmother, and costumes in order to shift their relationships with Indigenous communities.

Past clients

WIA-Youth Start Program

Women AdvaNCe

Lumbee Tribe of NC Lumberton

Chamber of Commerce

Two Hawk Employment Services

Pembroke Chamber of Commerce

NC Coalition against Domestic Violence

Non Profit Marketing Guide

Robeson County Partnership for Children

Southern Movement Assembly

Robeson Health Care

Lumber River Council of Governments

League of Chicago Theatres

National Coalition for Non Profits

UNC Chapel Hill

UNC Pembroke

Guardian Ad Litem

Alternate Roots