Soulful Expression

Race Literacy

Date: Thursday, 3/16/23

Time: 1- 4 pm

Location: Baltimore Unity Hall

This session will explore terms and concepts that are central to naming and framing the interpersonal, intrapersonal, institutional, and systemic appendages of race and racial hierarchy. This session is essential to the foundation of one's internal investigation of their internalized racial oppression and/or superiority. Participants will engage in experiential learning designed to elucidate the lived experiences of structural violence that is framed around racism. The competencies learned will provide participants with a toolbox of information to build their capacity in facilitating difficult and direct discussions regarding racial justice.

Date: Thursday, 4/20/23

Time: 1- 4 pm

Location: Baltimore Unity Hall

Culture is the sum total of our lived experiences, esthetic standards, communication styles, operational values, etc. Organizations and social movements engaged in planned organizational systems and or community change often neglect to identify the DNA that holds them together–their values and operational ethos. Black and Brown people in the workplace often rely on their ability to identify and negotiate racism in order to survive and thrive. This session will explore how inequitable power systems are part and parcel to institutional culture and can extract opportunities for individual and community empowerment. It’s important for social health providers to audit how power is leveraged as a system to thwart progress and change. Participants will learn how to identify covert power systems and begin the process of power analysis operating in organizations, systems, and communities.

Date: Thursday, 5/18/23

Time: 1 - 4 pm

Location: Baltimore Unity Hall

Funders are tying strings to connect resources by requesting that providers create equity strategies and benchmarks. This process begins with auditing policies, practices, and operational systems. Collecting information for analysis requires a multi-prong approach of reviewing pre-existing data, including the origin story of the institution, human resources data, and conducting key informant surveys and interviews. This session will explore how this process can create organizational “white water” by triggering racial trauma for people of color and uncovering unconscious biases of supervisors and co-workers. Participants will learn key indicators to begin an analysis that focuses on measuring the impact of REDI audits and benching development and learn key strategies to navigate the turbulence of uncovering disparities that are often baked into organizational culture.

(REDI) Creates PTSD

Date: Thursday, 6/15/23

Time: 1- 4 pm

Location: Baltimore Unity Hall

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a hidden condition that can be triggered by ongoing experiences with microaggression, discrimination, and retaliation for speaking up and out about inequitable policies, practices, and culture that undermines people who experience discrimination due to class, disability, educational/employment status, ethnicity, gender expression or identity, national origin, race and sexual orientation individually or with intersectionality. This condition can also be triggered when frontline REDI practitioners constantly experience covert, uninformed, and performative efforts without a real destination or plan of action. This session will explore how Courageous Conversations designed to uncover workplace biases are often fatiguing and can trigger workplace PTSD. Participants will learn how to recognize the conditions of a toxic work environment and learn strategies to support and implement mindfulness within organizational operating norms.

Date: 7/20/23

Time: 1-4 pm

Location: Baltimore Unity Hall

Facilitating Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives should/must confront the history and apparatus of racism. DEI practitioners’ bodies become the container for the resistance of shifting power dynamics. The DEI arena consists of practitioners who were promoted to often ambiguous positions without the benefit of committed leadership and the authority to move the needle of racial equity in policy and practice. This session will explore the restraining forces that take a toll on the economic, emotional, mental well-being of practitioners, and ultimately resulting in physical health challenges and a diminished quality of work life. Participants will share strategies to cope in toxic environments and will learn ways to leverage healing technologies in the moment to develop a practice of self-care in the workplace.

Date: Thursday, 8/17/23

Time: 1-4 pm

Location: Baltimore Unity Hall

The work environment can promote productivity and a healing space for those who work in trauma-exposed environments. Often, social health practitioners are exposed to vicarious trauma as a result of working with community members who are experiencing chronic and compound stress. The interior composition of a client serving environment can further induce toxic stress. This session will explore how the positioning of furniture in the workplace, color pallets, art, lighting, plants, sound and ergonomics can reduce stress for both provider and client. Participants will learn trauma informed design principles that promote wellness and biophilia in the workplace.

Date: Thursday, 9/21/23

Time: 1-4 pm

Location: Baltimore Unity Hall

Capitalism is baked into institutions’ operating norms. Disrupting Eurocentric ethos of rugged individualism, scarcity and competitiveness in the Black social uplift space is important to our collective movement and sustainability. Dismantling social determinants of health will require the disruption of silos that further reinforce competition over collective impact and outcomes. To embrace the principles of Ubuntu (I am because we are) is to begin to unlearn the principles of bootstrapping. Participants will learn how to incorporate the principles of Ubuntu, create and deepen partnerships and collaborations, and identify tools to interact with those who have not embraced the principles of Ubuntu.

Date: 10/19/23

Time: 1-4 pm

Location: Baltimore Unity Hall

The Myth of White Supremacy is centered in every aspect of workplace culture, interpersonally and structurally. It is not just the water in which we all exist; it is an anti-oppressive decision point that one ultimately decides to make or not to make. Dismantling the myth of white supremacy in work environments requires individuals, communities, and organizations to understand the stakes and range of possibilities of either choice. This session will explore the tactics used to promote the myth of white supremacy culture, including supervisory styles, communication practices, competitive environments, and performance reviews. Participants will engage in experiential processes that uncover the operating norms, as well as, uncover strategies to dismantle operational practices, policies, and procedures that reinforce and burden internal and external stakeholders.

Date: 11/16/23

Time: 1-3 pm

Location: Baltimore Unity Hall

With a standard in place that defines and identifies what it means to be diverse, equitable and inclusive it becomes possible to measure diversity, equity and inclusion in a company, understand that company’s “level” of diversity, equity and inclusion against the standard and drive measurable and methodical results - i.e. make the company more diverse, equitable and inclusive over time. This requires data skills on the part of the facilitator and leaders in the company. This session will introduce participants to a new measurement system and tool for diversity, equity and inclusion, and methods for understanding decision funnels in companies that can be analyzed and utilized to drive improvements.