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“[There] is something so restorative to be able to share your experience of struggle and oppression in a way where. everyone else in the room is able to relate in one way or another without a sort of 'othering' that can happen when someone can empathize but can't relate."
Power 50 participant
Our Political Education Sessions
These are sessions that foster a shared political analysis of the context that women identified people of color organizers are leading within. They are facilitated in 2 to 3 hour-long blocks and are structured according to the Vertical Development pedagogy. This means that during each session we introduce a "heat" topic that awakens long held, under-examined perceptions, then unlearn/discern and advance through discussion, activities, and planned experiments.
These sessions can be particularly hard for both participants and facilitators. So we are always mindful to 1) remind the participants that the vertical development process is not one they need to do on their own—they have their siblings to lean on—and 2) always facilitate a "cooling" experience in the session that follows- meaning-making about the sessions via pair-ups, journaling, group reflection, or TeachBacks (wherein participants use their own voice and experiences to revisit a core concept with their peers).
INTRO TO VERTICAL DEVELOPMENT
Coming soon
Description: This session aims to build a shared identification of Women Identified POC as world builders, culture shifters, and political strategists. . It also aims to create a shared analysis of the conditions necessary for POC to assume this leadership and thrive in general. In this session, current Women Identified POC leaders connect their individual and their group’s lived experiences of standing in their power to a movement lineage.
Process: about 90 minutes minimum plus breaks with 16 people (up to 145min if in-person or additional time to pair breakouts)
Description: Organizers have achieved countless wins utilizing traditional organizing methods (such as the Alinsky Model), but if we dig into these approaches we can see that they are often rooted in the very oppressive structures that we are working to dismantle.
This session (in 4 parts) takes participants through an evocative process which explores familiar narratives, campaigns, and organizing approaches to understand how some of our common organizing methods limit our ability to achieve transformational goals. These sessions also invite participants to explore the potential of transformative approaches to organizing to build power and take radically doable first steps to addressing all manner of injustice.
Process: about 6 hours over 4 parts
Description: One of the deepest challenges we hear from Women Identified POC leaders centers around the disappointment and resistance they face from other staff of color for not being able to instantly transform oppressive organizational culture. On the staff end, we hear frustration over what they see as Women Identified POC leaders adopting oppressive behaviors as soon as they assume positional power or become ‘THE MAN’. In this session, staff and organizational leaders have the opportunity to think interdependently and strategically about how to continue transforming oppressive organizational structures together as they move through positions of power. (The structure of this exercise is based on the generational leadership workshop featured in the book Working Across Generations by Kunreuther, Kim, and Rodriguez.)
Process: minimum 2 hours
See companion session designed for organizational leaders here.
“Our experiences from being in a constant state of survival require each of us to do some inner work that materializes into outer impact. Otherwise, we are likely to perpetuate negative energy onto each other because we have not developed patterns to disrupt our shaping from oppression. The dis-ease of energy produced from oppression will literally live in our bodies until it is reactively released. When we do not or cannot make space to deal with the deep impact of oppression on our individual beings, we inevitably partake in a cyclical pattern of reactively expressing oppression, from the inside, to others around us.
This is vomiting rage.”
Rusia N. Mohiuddin, Vomiting Rage (2015)