Mohammed Soriano Bilal

12 Steps Towards Appreciating Diversity Have you ever been misunderstood due to cultural differences? Have you ever longed for everyday, logical, concrete steps for communicating and forming strong, lasting friendships with people from different cultures (i.e. difference genders, ethnicities, abilities, sexualities, etc.)? With this presentation, Mohammed has helped thousands of people move beyond the sheer tolerance of difference. His 12 Steps Towards Accepting Diversity is a fun, interactive presentation sprinkled with scholarship, hip-hop, and self-reflective narratives that equip the participant with easy, valuable, and powerful tools for appreciating the wondrous diversity around us.

Freedom Dialogues: Navigating Conflict and Fostering a Liberatory Culture in Higher Education In this session, Mohammed delves into the multifaceted role of dialogue in creating inclusive and equitable environments for all stakeholders – staff, students, and faculty alike. Through experiential activities, participants will learn how to harness the power of dialogue to build empathy, navigate socio-political animus, and foster a liberatory culture. Key topics include:

• Understanding the transformative potential of dialogue in addressing conflicts and fostering liberation.
• Strategies for promoting empathy and understanding among diverse stakeholders.
• Techniques for challenging oppressive systems and structures within higher education institutions.
• Empowering marginalized voices to drive meaningful change and advocate for social justice. By the end of the workshop, participants will emerge equipped with actionable insights and concrete strategies for implementing a transformative dialogue program at your institution.

How to Create Brave and Safer Spaces in an Anxious World How can we have difficult or challenging conversations with people who may not agree with or grasp our perspectives? How do we create safer, structured environments where people from different social identities can explore power, privilege, positionality, and systems of belief? We live in a time of unprecedented change and uncertainty, a situation which has forced many to seek refuge in comfortable, familiar spaces devoid of meaningful differences and ideological challenges. In this workshop, Mohammed utilizes experiential activities and scholarship to catalyze intergroup dialogue and understanding across differences. Participants will learn dialogic methods for examining their own social identity and its relationship to power, alongside skills for designing braver and safer spaces - so necessary for engaging more people to transform our institutions to be true beacons for equity and social justice.

Recognizing Bias in the Workplace - How to Create a More Inclusive Environment If bias is an error in decision-making, and errors can be bad for business, how do we work toward effectively mitigating bias in our personal lives and the workplace? We start by understanding how bias affects us and how we might interrupt the patterns that lead to bias. In this presentation, Mohammed provides insights into tested methods for creating a more inclusive workplace.

Big, Little Steps Toward Inclusive Leadership - How Leaders Can Use Small Wins to Build Trust For many organizations, the development of equitable policies and the shifting of culture needed to actualize those policies takes clear strategy, care, and time. For leaders looking to make substantive, meaningful change, this workshop explores the concept of small wins the short-term actions inclusive leaders need to take to demonstrate their commitment to Diversity, Equity & Inclusion while long-term policies are being institutionalized.

Social Justice is a Value Is charity Social Justice? Volunteering? Service Learning? If Social Justice is a living, breathing thing, then our understanding of it, our relationship with it, affects our actions around it. Our values aren't immune to our weaknesses and prejudices. In this talk/workshop, we explore Social Justice as a Value, a value that we place on living systems. So come use a little scholarship, a little Hip-Hop, and a little laughter to explore the Social Justice that lives in you.

Preference & Prejudice Do you prefer pink or blue, car or bike-- black man or white woman? When choosing A over B- how do preconceived socio-cultural notions affect our daily choices and what role does prejudice play in our preferences? Preference & Prejudice is a engaging, insightful examination of preference and its role in the ways we move toward and away from one another. Using his own personal narrative, Mohammed Bilal blends scholarship, rap and spoken word into a playful exploration of preference and desire, elucidating everyday methods for open interactions.

Spatial Awareness While people of any composition are allowed equal treatment under U.S. law, do Black Americans occupy the same space as White Americans? Hurricane Katrina, the Digital Divide, the killing of Black people by police and vigilantes, and the Federal abandonment of (un)affordable housing in big city America, all shed light on the ways in which "space is proscribed, denied, and ascribed" for people of African descent living in America. Using scholarship, personal narratives and Hip-Hop lyrics to highlight the ongoing quest for equity and inclusion in America, Mohammed Bilal explores Blackness and Space, offering practical solutions toward greater understanding and a freer America.