Challenging White Supremacy through Community Care
SHIFT will unpack the ways we internalize white supremacy values and share back practices on how we can begin reconstructing a culture that recenters our humanity. Building off of the work of Tema Okun and the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, we will explore what it means to support and commit to practices rooted in care, rest, and honoring processes. Through this workshop, participants will leave with an awareness of what it means for us - as individuals and organizations - to challenge white supremacy through shifted value sets and in the ways we interact with each other.
Women of Color Entrepreneurship and Leadership
Co-founders of SHIFT, a WOC owned racial & gender equity consulting business, shares lessons learned as Women of Color navigating entrepreneurship and leadership. From challenging respectability politics, pushing back on imposter syndrome, and calling-in into our power and strength, SHIFT vulnerably shares the tools and tips that have helped they’ve learned along the way. They will transparently share back their studentship in running a business that operates in white supremacist capitalist systems, whilst also trying to challenge those same systems.
Respectability Politics
Our standards of professionalism have been set in place by white supremacy culture and as a result, the ways we perform in workplaces can compromise our own identities and understandings of self. How can we bring about workplace culture shifts to reflect who we best are? How does respectability politics tie into toxic work environments and self-care at work and other community spaces? How do we decolonize the workplace to redefine what professionalism can look like, in order to create spaces where individuals can thrive? In this workshop we will explore these questions through a facilitated dialogue on how we can - and the need to - bring more of our identities, diversity, and backgrounds into historically white spaces.
Anti-Blackness in Brown Communities
Anti - blackness exists in our communities, even in communities of color. Through this workshop, participants will come to understand that the structures of racial injustice in the US lie between black vs. white colorism and the roots colonialism. How do we address racism that exists in between communities of color? How can we have productive conversations to combat anti-blackness within our own spaces (and families)? In this workshop we will explore these questions through a facilitated dialogue to openly talk about best practices, share anecdotal experiences, and find tangible takeaways to apply in our own personal situations.
Sexual Harassment Prevention
We employ arts-based exercises, facilitated dialogue, and media literacy to contextualize rape culture in our current day climate. Participants leave aware of power on a systematic level while also understanding their individual power to change these systems. We conduct bystander training and intervention tactics, deconstruct ideas about the gender binary, and rebuild definitions of consent within nuanced scenarios.
Other Topics Include:
- Race, Power, Privilege & Gender 101 for Students
- Uplifting the Complexities of the Asian American Experience: A Community Dialogue
- Creative Content as Resistance - From IRL to the Internet
- Solidarity Building
- Identity and Introspection
- Short and long-term DEI consulting and professional development
