This week we take you into a real experience Shannon had on a recent client engagement. It was an experience where it didn’t take long for race to become named explicitly, and Shannon was able to look at what she was, and wasn’t, tracking. We explore what came up for her, how she navigated it, and what some of the learnings she’s taken away from the experience. You’ll want to give this one a listen.

We decided we wanted to explore some of the topics we’ll be looking at in our 9-week program this fall, and decided to start with control. It just so happened that Shannon was on a family getaway, and some stuff was up for her, so we recorded part of our conversation.

We were both really struck by an interview with Resmaa Menakem, Báyò Akómoláfé, and Orland Bishop as they prepared for their event Three Black Men on June 24th and 25th. Their interview is far reaching, and it had us thinking about our work, what it means to facilitate, and how do we do this deep, uncomfortable work. We are incredibly grateful for these men, as well as those who are holding and supporting them as they do this work.

We are excited to be offering a new program this fall - **Disrupting Our Practice: Understanding Whiteness**. In this episode, we wanted to talk about the program - why we are doing it, what you can expect, how it's different than a lot of other programs out there. It's a deep dive into the heart of what it means to be in this work, and what it is that we are trying to build.

We’ve been wanting to have Jennie and Dylan on since the beginning of this podcast. This is one for the books, friends. Dylan Wilder Quinn (they/them) founded TransIntimate in 2020, to build connection and skill-building for cisgender people who want to be close to transgender people to know us beyond our pronouns. Jennie Pearl (she/her) is on the team at TransIntimate, working closely with Dylan. Both Jennie and Dylan are also on the core team at Holistic Resistance.

We started this conversation with an inquiry that Shannon’s been in for a bit: How do i build the capacity to really interrogate the tools I’m using? How do I develop a practice of looking at the tools and the ways that I use them that supports actually disrupting the norms that are making it so not everyone is heard? It ends up being a rather far reaching conversation that not only includes all of that, but looks at the ways we (white-bodied folks) don’t tend to give credit where it’s due. This is especially true when we consider the origins of many of the approaches we use in our work. We talk about the starting points for the conversations, and what does it really mean to move beyond the “formulaic approach” to some facilitation processes? How do we deal with situations where bottom up decision making is requested, but not actually respected in the end.

Reaching back a couple of weeks to when Greg interrupted Shannon’s thought to invite in the idea that maybe, just maybe, leaders should consider not making meetings, retreats, workshops mandatory—that’s what we’re doing today. What if instead of trying to figure out what to do next, we thought about what to stop doing? What if we gave people the freedom to walk away? What might we learn?

Today we come back to a powerful question that we started working with a few years ago: “What’s on top about race?” It’s one we learned from our teachers and friends at Holistic Resistance, and we’ve turned to it again and again. This time, we were both swimming in some different types of issues related to race: from how do we support our friends and colleagues who are People of the Global Majority when yet another horrific act of violence happens to what does it mean to be a white-bodied consultant among Latinx employees?

We were thinking about what it is to prepare to go into a space to facilitate—especially when we are pretty sure it will be a mixed space. What are the questions we should be asking ourselves before we go in a room like this? Or, more broadly, what are questions we might want to ask ourselves before taking on a project? As we started this conversation, it became clear that many of the questions we were asking were not necessarily the best. Pick up on it? Let us know!

We’re back! After taking a short hiatus for some rest and travel, we’re back and ready to dive into the conversations. We thought we’d start by reaching back to the experience of the workshops we did in February and March. The idea of talking about the workshops was first floated by a participant who was curious about how we experienced them, as well as what we learned. As we considered it, it became clear that there were aspects of the way that we hold these workshops that disrupt our own way of operating. You know, forcing us to disrupt our practice.