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Rae Carter ~ Founder, Facilitator & Practitioner

Rae Carter Vermont

Rae (she/ki) is a communication facilitator, culture builder, equity educator, and healing arts practitioner. As the founder of EmpowR Transformation, she is an architect and designer, building a generative and reciprocal container to serve The Great Turning through the lineage of transformative justice. In collaboration and cocreation with people weaving movement for collective liberation, Rae cultivates emergence for fractals of transformational change.

Rae is an equity consultant and associate with The Creative Discourse Group, a wellness practitioner in the University of Vermont Integrative Practitioner Network, an ordained minister with The Universal Life Church, and a steward of Grandmother Cherry Sanctuary located on the ancestral land of Abenaki First Nation people in Plainfield, Vermont.

She has a 20 year career background serving Vermont in communications, public relations, grassroots campaign management, macro behavior change, and social impact marketing across nonprofit organizations, government, educational institutions, and the private sector. Her scholarship and expertise includes allopathic and holistic health care, community and economic development, education, human services, financial services, food system planning and policy implementation, recreation and tourism, renewable energy, small business development, and sustainable agriculture.

Previous roles in Vermont include communications director for the Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund and Vermont Farm to Plate Network, visionary/curator of the Rooted in Vermont local food campaign, board leadership and equity advocacy with Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility, steering committee leadership and equity advocacy with Vermonters Taking Action Against Cancer, owner and managing director of Rachel Carter PR, public relations instructor at Champlain College and public relations director at Paul Kaza Associates.

Prior to coming to Vermont, Rae’s experience spans mental health and youth services work in Massachusetts, nonprofit program management and equity work in Tennessee, and communication and music education in New York.

Rae is an active somatic abolitionist, practicing with Education for Racial Equity (ERE) and completed racialized trauma studies with the Cultural Somatics Institute. She is a graduate of the Art of Navigating Change program with Rockwood Leadership Institute and completed the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction program, as a part of her deep dive into bridging an arc between social change and mental health. A trained facilitator in The Circle Way, Rae also completed coursework with the Land Peace Foundation and White Awake, while continuing education with the Center for Transformation and Change and Anti-Racism Daily.

She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Marist College with a concentration in public relations and organizational communications and a certificate in music performance.

Rae’s lived experience navigating and healing from two cancer diagnosis, a health crisis that brought her deep into the underworld, financial trauma and health inequity, career burnout, detrimental impacts of cancel culture for speaking truth to power, and living a path of healing and transformation directly informs her contributions to healing and social justice.

A community herbalist and Reiki practitioner, Rae is a graduate of Rosemary Gladstar’s Science and Art of Herbalism program and is a Reiki I and II certified practitioner in the Usui System of Reiki Healing.

A singer, lyricist, and percussionist, Rae is also a sound healer, completing coursework in vocal somatics with Voice Science Works and drawing from her lifelong intuitive relationship with voice and sound. She is also a collaborator with the Hygge Den music collective, drawing from her sacred relationship to Ancestors, Earth, and Spirit.

Rae Carter with black cat and herbal remedies

“As a person of Western European lineage, my ancestors were colonized long before they began colonizing Turtle Island. In doing so they transmitted a multigenerational arc of epigenetic trauma to the land, beings, and people of Earth in the wake of supremacy from colonization, capitalism, casteism, and patriarchal dominance. As someone who both benefits and suffers from the systems my ancestors built, and who, by identity, is in collusion with these systems, I am dedicated to the lifelong healing path of decolonizing my heart, body, mind, soul, and spirit.

In my commitment to disrupt the patterns of behavior that live within me that perpetuate these systems, I am reclaiming the severed roots of my Celtic and Norse animist and indigenous ancestry to repair belonging to the human and Earth kin relationships and sense of community that was ruptured by my colonizer lineage. I live each day in service to embodied spiritual and relational repair with seen and unseen kin and the collective healing that is at the root of transformative justice. I created and continue to curate EmpowR Transformation as a medicine in service to this movement.”

~ Rae Carter

EmpowR Vermont Sunburst

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