Retreat
Equity Integration Retreats
Grandmother Cherry Sanctuary retreats for groups and teams to build capacity for shared learning, sharing power, and to deepen understanding and integration of equity practices in personal life and organizational culture.
Equity Integration Retreats are co-created with interested organizations to meet teams and groups at their entry points for cultivating understanding of how equity influences culture change that truly benefits the entire organization and its people.
Retreats are designed for organizational teams and groups who are willing and open to shifting perspectives, sharing power, and building capacity to develop and implement equity-based group process and communication. Facilitated at Grandmother Cherry Sanctuary in Plainfield, Vermont, retreats embrace nature-based learning as a way to creatively infuse inclusive and uplifting practices that support organizational nervous systems to handle the emotional charge of conversations around racial, gender, sexual, class, and ability identities.
Racial equity is centered in a context where all oppressions matter to help organizations create spaces where deeper equity, inclusion, diversity, and belonging work can be possible.
Program Details
EmpowR Transformation Equity Integration Retreats support organizational implementation of equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging planning, trainings, and education. The retreats slow down the process of intellectual download by creating space for team members to feel and experience unlearning and relearning in the body. By co-creating the retreat with the team or a couple of members of the team, facilitation focuses on new ways of looking at the work organizations are undertaking and the challenges that present obstacles to moving equity work forward.
Retreat Components:
- Circle process facilitation invites vulnerability, relationship building, and trust.
- Engagement agreements and equitable communication is practiced throughout the day, offering teams experiential learning that can be applied to help shape organizational culture.
- Embodiment practices and somatic experiences in a communal outdoor setting that invite sensory intelligences to generate reflection, shared learning, and perspective change.
- Building individual and group capacity for withstanding increased levels of discomfort so equity conversations can progress.
- Navigating intersectionality, racialized and subjugated trauma, and social, cultural, and language competency in group dialogues.
- Addressing interpersonal and organizational communication, project management, meeting and group process and how they can shift away from the characteristics of white dominant social norms that are imbedded in “professional” work behavior.
- An understanding of the connection between self-examination of personal behaviors and creating the safe, inclusive, equitable cultures we seek.
- Nourishing food, plant beverages, and a sanctuary environment where Nature and Elements are retreat participants.
Intentions:
The intentions for retreats are collaboratively developed in planning for the experience between EmpowR and the interested organization. EmpowR works with organizations to identify intentions that are inclusive of where each team members is at. The retreat is designed around those intentions with deliberate space for allowing the conversations to inform the flow of the day and spaciousness to be present and grounded in nature.
Testimonials:
Learn more about Let’s Grow Kids’ experience at an EmpowR retreat in the Equity Integration Retreat to Support Grassroots Movement Building blog post.
