Registration is now closed for Crisis as Catalyst!
See you in 2022!
Series Overview
The global pandemic made visible just how inadequate our health systems are in caring for people and communities, creating widespread disillusionment and manifesting in stronger demands for accountability from our systems and institutions. As more people awaken to the deeply-rooted injustices of our world, a widespread urge to “return to normal” stirs up a deep sense of cognitive dissonance. We believe that returning to normal is neither a possibility, nor a desirable goal. Ideals of “normalcy” are rooted in violence to the global majority, as well as to the earth itself. This myth is also deeply embedded in our mental health system, whereby social and behavioral “norms” created and perpetuated by White dominant power inundate how we think, learn, act, prescribe, treat, and care.
What we need now is to make sanctuary in the cracks of the normal. We are guided by Ashton Crawley’s radical assertion of otherwise possibility: the idea that “what we have is not all that is possible, that alternatives to the normative can and already exist in this world.” We meet this moment of prolonged crisis as an opportunity to fashion new worlds rooted in community, connection, and relationship. We collectively hold the power to define what futures are possible, drawing upon our ancestors, elders, and modern visionaries who carry forward these visions.
IDHA’s Fall 2021 Training Series resists calls to return to normal in a supposed post-pandemic world, and invites us to instead center a vision of radical transformation: moving from healing or fixing what is broken to cultivating what could be.
This process requires grieving the extraordinary losses we have faced over the last year and across generations; challenging assumptions and occupying liminal spaces; and sitting with our pain and exhaustion as a means to grasp problems firmly at the root. It requires honoring ancestral and Indigenous ways of knowing, rectifying harm, and inviting people to cultivate radical joy to usher in a future shaped by ecological, economic, racial, and healing justice.
Over the course of five sessions, we will introduce an array of healing strategies proliferated by world weavers past and present, as well as practical opportunities to apply knowledge and experiences to our lives and work. We are honored to present a diverse offering of mental health practitioners, scholars, and artists sharing their visions for community care and liberation. Join us as we sit with the unknown, while concurrently building the skills we need to navigate a future of possibility.
“This has been the most interactive, participatory virtual class I have ever attended in my entire higher education experience. This really stood out as a space where people are ready to listen and bring vulnerability.”
—IDHA training participant, psychologies of liberation
Schedule
Registration includes the 3-hour class session, and access to IDHA’s School for Transformative Mental Health forum on Mighty Networks. This is our virtual learning community where you’ll have the opportunity to engage with other students and your faculty.
ASL translation and live closed captioning will be provided for all classes.
Date and Time |
Course Title and Faculty |
|
|---|---|---|
| Saturday, October 23 12-3pm EST |
Grounding in Grief: Interrupting Overwhelm with Embodiment and Ritual
Camille Barton and Marika Heinrichs | ENROLL |
| Saturday, November 6 12-3pm EST |
Ancestral Healing: Honoring Origins to Form Sacred Futures Elmina Bell and Cleopatra Tatabele | ENROLL |
| Saturday, November 20 12-3pm EST |
Transcending the Punishment Paradigm: The Promise of Restorative and Transformative Practices Mikaela Berry, William Evans, and Shana Louallen | ENROLL |
| Saturday, December 4 12-3pm EST |
Liberatory Art-Making: Reimagining Community Care Priya Dadlani and Roxie Ehlert | ENROLL |
| Saturday, December 18 10am-1pm EST |
Making Sanctuary as Decolonial Practice: Putting Wounds to Work Bayo Akomolafe | ENROLL |
Grounding in Grief:
Interrupting Overwhelm with Embodiment and Ritual
Saturday, October 23, 12-3pm EST
Facilitated by Camille Barton and Marika Heinrichs
We are at a crossroads: as dominant systems seek to diminish the harms of a global pandemic, racial violence, and climate catastrophe, among many ongoing crises, the collective body-mind is stuck in that incongruence. To resist further disconnection from self and others, we must name and work with natural responses to immense and prolonged societal violence. Though Western frameworks seek to separate psychology from the realms of physiology and spirituality, this compartmentalization represses our most basic needs, leading to burn-out, overwhelm, and shame.
This class will explore how grief can serve as a teacher, an assertion of our collective humanity when allowed acknowledgement and tending. Facilitators Camille Barton and Marika Hendricks will challenge the pressure to neglect these parts of self, moving through experiential practices rooted in somatics and ritual that offer pathways to transmute grief and ground in deepened connection and choice. Participants will be guided through feeling what has been lost, and what we might build into the future, if we can sit inside the generative power of grief, mourning this moment and resourcing ourselves to create space for pleasure, joy and liberation.
Learning objectives:
Critique how mainstream Western ideologies work to disconnect and disembody us from human responses to loss, harm, and violence
Name the ways grief and shame are stored and manifested in the body
Identify the outcomes of unprocessed emotional and physiological overwhelm
Locate the histories of colonization and how grief and shame impacts communities differently across experiences of racialization
Explore grief’s connection to creating room for mutual care, growth, and joy
Learn to utilize somatic and ritual practices to process and integrate collective and intergenerational trauma
Camille Barton is an artist and renegade researcher working on the intersections of embodiment and healing justice. Camille is the head of MA Ecologies of Transformation which explores how art making and embodiment can facilitate social change. Camille’s practice is rooted in Embodied Social Justice - their work explores how oppression, such as racism and ableism, is rooted in the body; and how we can re-pattern it using mindful attention and movement. Camille is currently completing grief research in collaboration with GEN, to create a toolkit of embodied grief practices. They also work to ensure that psychedelic therapies will be accessible to global majority communities (POC).
Marika Heinrichs (she/her) is a queer femme of German, British, and Irish ancestry who has been practicing as a somatic therapist and educator within social justice spaces for over a decade. She has trained in the lineages of generative somatics, Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy (BCST), Focusing, and NeuroAffective Touch. Marika holds a commitment to pushing back against the appropriation of BIPOC cultural wisdom in mainstream somatics, as well as to cultivating spaces for people of European ancestry to connect with something in themselves older than whiteness, through embodied practice
Ancestral Healing:
Honoring Origins to Form Sacred Futures
Saturday, november 6, 12-3pm EST
Facilitated by Elmina Bell and cleopatra tatabele
NOTE: 2.75 CE credits are available for this class. Learn more about CE credits at IDHA here.
Level: Beginning/Introductory
Our dominant mental health care system disconnects people from their lineage, rarely acknowledging the impacts of generational trauma and wisdom. While some forms of practice have begun to integrate a decolonial analysis, too often these efforts displace traditional forms of knowledge from their source, and co-opt Indigenous practices to fit the mold of oppressive structures. As we seek to transform what liberatory care can and should look like, our ancestors play a crucial role in mapping futures of possibility. The work of ancestral healing requires reconciling immense loss of culture and people, as well as honoring Indigenous ways of knowing that have been practiced by shamans, elders, and healers worldwide for generations.
This class will explore what it means to “decolonize mental health,” and how we can do so in a way that centers respect and care for diverse sources of Indigenous wisdom and expertise. Our faculty will introduce a range of alternative practices rooted in Indigenous ways of knowing that can nurture individual and collective healing. Participants will be encouraged to think, learn, and act intergenerationally, using lineage to help make sense of ourselves alongside our past, present, and future ancestors. In the process of uplifting and centering indigenous practices, we will learn how to call in our own ancestral lineages, make meaning of our experiences, and dream toward a world that centers collective care and liberation.
Learning objectives:
Identify key assumptions about ancestral healing and Indigenous practices and how to honor them respectfully
Discuss our current understanding, and future action, of ancestral honoring and wisdom within our current mental health system
Demonstrate how connecting to ancestors can create new pathways for healing for those we support in our roles as mental health professionals, peers, and caregivers
Practice setting intentions to connect to ancestors or ancestral knowledge in our personal or professional lives
Agenda:
Introductions, welcome, and check-in (10 min, 12-12:10)
The importance of ancestry and lineage in healing (30 min, 12:10-12:40)
Experiential practice and breakout reflections (40 min, 12:40-1:20)
Indigenous healing practices (40 min, 1:30-2:10)
Journaling prompts (30 min, 2:10-2:40)
Group reflection and closing comments (20 min, 2:40-3:00)
Elmina Bell is the Visionary Seeder at Indigenous Mental Health Awareness Network International (IMHANI) with her team of healers, ancestors and guides. She has a background in movement work. Elmina researchers and teaches on Indigenous holistic psychologies for improved mental health, community building, and for the dismantling of oppressive psych ward systems. She’s a first-generation American born to Cameroonian parents with Togolese roots too. Her work as trauma-informed peer support facilitator, astrologer, sound healer, and budding medium is guided by Mulema Alchemy. Mulema means heart in Bimbia, from the Sawa peoples of Cameroon. She believes in the transformative power of the heart.
Cleopatra Tatabele (they/she pronouns) is an activist, healer, educator, and organizer born and raised in Lenape Territory, so-called NYC. As a Black and Indigenous two spirit person, they believe that by honoring their Black and Indigenous ancestors healing is possible.
Transcending the Punishment Paradigm:
The Promise of Restorative and Transformative Practices
Saturday, November 20, 12-3pm EST
Facilitated by mikaela berry, william evans, and shana louallen
NOTE: 2.75 CE credits are available for this class. Learn more about CE credits at IDHA here.
Level: Intermediate
The world is awakening to the widely resonating damages of systemic harm, inviting us to demand accountability and nurture healing-centered, cultural transformation. Amid this prolonged crisis, we pose a series of critical questions: As a collective society and individuals, how do we move forward and rebuild? How can we ensure meaningful repair and reconciliation amid the many ways harm presents in our systems, our communities, and ourselves?
This class presents an overview of restorative and transformative healing ideals, philosophies, paradigms, and practices. These frameworks carry immense potential to transform the ways that our society responds to mental health crises and the needs of those who struggle on both interpersonal and systemic levels. Our hope is to galvanize practitioners and community members alike, uplifting concrete tools you can employ in your life and work in pursuit of creating a more trauma-informed and compassionate future. Participants will be introduced to practices that center individual and community restoration, and invited to consider how we might move away from our current reliance on carceral practices and paradigms.
Learning objectives:
Practice strategies rooted in restorative and transformative justice that will help you create transformative change in your patterns of thinking, interpersonal interactions, and community work
Inspect the intersectional harm proliferated by our mental health, criminal justice, and other systems and patterns in response to harm
Identify how you hold power in these systems, the responsibilities and accountability that connect to that power, and ways to own that power to cultivate transformative change
Question the deeply-ingrained, punishment-centered programming the world has had instilled in us, and explore how this has implicated us in individual and systemic harm
Discuss the real life applications and proven successes of restorative and transformative justice practices through the experiences of of faculty
Demonstrate how the punishment paradigm shows up in mental health work, and how it creates harm that will lasting repercussions
Agenda:
Introductions, welcome, and check-in (10 min, 12-12:10)
Foundations of restorative and transformative justice (40 min, 12:10-12:50)
Breakout room and share backs (30 min, 12:50-1:20)
Break (10 min, 1:20-1:30)
How punishment-centered paradigms show up in the mental health system (30 min, 1:30-2:00)
Roleplay and experiential practice (40 min, 2:00-2:40)
Group reflection and closing comments (20 min, 2:40-3:00)
Mikaela Berry (they/them) is a writer,educator, and creator focused on making and providing spaces in which marginalized voices can be heard and encouraged. They currently work as the Restorative Justice Coordinator for Soul Sister's Leadership Collective where they manage Circles Not Cells, a restorative approach to conflict, in addition to 8 Circles of Safety – which implements 8 Restorative Justice Healing Circles to support young people with their reentry. For the past 2 months. Mikaela has also been engaging in restorative justice work with the young men at Horizons Juvenile Detention Center, where the programming is centered on navigating toxic masculinity and LGBTQIA education. Mikaela is also a second-year Master’s student at Columbia's School of Social Work. Their goal is to write trauma informed curriculum to make the classroom a safer and more equitable place for students of color.
William M. Evans grew up in the south Bronx. As a victim of gun violence and the criminal justice system, he internalized the impact and contributed to the destruction of his community. Making restorative decisions as an adult allowed him to improve his lifestyle and the lifestyle of those around him. William reflects the values of social responsibility and self empowerment as a part of his mentoring practices with young people. William is a Restorative Practitioner specializing in Strategic Urban Leadership Development (SULD) and three levels of healing (Individual, Neighborhood, Community) to transform systems of impacted individuals into people that model changed behaviors and rebuild community. William is the Co-Director at the Institute for Transformative Mentoring, Founder & President of Neighborhood Benches, Co-Founder of Never Be caged, member of the Restorative Roots Collaborative, and board member of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence.
Shana Louallen is a former publicist who shifted into the human services industry in 2008. A graduate of the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College, Shana engages in advocacy and organizing around social policy, race, class, gender, and sexuality. While her primary focus is on the intersectionalities of racial justice, she remains connected, both locally and abroad, to youth-based organizations, stakeholders, and organizers creating impactful changes in their communities. Shana works to help solidify the intersection of racial justice and restorative practices as a way of life in and outside of New York City. She engages schools, organizations and communities in strategic planning and action on transformative culture shifts, trauma-informed models, equitable policies, and uplifting stakeholder voices. She is the co-founder of Peer Connect, a consultancy firm focused on the training, coaching support, and implementation of restorative practices nationally. She continues to explore social work with a specific focus on the intersection of restorative justice, racial justice, and equitable practices through an abolitionist framework. She is based in NYC and holds a role as the Chief Equity and Inclusion Officer at a large social service non-profit in NYC.
Liberatory Art-Making:
Reimagining Community Care
Saturday, december 4, 12-3pm EST
Facilitated by Priya Dadlani and Roxie EhLert
In dreaming new worlds, it is easy to get lost or trapped in the impossibility of articulating the intangible. Recognizing that our mental health system is often limited to the ways in which we presently offer care, we turn toward artists, cultural bearers, and creators who possess the gift to channel the abstract and conceptual. While art has been integrated into mental health practice, it is rarely taken to its fullest potential of fostering new ways of knowing, or locating oneself culturally, politically, or spiritually.
This class will explore the liberatory and healing potential of art-making, introducing applications of art within mental health settings that create cracks of possibility. Participants will take away practical tools to create spaces of imagination that can be applied in and outside of clinical care settings. Through an experiential approach, participants will be invited to ground themselves in somatic practice and journaling. We will explore the following questions: In what ways do you see your wellness tied to the wellness of your community? How does your community already care for you? What areas do you need help? What could become possible as we prioritize liberation and care for all? Faculty will also weave together previous themes covered in this series, including channeling our ancestors and moving through grief.
Learning objectives:
Apply somatic imagining exercises to fashion new worlds rooted in community, connection, and relationship
Discuss the use of art in order to cultivate inclusive communities through shared art-making and cultural exchange
Demonstrate how art practices can create spaces of healing and discovery for those we support in our roles as mental health professionals, peers, and caregivers
Priya Dadlani (she/her) is an Indo-Caribbean cultural worker from Silver Spring, MD. Dedicated to liberation from the oppressive boxes white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy work overtime to keep us in, Priya's work is rooted in constantly standing on the edge of transformation, believing in the possibility of a new world. Her toolbox consists of political education, zine making, strategy, facilitation, and storytelling. Priya currently resides in Brooklyn, NY where she organizes with SPICY, a collective she founded led by and for queer people of color working at the intersection of art, justice, and cultural archival. In addition, she is the Communications Associate at Third Wave Fund, a member of the Jahajee Sisters grassroots action team, and works with Media Sutra to support the dreams of Black and brown creative entrepreneurs. She also self-publishes a monthly newsletter titled “Dispatches from Chrysalis.”
Roxie Ehlert, LCPC is a disabled, queerfemme artist, art therapist, educator, and writer. She holds a Master of Arts in Art Therapy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she later taught in the Art Therapy graduate program. Her research examines how sanist stigma impacts mental health providers who also experience “mental illness.” She has worked in community mental health, rape crisis, immigration detention, community studio, and private practice settings. Roxie currently teaches in the Art Therapy and Counseling graduate program at Southwestern College in Santa Fe, NM. As an educator she is committed to creating anti-oppressive classroom spaces that politicize emerging mental health practitioners and foster the development of critical consciousness. Her personal art practice explores themes of dislocation, home, grief, and queer belonging using stitch work, installation, photography, and encaustic collage.
Making Sanctuary as Decolonial Practice:
Putting Wounds to Work
Saturday, December 18, 10am - 1pm EST
Facilitated by Bayo Akomolafe
NOTE: 2.75 CE credits are available for this class. Learn more about CE credits at IDHA here.
Level: Intermediate
Bayo Akomolafe is a maker of sanctuary. This is a project of becoming lost as a way of responding to the constraints of identity, steeped in Yoruba folklore and the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. Bayo’s work is rooted in the notion of postactivism, or opening a space of inquiry about the ways in which we respond to crises. The Swahili word Vunja is also at the core of this project, marking the site of strange ruptures, then inviting celebration and dance with/in those cracks. These cracks are sites of excess where things spill over; where new forms of becoming-together might be cultivated. The motif of Vunja is a galvanizing force that informs our explorations, our attempts to bring things together in new ways, and our gesturing towards the concept of “making sanctuary.” In these and many other ways, this class seeks to position such openings in relation to our current notions of safety and mental health.
This class invites participants to put individual and collective wounds to work, to treat them as portals and cracks connected with larger territorial shifts, instead of matters to be eradicated by a dominant mode of being. Rather than seek to help people arrive at a fixed consensus or identify solutions to our problems, this class is a unique invitation to meet the world differently and come alive in other ways. To serve those disarticulated by and disenchanted from dominant systems, we will create together, lean into the exquisite, re-member the places that hold us, and make sanctuary tangible.
Learning objectives:
Review how to co-create a local/decolonial sanctuary as a way of becoming response-able to and with/in colonial frameworks
Question what the concepts of postactivism, transraciality, becoming-black, and making sanctuary offer to our movements for a ‘better’ world and “mental health”
Explore how we can cultivate “ecologies of trust” in a time of weaponized divisions and deep uncertainties
Question how modern forms of knowing – including the scientific method – determine and preserve how crises are made real to us
Agenda:
Introductions, welcome, and check-in (10 min, 10-10:10)
Review of Yoruba Ifa healing traditions(30 min, 10:10-10:40)
Breakout room and share backs (30 min, 10:40-11:10)
Break (10 min, 11:10-11:20)
Defining postactvism and the concept of making “sanctuary” (40 min, 11:20-12:00)
Applying introduced concepts to participants’ lives and work (40 min, 12:00-12:40)
Group reflection and closing comments (20 min, 12:40-1:00)
Bayo Akomolafe, PhD rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea and Kyah, the grateful life-partner to Ije, son and brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, essayist, and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak, Bayo Akomolafe is the Chief Curator of The Emergence Network and host of the online postactivist course, ‘We Will dance with Mountains.’
"I was in awe the whole time. I have been looking for a community like this. I appreciated the presenters integrating work and research from a variety of sources. This demonstrated to me the vast amount of work being done to improve the systems of mental health care globally."
—IDHA training participant, psychologies of liberation
Pricing Tiers
What you get: |
Reduced/Member $25/ class |
General $55/ class |
Supporter $79/ class |
| 3-hour live class session | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Class recording and resource list | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Access to IDHA's virtual learning community on Mighty Networks | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Complementary CE credits (pending) | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Subsidize another participant and sustain IDHA's ongoing training program | ✓ |
We are also offering 25 complete scholarships to the entire series.
Apply here by October 6!
Bundle Pricing
Save more than 30% when you purchase all five courses in the series!
|
Reduced/Member $125 $85/ 5 classes |
General $275 $190/ 5 classes |
Supporter $395 $270/ 5 classes |
CE Credits
As a training institute that values lived experience as highly as professional training, IDHA recognizes the way that the credentialing system enforces a culture of professionalism and devalues lived experience. At the same time, we believe it is a radical act to offer our training content for CE credits, ensuring that mental health workers and other clinicians can apply transformative mental health knowledge in maintaining a credential.
For this fall 2021 series, we are currently able to offer CE credits for three of our five classes: Ancestral Healing: Honoring Origins to Form Sacred Futures, Transcending the Punishment Paradigm: The Promise of Restorative and Transformative Practices, and Making Sanctuary as Decolonial Practice: Putting Wounds to Work.
CE credits are available to psychologists, psychoanalysts, social workers, counselors and marriage and family therapists, creative arts therapists, chemical dependency counselors, educators, and nurses.
IDHA offers these CE credits (2.75 credits per class, a $20 value) at the General and Supporter Rate only, for no additional cost. Credits are processed by our staff after the class is over. Certificates are available following course completion at www.ceuregistration.com. For more information about CE credits at IDHA, click here.
FAQ
What’s unique about IDHA’s approach?
We value lived experience as highly as professional training, so each course will be led by both a mental health clinician as well as someone who identifies as a survivor, a mental health service user, and/or someone who has experienced a mental health crisis. This will ensure participants receive holistic and nuanced perspectives.
Who is this series for?
This course is for mental health professionals, including but not limited to: clinicians, such as psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers, peer specialists, recovery support specialists, housing specialists, nurse practitioners and medical professionals, students. and anyone who works or plans to work with and around people who experience mental health-related issues.
Where are the classes held?
Classes will be held virtually via Zoom. Be sure to download the Zoom software onto your computer in advance of the training!
Are scholarships available?
IDHA will award 25 scholarship positions to mental health providers, peers, current and prior users of mental health services, and/or activists and advocates who are passionate about transformative mental health practices. POC, LGBTQI, transgender, low-income, disabled persons, and other marginalized groups are given priority. Apply for a scholarship by October 6 here.
Are these classes accessible?
Live ASL translation and closed captioning will be provided for all five class sessions.
Do I have to show up right at the time advertised for the class?
Yes, this is a live training so please be sure you are available at that time. All sessions will be recorded and shared with registrants after. Please note that all sessions begin at 12pm EST, with the exception of the final class (which begins at 10am EST).
Will I have the opportunity to interact with faculty?
Yes, each live training will provide the opportunity to interact with the faculty. You can also interact with many faculty members on Mighty Networks.
What is your cancellation policy?
For any questions or concerns, please email us at contact@idha-nyc.org.
There is no conflict of interest or commercial support for this program.