Welcome to your Learning Journey ✨
This page is designed to be reviewed before our session together on Tuesday!
First, some housekeeping:
You will have three learning sessions and three community trusts to learn, reflect, and connect with a community of values-aligned peers. Calendar invites have been sent to you for Learning sessions; community trust sessions are coming soon!
A note on session attendance: We believe the true value of these spaces is learning and holding space for content with each other in community. Please let us know if you cannot attend a session as scheduled!
Between sessions, you will be asked to reflect on case studies and review resources to continue to deepen your knowledge and help you integrate ideas shared in sessions. Your Community Trust groups will be a place to discuss and reflect together.
Please ensure you’ve completed your intake form, as it will allow us to set you up for success!
To prepare for Tuesday, spend some time either on a walk or with a journal to reflect on the following prompts; we recommend 10-30 mins of intentional reflection.
How’s your heart? 🧡
What emotions are alive in you as you enter the first session? Where do you feel these emotions in your body? Refer to a feelings wheel if you're stuck
What’s on your mind? 🧠
Why are you participating in this experience? What do you hope to gain? What are your motivations for spending time and energy thinking about your allyship?
How do you want to show up? 👋🏾
What’s something about yourself you’d like to share with this community? This can be a fun fact, part of your identity, or something you are reading/watching right now.
Just because unlearning is hard work doesn’t mean it can’t feel good.
Throughout this learning journey, you may find yourself in moments of discomfort. As we come across new perspectives that we aren’t often exposed to, discomfort is normal. This discomfort, left unchecked, can become fear as our minds start creating stories to distance us from difference - this is human.
Emotions are important data points during this journey and need to be honoured. They help us learn, but we don't need to act on every emotion. During the next three weeks, you'll have containers to process these emotions, as well as space to practice holding this discomfort while we centre our learning and unlearning.
Our commitment to you…
We understand that this work is sticky, and we want to help create spaces for learning that centre justice with compassion.
We can grapple with hard truths and choose curiosity instead of fear, shame, or blame. We know this will be imperfect, and we will move with care and intention.
We know that transformative justice (imagining a world that works for everyone) requires creativity - and creativity requires safety. We want to co-create this container with you.
These three ideas guide our community agreements, which we will co-create together.
-
We're all at different points of our unlearning journey, so let's honour that and give eachother grace as we move towards a common destination
-
For example, one of these sticky truths we are not afraid to name and unpack is White Supremacy Culture. We're all complicit in white supremacy (to different degrees) because we live, play, work in a system that is upholding white supremacy
-
Let's honour that we weren't given a road map for this work. It isn't easy to ally even for people with the best of intentions because we haven't been given the tools to unpack unconscious biases and unlearn. Give yourself grace on this journey and acknowledge that this is new learning so you can lean into curiosity instead of shame, blame, fear, etc.
Emotions are data, and discomfort is a sign you are on the right path.
Review this 5-minute video from Karlyn Percil, an expert in the neuroscience of psychological safety, to dive deeper into the emotions you can expect on your learning and unlearning journey.
Over the next three weeks, we will share resources and media with you and invite you to save and bookmark the resources that resonate with you - thus building your personal library of unlearning tools.
Breathe and Affirm:
I am open to new ideas ✨
We love this guided meditation from Brocollete and affirmations by Tracy G to get us in the right head and heart space for this work. We recommend building a music playlist to support your reflection time and put you at ease. Music is a great tool to disarm your stress response and calm your system as you engage in this work.
