Radical Self Inquiry Part 1 of 2: Racial Justice Facilitation Skills Series

Taquelia Washington and Jo Brownson/Empower Me! Services  

Training Description

This first session of a two-part training is meant for those who facilitate or plan to facilitate conversations rooted in race, power and identity. Participation in both sessions is required. Skills learned throughout this series will be transferable to many contexts, including group supervision, direct work with clients, facilitating staff meetings, etc. Trainers will use small group discussion, modeling and role play to engage participants. This training is focused on developing the habits of humility, self-reflection and critical inquiry necessary to be a grounded facilitator of humanizing spaces.

Learning Objectives

• Define the role of a facilitator in creating courageous and humanizing learning spaces
• Identify dominant and counternarratives in society and in their own history and practice using them as a tool in their facilitation
• Name and practice strategies for reframing and building community in their role as a facilitator

Agenda

1-1:15pm Introductions and Preview of Agenda

1:15-1:30 Conceptualization Lecture: Radical Self Reflection

1:30-2pm Large Group Discussion

2pm-2:30 Small Group Interactive Exercise on Radical Self Reflection

2:30-2:50 Large Group Application Scenarios

2:50-3:00 Wrap-up, Next Steps, Evaluations

Trainers Bio

Taquelia Washington is a licensed clinical social worker (LCSW) and has extensive experience working in community mental health, specializing in providing services in the school systems. She has close to 20 years of experience working in the field, with over 10 of those years spent working at a continuation school, providing mental health related services to “at risk” and “hard to engage” youth while also developing systems of care to help best support them. In addition to her clinical background, she is the founder of EmpowerMe! Services. Through this business, along with a team of subcontractors, she teaches workshops designed to help individuals and systems to be more culturally inclusive, she facilitates courageous conversations

as requested by a variety of organizations, and provides leadership coaching. Additionally, she offers consultation to help support the development of culturally inclusive services and systems of care. She brings all of herself to her individual work as well as her teaching endeavors. She strives to create a safe space for her students to focus on their own healing, self-growth, and empowerment.

Jo Brownson is a racial justice educator and facilitator based in the bay area. She has worked in the field of education and racial justice for over a decade in K-12 classrooms and in the nonprofit sector. As a white, queer, cisgender woman, her area of practice is in supporting individuals and organizations to understand how whiteness is operating inside their context, how it intersects with other systems of oppression, and what they can do to mitigate and transform its impacts. Jo is the daughter of a minister who moved around the south and Midwest as a child. She began teaching in Philadelphia before landing in Oakland (her forever home) with her wife in 2011 where she taught at Fremont High School in east Oakland until 2013. Since then, she has been a facilitator and coach with the San Francisco Coalition of Essential Small Schools. There, her work focuses on transforming the beliefs and practices of educators and school leaders and organizing them in service of more equitable outcomes for their students of color, students living in poverty, and LGBTQ students. In 2020, she founded Tangled Roots to apply her knowledge of anti-oppression facilitation, organizational change processes and adult learning to contexts within and beyond the education sector.

This course meets the qualifications for (2) BBS CEUs for LCSWs and MFTs as required by the California Board of Behavioral Sciences & is provided by Fred Finch Youth Center, CAMFT Provider #045295.