Yearlong Course: Opening to Freedom • Session 1
Jul
9
to Jul 12

Yearlong Course: Opening to Freedom • Session 1

June 2026–February 2027
Midwest and Northeast

For white racial justice leaders
Intermediate/ Advanced

In-person and online training program for white racial justice organizers and movement workers to build community, capacity and courage to fuel your ongoing work.


Opening to Freedom, a nine-month somatics training that combines in-person retreats, one-to-one coaching, and virtual group sessions. 

The yearlong program is focused on applying somatic practice and principles to your organizing and everyday life. The curriculum is not focused on learning to teach somatics, but rather bringing the principles of somatics into your life, your organizing, and how you show up in the world. 

Participants will develop:

  • The ability to align your body, words, and actions with your longings in the world 

  • A community of practice and relationships with peers who are in it with you

  • Practices that deepen your embodied physical awareness and ability to be present, open, and connected

  • Understanding of embodied anti-racist frameworks

The structure of the program includes:

  • Monthly one-to-one coaching with a member of the teaching team 

  • Three in-person retreats spread across seven months

  • Monthly practice & methodology calls in between retreats to stay in practice together and go deeper on concepts and political analysis

  • Virtual small groups with members of the teaching team

  • Practitioner track for those who have completed more than 12 days of in-person courses

  • Peer-to-peer groups to go deeper into topics and practices based on interest and experience

Prerequisite- Preferred- a four-day somatics course or the equivalent in this lineage, like Embodied Leadership

  • Dara Silverman is an embodiment teacher and social change consultant whose work is based on their 25 plus years of community experience in environmental, social, and racial justice movements, 35 years of facilitation practice, and embodiment training at the Strozzi Institute and generative somatics.

    Michael Strom (they/them) is a facilitator and somatic practitioner living in the Northwest Bronx, NYC. They feel most at home when they can put their body in the sea, nerd out on a big idea, or find something to giggle about.

    Michael came to life as an organizer through queer, feminist, and anti-war student organizing and driving predatory developers out of the Bronx with the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition in the late 2000s. In the wake of the housing crisis, they helped bring together Organizing for Occupation (O4O) and Occupy Wall Street to blockade evictions and shut down foreclosure proceedings with song. After the Ferguson Uprisings in 2014, they founded the NYC chapter of Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), a national network organizing white people to undermine white supremacy. Until 2021, Michael was a faith leader at New Day Church, a Bronx-based faith community confronting injustice with the compassion and abundance of God. From 2015-2024, they were a Director at The Wildfire Project, supporting social movement organizations to build healthy group dynamics, have hard conversations, turn toward generative conflict, and step further into their agency to reshape our world.

    Michael brings 14 years of facilitation, a decade of somatic training, and a faithful delight in human beings to their work. Outside of work, they’re finding tremendous sweetness in reconnecting with the faiths and lifeways of their Sicilian and Irish ancestors (they’re still trying to figure out how to have hobbies that don’t involve healing). They firmly believe that wherever we're going, it'll be easier if we can laugh on the way there.

    Sarah Abbott (she/her) is a somatic coach and social movement practitioner with 15 years of experience in movements for racial, economic, climate, and gender justice as an organizer and an organizational leader. She is a white, bisexual, raised-Christian, chronically-ill woman with class privilege. Sarah grew up on Dakota and Anishinaabe land in a college and farming town in Minnesota, and recently returned home to Minneapolis after living for 8 years on Lenni Lenape land in Brooklyn, NY. She was first introduced to somatics by Susan Raffo in 2011 in Minneapolis through her somatic workshops on dismantling white supremacy. She has participated in generative somatics courses since 2013, and is a graduate of the Strozzi Institute Somatic Coaching Program.

    Rachel Berliner Plattus is from New Haven, CT and currently lives in Boston, MA. She is Co-Creator of Beautiful Solutions, a storytelling and popular education project supporting people to imagine and create community-controlled solutions to the problems they face. Rachel has worked with a national network of women religious and millennials through Nuns and Nones, and with Jewish organizers and spiritual leaders through Taproot. She is a graphic artist, a street medic, and a trainer with PeoplesHub. She likes to explore how to make meaning and support healing on big paper, in the dance studio, in the kitchen, in wild places, and in spaces that bring us into conversation, connection, and collective action with one another. Find out more about her work at rachelbp.com.

 
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Advanced Courses: ERJ Reunion
Oct
22
to Oct 25

Advanced Courses: ERJ Reunion

Intermediate/ Advanced
This is a multiracial space for folks who have been through an ERJ course.

The first-ever ERJ reunion. Come for the community, the practice, the songs and to make meaning of this political moment and how we can turn and face it together.

September 25-28, 2025
Upstate New York

Between 2020-2025, ERJ trained over 600 people online and in person. For the first time, we’re offering a time to get together with other members of the ERJ community. This four-day retreat will be in beautiful upstate New York, and we’ll have a chance to explore some of the most pressing political questions, practice together, share resilience practices, and build relationships across ERJ.

  • Dara Silverman (she/her) is a white queer Jewish consultant, somatic coach and trainer with over 20 years with organizations and movements for social, racial, economic and gender justice. She partners with trainers of color to lead organizational change and leadership development initiatives centering racial justice, equity and liberation. Dara partners with white trainers to lead caucuses and trainings specifically for white organizers and leaders on dismantling white supremacy in ourselves, organizations and movements. Previously, she was the founding Director of Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) and the Executive Director of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) in New York City.

    Dara has been studying Somatics with the Strozzi Institute and Generative Somatics since 2011. She became a Somatic Coach in 2013 and was trained as a Somatics teacher to lead courses by the Strozzi Institute.

    Dara lives in the Hudson Valley on Wappinger and Lenape land where she lives on a third of an acre where she grows eight kinds of berries. Dara founded Mutual Aid Beacon in March of 2020 to meet the needs of those most impacted by COVID-19. The group organizes more than 800 volunteers and prepares and delivers meals to 650+ families a week in Beacon, Fishkill and Wappingers in the Hudson Valley.

    Cari Caldwell (she/they) catalyzes life as a facilitator, executive coach, consultant and entrepreneur committed to using her privileges and 20 years of experience to co-create better relationships, systems and communities.  Cari integrates a wide variety of liberatory methodologies and practices that open new possibilities for equity, relationship, and performance.  

    A taste of her work includes teaching embodied racial justice for white leaders, facilitating multi-stakeholder social innovation labs, supporting executive and team collaboration, relationship, resilience and repair, producing a childbirth education film, and co-founding five organizations across the US and internationally.  

    Cari has trained and/or certified in ontological and somatic coaching, organizational and family constellations, Theory U/social innovation, psychodrama, Art of Hosting, Barrett Cultural Values, sacred sexuality and intimacy, and somatic leadership with organizations including the Radical Resilience Institute, Strozzi Institute for Somatics, Visions, the BIPOC Alliance.  She lives on unceded Arapahoe, Cheyenne and Ute territory in Colorado with her beloveds and two sons, and loves the exquisite torture of hot yoga.

    Michael Strom (they/them) is a facilitator and somatic practitioner living in the Northwest Bronx, NYC. They feel most at home when they can put their body in the sea, nerd out on a big idea, or find something to giggle about.

    Michael came to life as an organizer through queer, feminist, and anti-war student organizing and driving predatory developers out of the Bronx with the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition in the late 2000s. In the wake of the housing crisis, they helped bring together Organizing for Occupation (O4O) and Occupy Wall Street to blockade evictions and shut down foreclosure proceedings with song. After the Ferguson Uprisings in 2014, they founded the NYC chapter of Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), a national network organizing white people to undermine white supremacy. Until 2021, Michael was a faith leader at New Day Church, a Bronx-based faith community confronting injustice with the compassion and abundance of God. From 2015-2024, they were a Director at The Wildfire Project, supporting social movement organizations to build healthy group dynamics, have hard conversations, turn toward generative conflict, and step further into their agency to reshape our world.

    Michael brings 14 years of facilitation, a decade of somatic training, and a faithful delight in human beings to their work. Outside of work, they’re finding tremendous sweetness in reconnecting with the faiths and lifeways of their Sicilian and Irish ancestors (they’re still trying to figure out how to have hobbies that don’t involve healing). They firmly believe that wherever we're going, it'll be easier if we can laugh on the way there.

  • This course is offered on a sliding scale. 

    Organizational: $2,500-$4,000: for those who have an organization paying for their registration, we invite you to a registration tier based on your organization’s annual budget. 

    • $4,000+ per registrant if the budget is above $20 million 

    • $3,500 per registrant if the budget is between $10 - $20 million

    • $3,000 per registrant if the budget is between $5 - $10 million

    • $2,500 per registrant if the budget is below $5 million

    • Individual: for those who are registering as an individual, we invite you to base your registration based on your income and wealth.

      • Sustainer $3,500-$4,500+: for those who have generational or inherited wealth

      • Supporter $2,500-$3,499: for those who have a regular income and are comfortably paying their rent or mortgage

      • Grounded $1,500-$2,499: for those who are paying their mortgage or rent

      • Equity $1,000- 1,499: for those who are challenged to make ends meet

    This infographic includes more about the sliding scale tiers for consideration. 

    All of this only works if everyone pays at the level they are able - not at a level lower than what they can pay. Together we can create financial balance when we each pay in alignment with our abilities. 

    Your registration fee pays facilitators a living wage, allows us to redistribute funds to local Black and Indigenous groups as well as Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity, and includes paying the ERJ Practice Manager for organizing and administrative fees associated with the course.

    Donations and sponsorships to offset the course cost for other registrants are always welcome.

 
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Intense as F*ck Times:
Mar
26

Intense as F*ck Times:

Join Embodying Racial Justice and Lumos Transforms for a free workshop with Dara Silverman and Nkem Ndefo. The session will build your capacity to meet the intensity of this moment.

When: 3/26 at 5pm GMT/ 1 pm eastern / 12 pm central / 11 am mountain / 10 am pacific

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