2017/2018 Liberation School Cohort 

This is our first amazing Liberation School Cohort, introducing themselves in their own words!

Allison Glass is a newly transplanted Atlantan, but will always be a Memphian at heart. She’s done grassroots organizing, developed a training program and taught organizing skills, facilitated many challenging conversations and most recently led a statewide coalition around reproductive and sexual health issues in one of the most conservative states in the country. She has been passionate about justice and liberation since a young age, and is looking forward to learning and integrating spiritual and liberatory practices that will help her do this work and serve from a grounded, intentional and love-centered place for the rest of her life. She's a mother of three beautiful humans and has the sweetest partner/best friend/co-conspirator around.

Bernadette Arthur serves as a Race Relations Advocate for the Canadian office of the Christian Reformed Church in North America. She offers training, coaching and facilitating in the areas of anti-racism and reconciliation.  She is honoured to join her place in the historical movement towards authentic healing and re-conciliation within the church, as it's an institution which has historically perpetuated and maintained oppressive systems in the global world.  She is most alive when she is a part of creating and maintaining spaces that honour the intersection of spirituality, healing and justice.  She is vocal about making significant strides towards racial reconciliation in Canada, because the promises of God are a "YES" and "AMEN" in Christ Jesus (2 Cor. 1:20).  Bernadette is a vetted Community Advancement Coach with Communities First Association.  She has been living out the principles of “Asset Based Community Development” (ABCD) ever since she was a young girl growing up with 5 siblings in a neighbourhood that’s greatest asset was its social economy.  She employs and lives out the posture and practices of ABCD in her personal life and with neighbours in her local neighbourhood.  She trains, consults and coaches on the strategies of ABCD in community based and faith-based settings in Canada and also the U.S.  She is a pursuer of God, daughter, sister, friend, auntie, mentor, teacher, change-maker, and life-long learner. She enjoys listening to live music, especially jazz; reading a good book; eating ethnically diverse foods; and hiking.

Carrie Ann Welsh, though raised in the southeast, lately she’s been living on a lively isthmus between two lakes in the upper midwest, a place with astonishing winter light and resounding summer thunderstorms. There, she does organizing in community and radical herbalism, sits with a Soto Zen Buddhist lay community, is learning to produce short audio pieces for community radio, and works as a professional writer and editor. She moved to Wisconsin for graduate work in the history of education—specifically, Zilphia Horton’s cultural, creative “folk approach” to music and labor education at Highlander Folk School when she arrived there over eighty years ago. She is so very honored to be joining the Liberation School, connecting, growing, learning, healing. Carrie Ann Welsh is based in Madison, Wisconsin.

Deitrah J. Taylor Perry, Georgia Public Historian/ Dramaturge I am very excited to be a part of the Liberation School. I have been passionate about social justice from a young age. As an educator, I always incorporate social justice into my teaching and programming. I am looking forward to building community and learning new things!

Elizabeth Vega is a Chicana poet, mother, grandmother, community artist and activist residing in St. Louis Missouri. She is cofounder of ArtivistSTL, a collective of artists who make social justice visual. Artivists direct actions include Requiem for Mike Brown, Occupy the Police and Monday Mournings. The mirrored coffin created by ArtivistSTL is now in the Smithsonian. Vega is also founder of ART House, a housing cooperative on the Northside of St. Louis. Art House residents live and collaborate with their neighbors through weekly food shares, after-school programming, political education and direct action organizing. Vega is excited about Liberation School, believing trauma work, healing and self care are essential to building a movement.

Evelyn Encalada Grez, guided by a spiritual practise of "transformation from the spirit within & the world throughout”, I teach and organize for global equity, particularly around migrant justice. Displaced and uprooted as a child from my birthplace, Chile, due to imperialism and fascism a through CIA backed military dictatorship, my whole life has been about claiming belonging and contemplating the right to live with peace, dignity and with respect of our full humanity. Raised in Canada in an refugee/immigrant working class household, I became the first person in my family to go to university and pursue a PhD. I am all about decolonializing the mind, institutions and practises that coerce our beautiful diversity and wholeness. Most of my community work right now focusses on promoting the rights of migrant farmworkers and their families who are separated by imperial borders. I am excited to be part of the Liberation School to uncover new possibilities for action, resistance and building a better world with everyone.

I am Giselle, a community organizer working towards racial justice, reproductive justice, and LGBTQ justice. I have lived and worked in Louisville, KY for the past 7 years and I have grown to deeply love this town. I'm passionate about building a future in which all of us are free.

Hannah Krieger is an anti-racist organizer, privilege educator, dancer, and artist based in Massachusetts. I was first moved to justice work through a call I had for environmental sustainability. My first experiences with organizing was developing a new waste system in my highschool, moving my school towards composting and recycling. In college I worked with the Real Food Challenge, a national campaign to get more local, organic, and humane food onto college campuses. After 2 years of college studying sociology while diving into a personal reflection of my own story of economic and race privilege, I dropped out of school. I craved more time for creativy, less time learning theory in a classroom, and more time learning how to organize and create community. I ultimately focused on anti-racist organizing in Asheville NC with the local SURJ chapter. After about 6 months trying to engage with the work, I felt overwhelmed, and struggling to find myself and authenticlly offer myself in my work. Feeling stuck I decided to use my savings to travel in Central America. After a year of travel I returned to my home state of Massachusetts to reunite with family. My last year has been about healing family traumas through therapy and Authentic Movement. I am now very interested in how art and especially physical dance movement can be used for liberation.

Honor M. Bell, III​, I am currently moving across the country from Pensacola, FL to San Diego, CA. During the last few years I've expanded exponentially spiritually and mentally and wish to nurture this growth with pure actions to support my passion for credible justice.

Jax Gil is on a self, ancestral, and community healing journey. They believe by knowing their true self, they can know (brown, divine feminine) God and By knowing God, they can know their true self. Jax works for Resist, a grassroots foundation in Boston, MA that funds radical community organizing, direct action, and creative community healing in the United States. They are a budding artist with interests in audio, film, photography, and performance that explores "third culture" space (the hybrid, the in-between, the liminal). With roots in the Caribbean coast of Colombia, the interplay of rhythm, memory, and myth are ever present and calling. They are curious about how this is all rooted in local, democratic economies and liberatory communities.

Judy Hatcher​, Cleveland, OH born and raised, now in Oakland, CA after stints in Chicago, Atlanta, Brooklyn, and Washington, DC. No partner or kids, just a wonderful circle of family and long-time friends. I’ve been called to advocate for human rights and social justice from a young age. After working for national networks and philanthropy since 1981, I’m more passionate than ever about helping grassroots leaders and organizers build transformative power while remaining whole and healthy for the long haul. I want to be very intentional about my “last act” as I approach my 60th birthday. I left Pesticide Action Network North America this summer to slow down a bit, doing consulting and training while I take some time to breathe deeply, reflect, and be more health-forward. I want to be a good elder, and to learn from much younger folks. I hope my time in this cohort sharpens some of my skills (facilitation and working across identities, especially), challenges my resistance somatics, and helps me locate where I can be most useful to our movements—and facilitates what, if any, major life changes I need to embrace to make this happen.

Luci Murphy is a native of D.C. where she is a vocalist who often leads group singing, but “sun-lights” as a medical interpreter of Spanish and English. She has a long history of community activism, especially working with children at risk. She has visited Lebanon to observe Palestinian Refugee Camps, China just before the normalization of relations with the U.S., Brazil for a grass-roots organizing conference, and Cuba to oppose U.S. travel restrictions. A past president of the D.C. League of Women Voters, she has also served on the Steering Committees of the People’s Music Network, "Health Care Now!,” and Washington Inner-city Self Help. She has also been the convener of the Gray Panthers of Metro D.C., an associate producer of Sophie’s Parlor Women’s Radio Collective at WPFW 89.3 FM, the Pacifica Station in D.C. and contact person for the Community Coalition for Peace and Justice. Currently she sings with the SGI New Century Chorus and the D.C. Labor Chorus. In 2007, she received the Paul Robeson Award for Peace and Justice from the Friends of the People's Weekly World. In 2012 the Emergence Community Arts Collective gave her its IN HER HONOR Award. Luci has been performing since her childhood in the 1950s. To reach the members of our diverse human family, she sings in ten languages: English, Spanish, French, Creole, Portuguese, Zulu, Arabic, Hebrew, Cherokee, and ki-Swahili. She draws on the folkloric traditions and musical idioms of all these cultures, as well as her own roots in Spirituals, Blues and Jazz.

Magdalena Kaluza, I am a queer/mestizx Maya K’iche’ writer, performer, and youth worker (she/they) based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I love to garden, cook, dance, bike, and co-create. I currently manage youth programs at a community bike shop called Cycles for Change. I am a longtime member of Palabristas, a latinx spoken word collective. I’ve begun to play with & share puppetry, looking at Mayan cosmovision and historical memory. I care about many forms of healing - including individual, community, and environmental - and I believe firmly in the truth. I am most at peace outside of the city, near mountains, forest, desert, and water. My second home is Guatemala, where I laugh and learn with ex-migrants, farmers, artists, and spiritual guides.

Mary Devitt, I am an unpaid activist, Unitarian, poet, educator, and mother of a large blended family of adult children. I am in the process of reviving my practices of yoga and meditation, as support for dealing with my own trauma and the secondary trauma of supporting family members of victims of police and vigilante violence. I have been immersed in anti-racist work, in one form or another, for the last 15 years. Most recently, I have been engaged in the Black Lives Matter movement, as a participant and as an organizer, in protests, direct action, advocacy and education. The last few years have been really intense for many of us. I have been fighting burnout for a while, and attempting to keep going on fumes. And I am increasingly challenged within the activist culture to work on change-making in a way that encompasses compassion for self and others, including those who are at a different place in this journey. I am looking forward to helping build a culture that nourishes and sustains our capacity for change-making together.

Natalia Thompson is a feminist activist and writer. Born and raised in the Midwest, Natalia studied Chicana feminist thought and transnational feminist practices at Yale University. As a translator, storyteller, and grassroots fundraiser, she has collaborated with feminist, queer/lesbiana, and migrant rights collectives in Wisconsin, Connecticut, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico. Natalia currently lives in Mexico City, where she works with Centro de los Derechos del Migrante, Inc., a transnational migrant justice organization. Her writing has appeared in Chicana/Latina Studies: The Journal of Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social and in several feminist blogs and magazines, and is forthcoming in a new anthology from Third Woman Press. Natalia comes from a long line of mexicana healers, teachers, and organizers, and recently began studying Mexican herbal medicine. She also teaches restorative and yin yoga.

I'm Pamela Gomez coming from Tampa, FL. I was born in the Dominican Republic and my family immigrated to the Virgin Islands in the early 1990s in search of better educational and economic opportunities. I'm currently pursuing graduate studies in Latin America and Caribbean Studies at the University of South Florida (USF); focusing on race, gender, migration, and education issues. As an Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Taina, I work to build on the connection between my indigenous and African Disaporic roots and combat oppression, racism, and exclusion in my transnational community. In 2010, she joined the Florida Immigrant Youth Network and Students Working for Equal Right, which leads me to my current role as Central FL Community Organizer for the Florida Immigrant Coalition. I'm also part of the membership and leadership of the Dominican Association of Tampa, Black Lives Matter Tampa, among other community groups. I'm excited and passionate about liberation school because poetry by women of color has been my safe heaven and I'm so ready to more creatively and collectively work towards transformation and liberation.

Renee Reed *music with a booming base begins to swell* *strobe lights cut through a smoke screen* *Renee is gently lowered to the stage on a cloud of fabulous* Hello everyone and thanks so much for having me! As you know my name is Renee, yes *that* Renee. I'm currently living/working in Atlanta but I call Bloomington, IN home. What's my job you ask? Well as much as I wished that your love alone could pay my bills I must admit that I have to toil in the private sector in order to bring you the me that you see before you. To that end, I work in as Market Manager in Medicare sales. You'll also remember my work as 'that woman in that amazing outfit that danced at that one event' or perhaps you're thinking of the time you saw me performing on stage. It was indeed amazing. I cried too! Or are you thinking of the time you saw me tending to the children whilst also cooking and conducting a sing-a-long? Well no matter where we've bumped into each other before, I'm happy to be here, now, with you....Let's have some fun!

Sara Drew lives outside Philadelphia in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania with her partner Andy and their tuxedo wearing cat Booboo. She works as a reference librarian at a local community college and as a yoga teacher at her co-owned yoga center, East Eagle Yoga. Mostly, she tries to learn everything she can about everything she can and right now is focused on herbalism, labor and birth, and anti-racism. Sara aspires to be a writer and is in the process of creating a platform for that at blueskysunday.com. Though she spends most of her time teaching, Sara doesn’t think authentic teaching has much to do with telling people how to do something or what to think about anything. She mostly concerns herself with cultivating opportunities to engage in self-study and trying to convince people that they are smart and worthy and beautiful already. Sara is so excited to be a part of Liberation School because she feels called to help others connect with themselves, nature, and each other, but sometimes feels disconnected herself. She finds inspiration from others’ perspectives, ideas, and energy and knows that she will find opportunities to grow at Liberation School.

Sean Estelle is a community organizer and performance artist now living in Chicago, after growing up in San Diego, CA. They received a B.A. in Theatre from UC San Diego, and have trained with multiple performance and organizing-oriented schools of work; they're particularly excited about joining Liberation School to build on these foundations and continue to center creative expression and queer visibility in their work.They currently serve as Network Coordinator for Power Shift Network, a national network of youth-led climate justice organizations, and perform frequently at open mics and other queer cultural spaces in Chicago. They are working to harness queer fury to address the root causes of the climate crisis and build a world worth fighting for.

My name is Shayla Tumbling. Created and Cultivated in Mississippi. Formal traditional educational background: B.A. (Psychology & English) MSU; M.S. (Mental Health Counseling) MS College; Doctorate training (Counseling Psychology)TSU. Extraordinary certifications: Red Tent Facilitator, Sacred Woman, MW Humanitarian Ambassador. I educate people about generational trauma and support reconnection with personal power by improving their sexuality, emotional health, & self-image. I bring warmth, care, optimism, dependability, consistency, honorable work ethic, amazing supportive and teamwork skills to the trip. I am extremely honored to be a member of Liberation School so I can grow and learn improving my service and living in this world.

Steve O'Neill - home Northampton Massachusetts - dad, spouse, community organizer, buddhist, happiest moving quickly outdoors with others (running, biking, kayaking, climbing...) or finding connection with people and liberating ourselves from suffering (through organizing to bring down systems and ideologies of cruelty and oppression, and also through mindfulness and other practices to free ourselves from suffering right now).

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