relational facilitators

for collective liberation

An intensive training program for movement leaders, healers, tenders and weavers.

Tending to the Heart of Our Movements

Fall 2024 Cohort:
*Fifteen Sessions: Thursdays, September 5-December 19
12:00pm-2:30pm Eastern (US) 9:00am-11:30am Pacific (US)

This program is designed to help nurture a network of facilitators committed to strengthening the relational tissue of our intersecting movements for liberation.

We know the work of tending to the relational tissue of our movements is often invisibilized, or seen as less valuable or less urgent than political wins and strategic outcomes. We are here to affirm the work of our movement healers and tenders, and provide facilitators with a robust framework and compelling relational tools that foster confidence and competence in this work. We’re excited to invite you to weave with us!

Building Cultures of Liberatory Practice

Our Relational Facilitators Program is designed to help folks build compassionate cultures of practice within their movements, communities, and organizations by learning to weave care-based, anti-oppressive, and healing-centered pedagogies—grounded in our CourageRISE model—into their leadership and facilitation.

Participants learn to:

- develop relational tools for strengthening connection and belonging;
- strengthen their structural competency and fluency in anti-oppressive pedagogies;
- apply tools for healing and transforming harm and oppression;
- expand their vision for more joyful, responsive and regenerative communities; and
- integrate their personal and collective liberation practices in sustainable ways.

Upon completion of the program, participants are invited to join our growing Courage Kin skill share and practice community.

Who This Program is For

We welcome all folks with facilitation experience—including trainers, mediators, DEI professionals, community organizers, educators, NGO leaders, coaches and healers—who are both grounded in healing-centered and counter-oppressive practice and are already embedded in communities and/or organizations in which they can bring this work forward in meaningful and impactful ways. We recognize that not all facilitators are formally recognized as such, and we encourage folks doing the often invisible work of relational culture building to join us!

What Folks Do With the Training

Folks go on to do extraordinary projects that incorporate the principles of the Courage of Care approach. Some highlights include: leading peace-building projects in Colombia; building compassionate, just school communities; leading regenerative culture programming within emerging political movements; and teaching relational compassion in diverse faith communities.

Learn more at the links below!

ecological justice for climate activists

compassion and justice in schools

anti-oppressive restorative justice training

Colombia Peace-building project

Advanced Follow-Up Trainings

We offer several advanced trainings to support and deepen our Relational Facilitators community following the training. These include:

- Kin Skillshare in which folks learn to adapt the CourageRISE framework for specific contexts and audiences;
- Peer Process Group in which folks explore personal edges related to the work that inhibit their facilitation; and the
- Art of Facilitation Working Group in which community members learn to give and receive critical-constructive feedback on their relational facilitation.

Our Team

We love this work! This year’s program will be co-held by Brooke Lavelle and Maha El-Sheikh with guest facilitation and presentations from our beloved circle of Courage facilitators, including Tina Strawn, Viva Asmelash, Katie Robinson, Katrine Bregengaard and Farah Mahesri.

Brooke is the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Courage of Care Coalition. She holds a Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies and Cognitive Science from Emory University, an M.A. in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism from Columbia University and a B.A. in Religion and Psychology from Barnard College. Her academic work focuses on the diversity of contemplative models for cultivating compassion as well as the ways in which spiritual practice and social activism inform one another.

Brooke has consulted to various human rights, educational and spiritual organizations, and has experience leading national and international political, educational and climate justice projects. She consults to the International Solidarity Matters Project, is a fellow at the Mind and Life Institute and the Institute of Advanced Sustainability Studies in Germany, and has led courses on compassion-based approaches to anti-oppressive education at the University of Virginia and San Francisco State University. Through her work at Courage or in her neighborhood of Gowanus, Brooklyn, Brooke remains steadfastly committed to building alternatives to the status quo.

With 20 years working in the international humanitarian sector, Maha’s work currently focuses on the social injustices underlying our global crises. As a facilitator, she is inspired by 15 years living and working in Palestine and Lebanon, learning how connection to heart, beloved community, mutual aid, joy, and compassion can serve as antidotes to oppression, colonization, injustice and violence. She is the co-founder of the first non-profit, volunteer-run yoga center in Palestine, and brings her experience in studying and teaching trauma-informed yoga, somatics, and meditation to explore the interconnection of healing, social transformation, and justice.

Maha serves as Co-Director of Courage of Care, and a member of the International Solidarity Movement, where she partners with relational facilitators and leaders in the economic, racial and climate justice movements. She also partners with international humanitarian groups to reimagine aid through compassion-centered, counter-oppressive frameworks.

Tina Strawn is a joy and liberation activist, racial and social justice advocate, and author of “Are We Free Yet? The Black, Queer Guide to Divorcing America.” Tina is also the owner and host of the Speaking of Racism podcast and she is the co-founder of Here4TheKids, an abolitionist movement to ban guns and fossil fuels. The heart of Tina’s work is founding and leading Legacy Trips, immersive, 3-day antiracism weekends where participants visit historic locations such as Montgomery and Selma, AL, and utilize spiritual practices and other mindfulness based resources as tools to affect personal and collective change. Tina has three adult children, an ex-husband, an ex-wife, and an ex-country. Tina has a TedX Talk entitled, ” Blaxit: The New Underground Railroad” She has been a full-time minimalist nomad since February 2020 and currently lives in Costa Rica.

is a passionate people operations and certified inclusion strategist specializing in sustainable DEI strategy, inclusive instructional design + learner experiences, and critical team conversations. Viva’s professional purpose is to create environments where people feel truly seen and are inspired to be their best and most authentic selves. She brings 15 years of experience in leadership training + development, values-driven branding, and employee engagement. Viva frequently designs and delivers group and individual inclusive leadership coaching programs for executives, delivers keynote speeches and panel discussions, and crafts custom DEI education experiences for organizations of many kinds.

As a first-generation Eritrean-American, Viva leverages a unique, lifelong perspective on race, gender, culture, belonging, privilege, and access to education. With this lens and her breadth of industry experience, she takes deep care in working with select clients to share insights and tactics to deepen their people + inclusion ethos and efforts—all in hopes of planting seeds for collective liberation and joy.

katie robinson is a writer, scholar, and interdisciplinary artist devoted to the exploration of what is present and possible outside of the white supremacist colonial imagination. Their essay, “Here’s How I Let Them Come Close,” a meditation on encounters, extraterrestrials, and the creative process, was featured in A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars from Milkweed in 2023. They are currently a PhD candidate at Pacifica Graduate Institute, where they are writing a dissertation at the intersections of depth psychology, decoloniality, and police and prison abolition.

Katrine is a facilitator who combines her background as a critical human rights educator, organizer and researcher with her work as a contemplative and somatic practitioner. She’s passionate about building meditative and compassion-based approaches that can strengthen our personal and collective capacity to address the complexities of eco-, gender-, class- and racial-justice. She facilitates radical mindfulness groups in Copenhagen and works with Courage of Care Coalition to build bridges between individual and collective healing and systemic transformation.

Farah Mahesri works as a strategy, organizational and leadership development thought-partner and collaborator for social justice, nonprofit and philanthropic organizations. She previously worked at Tides Advocacy, providing strategic, political and compliance support to multi-entity organizations working to build independent political power and work toward collective liberation. She also provided strategic and political advice to organizations such as Dream Defenders, Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, California Environmental Justice Alliance Action, Detroit Action and others. Previously, as a Muslim-American coming of age during the post 9-11 era, Farah worked with international organizations working on the anti-war/peace agenda.

Program Dates and Requirements

Fall 2024 Cohort: Fifteen Sessions: Thursdays, September 5-December 19
*no session Thursday, November 28 12:00-2:30pm Eastern (US) 9:00am-11:30am Pacific (US)

SESSIONS AND PODS

Weekly sessions are 2.5 hours. NYC time is our anchor time, so please note that session times may shift during daylight savings depending on your global location. (Find your timezone here!)

Participants can expect to engage in a minimum of one hour of prep work outside of our live sessions, including pre-recorded teachings on the theory and practice of the model, personal practice and reflection, and additional background material (as needed).

Participants will also be assigned to a small pod for the duration of the program. Pods will be encouraged to meet weekly for about one hour to support reflection and integration, and to build community. Pods will choose the time they meet as schedules permit.

PRE-REQUISITES

Interested participants should have at least 2 years of experiencing facilitating relational culture in their community or organization (see above for the array of roles that fall under the umbrella of facilitation!). Folks should also have familiarity with our CourageRISE model.

Those who have not attended a Courage training before should be sure our approach resonates with you by taking an introductory workshop, attending or engaging our summer intensive recordings, and/or or by reading more about our CourageRISE model on “Our Approach” page here on our website.

The Solidarity Fellowship

We are pleased to offer 5 reduced tuition scholarships to facilitators from and currently living and working in the global south. (BIPOC folks living and working in the global north should register at our solidarity tuition tier below.)

Interested fellows should be deeply engaged in facilitating counter-oppressive and healing centered work in their organizations and movements, and willing to join our peer practice community following the training.

Tuition & Payment Plans

We try our best to make our programs accessible and affordable. In addition to 37.5 live training hours, participants also receive weekly pre-recorded video teachings, guided meditations, workbooks, handouts, background resources and facilitator check-ins. Our core facilitation team also handles all aspects of program administration.

We offer a sliding scale registration fee for our courses and workshops in service of economic justice. We also offer payment plans as needed to support accessibility.

We understand that access to resources is a result of institutionalized white supremacy, capitalism and colonization.

A sliding scale fee structure allows white folks and others who have systematically benefited from these unjust and inequitable systems to practice reparations within our community by acknowledging Black, Indigenous and People of Color for their generations of stolen land and resources.

We also know that privilege is intersectional and that not all white folks have access to generational wealth or class privilege. We ask that you take your privilege and access to resources into account when determining your registration fee.

Folks registering on behalf of an organization or with professional development funds should register at the tier that aligns with their organization’s operating budget (e.g. full tuition for orgs with annual operating budgets of $1M or more). You may find this template helpfu l when requesting professional development funds from your organization.

Making one-time full tuition payments if possible is a great help to our organization. We offer payment plans to make the program more accessible.

***Please note that no refunds will be given for failure to attend or complete the course. Folks registering via payment plans are also responsible for completing full tuition payments. Please be sure you can participate fully before signing up.***

Sponsor: $1350

Payment Plan: $337.50/month
*$36/per live training hour. Participants also receive weekly video teachings, guided meditations and other practices, workbooks, handouts, background resources and facilitator check-ins.

We ask white folks and those with class privilege and access to financial resources to consider paying our sponsor fee. These registrations help us make our sliding scale and reduced options possible and sustainable. Thank you in advance for your generosity!

Sustainer (Full Tuition): $900

Payment Plan: $225/month

*$24/per live training hour. Participants also receive weekly video teachings, guided meditations and other practices, workbooks, handouts, background resources and facilitator check-ins.

We ask white folks and those with class privilege (eg raised in middle-upper class homes and/or making over $62,000 per year), access to financial resources and/or access to organizational professional development funds to please consider paying the full course fee. We also ask all white-bodied participants being sponsored by organizations to attend pay the full course fee.

Solidarity Rate: $450

Payment Plan: $112.50/month

*$12/per live training hour. Participants also receive weekly video teachings, guided meditations and other practices, workbooks, handouts, background resources and facilitator check-ins.

We invite folks with less class privilege, financial hardship and/or those representing historically marginalized identities for whom the full tuition rate is not possible, to register at our subsidized solidarity rate.

Global South Rate: $150

Payment Plan: $37.50/month

*$4/per live training hour. Participants also receive weekly video teachings, guided meditations and other practices, workbooks, handouts, background resources and facilitator check-ins.

We invite folks of the global majority living and working in the global south to register at our solidarity rate.

Financial Assistance

We are committed to ensuring that our programs are accessible to all. We understand the challenges of doing this work in a deeply unjust racial-capitalist system.

Courage of Care facilitators and operations are compensated primarily through program registrations. We generally do not receive external funding or grants. While we try to raise funds to support our sliding scale offerings and scholarships, we do not have a sustainable scholarship fund. The discounted rates that we offer are often also a discount on the pay that our facilitators receive.

Reciprocity is one of our core community practices and we invite you to determine what financial contribution you are able to make to the program. While we do not offer full tuition coverage, we are open to specific tuition reduction requests as well as work exchanges for partial tuition relief. We can accept proposals for payment plans provided they are completed during the term of the program.

We also ask that you consider the following guidelines when requesting additional support:

- You are experiencing unemployment or houselessness, and/or
- Your paycheck barely covers or does not cover your basic needs of food, shelter, water, clothing, medical care, social engagement and rest for you and your family, AND
- You do not have access to organizational professional development funds, sponsorship, savings or other forms of financial support to cover the cost of the training.

Please use this form to request financial assistance

What Folks Say

Hear from some of our Courage Kin about the program!

application Deadlines

Registration is open now through August 30th, 2024 unless the cohort fills prior to that date!

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this a certification program?

No. We are happy to offer you a certificate of completion for the training upon request, but this training does not “certify” you to teach Courage’s model. It will prepare you to offer an introductory CourageRISE course in your community. On our view, it takes years to develop the capacity to teach this work in its full depth, and that level of training cannot be completed in one semester. We are also interested in moving away from the highly transactional certificate world, and instead are interested in building a community of practice. We trust that folks attending this training are committed to building collaborative practices and that we will co-learn together along this journey.

what are the pre-requisites?

Interested participants should have experience with the CourageRISE model. Folks who have completed any of our prior Summer Intensives, past Leaders or Healers programs, our Ecological Justice Course and/or our Radical Communion course meet this requirement. Folks who have not attended a prior training with us should take an introductory workshop with us, or attend our RelationSHIFT sessions. See our online community for other self-study options.

How much Prep time outside of the live sessions is expected?

We anticipate a minimum of 1 hour and 40 minutes will be needed per week in addition to the weekly Tuesday meetings.

We will provide a variety of background reading and multimedia materials and resources on a weekly basis in preparation for the week’s session. While the amount of time spent engaging with these materials will vary per person depending on previous knowledge, interest, capacity, etc, we estimate that time needed could range from 40 minutes to 2 hours per week.

In addition, we will create sub-groups – or “pods” – which are invited to meet on a weekly basis – beyond our Tuesday sessions – for approximately 1 hour. Pods will provide space for more in-depth discussion and practice in smaller groups. Pods will self-organize in terms of timing and frequency of meetings.

what will i learn?

The outcome of the program is that you will be able to apply and use the CourageRISE framework and the various compassion-based, anti-oppressive, healing-centered, trauma-informed pedagogies, methodologies and practices in your work.

Our intention is that you will leave this program:

ready to assess folks’ readiness for multi-identity coalition work, and whether more healing and/or affinity work is needed before coming together
with renewed capacity to hold space lovingly and sustainably
more confident stepping into uncomfortable, difficult situations – including conflict
with capacity to embrace complexity and different possibilities for the future in a way that feels possible and less overwhelming
feeling more connected to an international network and community of relational facilitators and activists that will hold and support you in your work.