Life After Loss: Honoring Nex Benedict and Connected Students
A Process Space for Educators
March 7, 2024
12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. PT • 2:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m. CT • 3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. ET
(view your time zone)
This event has passed.
Join us to come together and create a container for processing Nex’s death, anti-LGBTQ2S violence, and support each other so that we can support our students.
SCRR Field Coach Oriana Ides teaches us that metabolizing grief is necessary for us as educators, for our recovery and renewal. That we can give ourselves and each other permission to feel, process, and make meaning when we witness experiences that have become normal when they are deeply not.
Who is this for?
Our SCRR community – you – is made of beautiful and brilliant educators, leaders, and community members who are witnessing this story and this life and this crisis with personal and professional grief.
It is an opportunity to lean into individual and collective cultural humility as we examine how our grief cultures might collaborate for healing, or at times collide and prevent recovery or renewal.
Gentle reminders in these moments: Invitations from your SCRR team
We invite you to practice loving consent: please ask a colleague if they have the space to talk about what you need to talk about, and respect them if they say no. Please feel permission if someone begins sharing with language that is activating to interrupt and advocate for what you need.
We invite you as colleagues and leaders to compassionately be mindful of language we use and words we share on calls, in faculty meetings, on Slack (etc) and on emails that might activate our colleagues and community members who have lived experience with anti LGBTQ2S violence.
We invite school leaders to offer moments of pause during meetings and with asks, be attuned that we as team members and colleagues might be carrying so much right now. It is ok to pause, to slow down and to make space. It is also ok to ask if people do not want to process and get consent to turn focus to the tasks at hand.
Some of us may feel deeply impacted, and others more distanced. We want to affirm that whatever and however these experiences land, what you are feeling is yours to feel. Meaning, we honor the deep rage, heart break, and distress that might strain our space to focus and “do,” and we honor that for others, working is a way of coping.
Two resources in this moment:
- Indigenous 2SLGBTQ Support (curated by Dr. Autumn Asher BlackDeer)
- Identity Support Plans – Tools to Support Schools in Planning, Safety, and Educational Equity for Gender Diverse Students (Pacific Southwest MHTTC)
Nex’s life mattered. Your students’ lives matter.
May our students be held with love, dignity, and freedom.
Hosts
Leora Wolf-Prusan (she/her) EdD
SCRR Project Director
Leora Wolf-Prusan serves as the Project Director for the School Crisis Recovery & Renewal project and as the School Mental Health field director for the Pacific Southwest Mental Health Technology Transfer Center (MHTTC), in addition to many other facilitation projects. She received a BA in international relations and a BA in Spanish with a minor in Social & Ethnic Relations from the University of California, Davis; a teaching credential from Mills College; and an EdD in educational leadership from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Oriana Ides (she/hers), MA, LPCCI, PPS
SCRR Field Coach
Oriana Ides is the School Mental Health Training Specialist at CARS, who approaches healing the wounds of trauma and oppression as core elements of social justice. She has worked with young people across life course from elementary school to college, and has served as teacher-leader, school counselor, classroom educator and program director. She is committed to generating equity within school structures and policies by focusing on evidence-based mental health techniques and institutional design. Her work to forge a more just world is motivated by and dedicated to Amilca Ysabel Mouton Fuentes.
