Love Made Visible
Cultivating Awareness, Protection, and Radical Healing for B/IPOC Educators Navigating Crisis
March 12 and 13, 2025
12:00 p.m. – 2:00 p.m. PT/ 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m. CT/ 3:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. ET
“I had to examine, in my dreams as well as in my immune-function, the devastating effects of overextension. Overextending myself is not stretching myself. I had to accept how difficult it is to monitor the difference. Necessary for me to cut down on sugar. Crucial. Physically. Psychically. Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” –Audre Lorde
As B/IPOC educators, we often find our professional work permeating our personal worlds and though this can be one of our strongest assets when supporting the wellness of our school ecosystems, it also runs the risk of severely compromising our ability to metabolize stress, create or maintain boundaries and prioritize our own wellness over the needs of our communities.
Join us in creating a brave healing space specifically for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (B/IPOC) who are school staff and school partners in which we can safely acknowledge the unique experience of being a care provider in a racialized society as we explore the many impacts it has on our lives, our bodies and our school ecosystems.
What is this?
Love Made Visible: Cultivating Awareness, Protection and Radical Healing for B/IPOC Educators is a series of two Community of Practice gatherings (120 minutes each) focused on naming the institutional barriers to our wellness and examining the many ways B/IPOC educators can find care in a system that consistently causes harm, trauma, and (mental and physical) fatigue as a result of our intersectional identities as B/IPOC folks, simply showing up to work every day.
We uplift B/IPOC individuals – of Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, South Asian, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern & North African – because school spaces are often dominated by white supremacy culture, which adversely impacts everyone, but the experience is especially taxing and harmful for B/IPOC educators, children, and families. Holding a B/IPOC affinity space* aims to provide crucial witnessing and support, prevent burnout, and provide a space to fortify ideas, energy, and well-being of B/IPOC educators. This space fosters the collective strength needed to create alternatives to the current educational system protected from the white gaze.
* ”Why People of Color Need Spaces Without White People”
How might this feel?
Sessions will be 120-minute facilitated gatherings themed on an arc exploring our exploration of the following guiding questions: What crises are B/IPOC educators impacted by in their workplaces? How are those crises structural and embedded specifically within educational institutions and systems? What do B/IPOC educators need to move toward recovery from those crises? How can our community develop, implement, and sustain those practices to move toward personal and collective healing and renewal?
Together we will build a container in which we can be our full and expansive selves while exploring the impeding social constructs and internalized notions that often compromise our holistic wellness. We will also look back to look ahead in solution-finding to better serve and support the mental health and wellness of our students.
Session One – March 12, 2025 – Naming and Mapping: We examine our historical legacies of self-care while acknowledging the compounded bio/psycho/social impacts of living in a racialized society on B/IPOC educators, school leaders, and communities as a result of the historical and institutional racism plays out in our school crisis leadership daily lives and the institutions we serve.
Session Two – March 13, 2025 – Resourcing and Implementing: We will explore the many ways B/IPOC school staff, leaders, and educators have relied on the earth and each other, both generally as well as within our own lineages, to stave off burnout and compassion fatigue in the face of oppression and violence. In this session, we will also uplift and affirm the tools accessible to us currently so that we might forge the world we desire and deserve.
We encourage you two attend both sessions as they are complimentary. If you can only join one of the two, we will welcome you.
Learning Goals:
- Host a brave and generative space for self & community introspection that interrupts educator isolation and fosters co-regulation.
- Identify and investigate institutional and internalized barriers to wellness for B/IPOC educators
- Call upon ancestral and community wisdom to address those institutional and internalized barriers
- Expand our self and collective care toolbox with community-valued and evidence-based practices (such as poetry, song, art, movement, journaling, talking circles, altar building, reconnection with nature, critical text reviews, etc.)
- Support participants in building meaningful connections to external people, places, and ideas that serve as protection against a culture that values productivity over our humanity.
Intended Audience
Any B/IPOC school staff or partner that tends to the well-being of young people in school settings (school leaders, educators, community service providers, guidance counselors in higher education, social workers, etc.).
Faculty
Oriana Ides, MA, APCC, PPS (she/her)
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.
Teddy McGlynn-Wright, MSW (he/they)
Teddy is a Belonging-Based Facilitator, politicized healer and award-winning professor, formerly of the UW School of Social Work. He currently directs a trauma-informed schools project in New Orleans, LA. When working with clients, (individuals and organizations), Teddy uses a body-based (or somatic) approach to healing and transforming systems that break people, families and communities.
His three main areas of work— teaching, trauma-stewardship, and facilitation, inform and are informed by one another.
Recognizing that all interpersonal violence happens in the context of structural violence, Teddy takes a body-based approach to healing and clearing secondary trauma in individuals and collectives, whether the trauma is racialized or gendered, interpersonal or institutional. Teddy supports those on the frontlines of anti-violence movements including domestic violence and sexual assault advocates, anti-racist organizers, and prison abolitionists.
He primarily works with values-based organizations/clients supporting them to align their values with their actions – grounded in what’s now to shape what’s next.
Niki Magtoto, MA (she/her)
SCRR Senior Project Manager
Niki Magtoto is the Senior Project Manager for the School Crisis Recovery & Renewal Project. She has a background in supporting public school districts through equity-centered and antiracist facilitation. She has worked in policy implementation as well as design and improvement projects focused on engaging all levels of stakeholders to transform systems. She is dedicated to building new realities for young people. She holds a Bachelor of Arts from Vassar College and a Master of Arts in Education: Equity & Social Justice from San Francisco State University.
Her work in school crisis recovery and renewal is motivated by and dedicated to Andréa, Matthew & Kendrick.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Is this program eligible for Continuing Education Hours (CEH)? No.
- Will this offering be recorded? No. Resources shared during each session will be sent to participants only.
- Do I need to attend both sessions? No
- Who can I contact if I have additional questions? Email us at scrr [at] cars-rp.org with “Love Made Visible” in the subject line.
