School Crisis Recovery and Renewal

As of June 1, 2025, SCRR is no longer funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration or a National Child Traumatic Stress Network Category II site. Learn more

The 2024 Summer Institute for Educator Healing

Embracing Renewal: Praxis and Practice towards Healing

August 6th, 7th & 8th, 2024

9:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. PT / 11:00 a.m. – 2:30 p.m. CT / 12:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. ET

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Building transformative school systems, environments and learning experiences from a place of overwhelm and collective exhaustion is nearly impossible. And yet! We are often if not always in that space. To create space and place to process what we as educators have carried, are carrying and will have to carry is necessary for our renewal amidst and after crisis. 

Join the School Crisis Recovery & Renewal project for our fourth SCRR Summer Institute for Educators.

This summer, we focus our time together on the vision for and experience of our renewal: how we make meaning of what has happened, how we embrace post traumatic and grief growth opportunities, how we hold questions that can block or buttress our healing, and hold each other in the aftermath. 

Together over the course of three days, we gather to reimagine our individual, collective, and structural healing experiences by exploring practices, strategies and interventions that allow us to welcome the new school year and more deeply attune to our personal and collective needs. 

Through powerful keynotes, attunement practices, renewal strategies, and art-based healing experiential workshops, we renew together. 

Institute Goals

  1. Create a safe, generative, and regulating experience for educators, school-based mental health providers, and people who tend to the emotional well-being of youth.
  2. Engage participants in evidence-based, art centered, ritual activities that positively impact the process of recovery and renewal after a crisis.
  3. Provide an opportunity for educators and other school professionals to learn new ways in which they can utilize ritual to recover and renew to support their community after a big thing (crisis event). 
  4. Support participants in imagining new ways to incorporate ritual and art into their personal practice in crisis recovery.

Our Guiding Questions

  • August 6th – Sustaining Myself: How might I renew myself as an educator?
  • August 7th – Sustaining My Community: How might I experience and create collective care and renewal within my school community?
  • August 8th – Sustaining our Structures: How might we create structural change to support authentic healing and renewal?

Intended Audience

Any 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.)

Our Agenda

You can find a PDF about our event with our entire agenda linked here.

Each day of our institute has its own theme and guiding question; all three days follow the same flow and are from 9:00 a.m. PT – 12:30 p.m. PT / 11:00 a.m. CT – 2:30 p.m. CT / 12:00 p.m. ET – 3:30 p.m. ET.

Guiding Question: How might I renew myself as an educator?

SCRR Welcome – SCRR Staff
9:00 a.m. – 9:20 a.m. PT/ 11:00 a.m. – 11:20 a.m. CT/ 12:00 p.m. – 12:20 p.m. ET

“Renewing Our Hope for Closing the ‘Tragic Gap’” – Alex Shevrin Venet, M.Ed

Opening Words – 9:20 a.m. – 9:50 a.m. PT/ 11:20 a.m. – 11:50 a.m. CT/ 12:20 p.m. – 12:50 p.m. ET

Educator Parker Palmer writes that “in every generation, we must try again to close the gap between our reality and our aspirations. That gap will always be open, and the hearts of those who try to close it will always be broken” (Palmer, 2020). Educators peer across the tragic gap daily when we see the distance between our dreams for our students and our world, and the harsh reality of educational inequities and trauma. How might we renew our hope and purpose as we work to shrink the tragic gap? How might we pursue healing and justice even as we recognize the scale of what needs to change? We’ll explore these questions together and consider what it means to cultivate a sense of hope that can lead us to action.

“My Body is a Vessel: Radical Rest to Reconnect” – Shirley Johnson, LMFT

Self-Attuning Practice – 9:55 a.m. – 10:25 a.m. PT/ 11:55 a.m. – 12:25 p.m. CT/ 12:55 p.m. – 1:25- p.m. ET

Emotional attunement is vital to our ability to move through crisis and to access our healing.  And yet, it often requires slowing down and being in a rested state to both offer and receive emotional attunement.  Our bodies help our ability to both emotionally attune to ourselves and connect from the space of compassion and attunement to others.  During our session, we explore our relationship to rest, rest as a lifestyle, trusting our body and trusting rest, rest as a portal to connect with inner self and inner wisdom, and connecting to our body through rest. We will also practice yoga nidra – a deeply restorative and gentle rest technology and get to experience how our body and mind respond to this practice of slowing down.  Connecting to our body supports our intellect and offers another dimension to insight and ways to heal through tumultuous and joyful times.  This self-attuning practice will offer space to inquire about and practice conscious resting, the eight types of rest, and embrace where we may be able to integrate rest into our lives in schools and beyond.

“Beginning Again: A Vision for Educators as Human Be-ers, Not Only Human Do-ers” – Leora Wolf-Prusan, Ed.D with 2023-24 SCRR Leadership Fellows – Camden Webb, MA, Christine Ewing, MS, LMFT and Roberta Marguerite Chávez, MA

Collective Renewal Strategy – 10:30 a.m. – 11:15 a.m. PT/ 12:30 p.m. – 1:15 p.m. CT/ 1:30 p.m. – 2:15p.m. ET

What might renewal look like, feel like, and sound like for us as educators? Join Leora (SCRR Project Director) and Christine Ewing, Camden Webb, and Roberta Chávez, three 2023-2024 SCRR Leadership Fellows, in courageous conversation. Together we share our questions, ideas, visions, challenges, and honest reflections on what the call for sustaining ourselves in unsustainable conditions actually means. Christine, Camden & Roberta offer their educator healing journeys as crisis responders, parent-leaders, and system directors through grief and grieving, paradigm-shifting, and embracing the authentic messiness required to reimagine ourselves anew.

“Honoring the Four Sacred Directions within Us” – Jesus Solorio, LMFT

Art-Based Healing Intervention – 11:20 a.m. – 11:50 a.m. PT/ 1:20 p.m. – 1:50 p.m. CT/ 2:20 p.m. – 2:50 p.m. ET

 In times of crisis and chaos, it is easy to feel reactionary, unsupported, disconnected, and alone.  Feeling this way moves us further away from our personal and collective power, it also moves us away from the creativity, possibility, and solution-finding times like this require.  During this art-based, collaging, drawing and journaling practice, we will uplift indigenous wisdom to engage in the liberatory process of attunement, reflection, and inquiry to connect to the consciousness of the four directions for deeper grounding, potential, and renewal.

Meaning Making & Integration Conversation – Oriana Ides, MA, APCC, PPS

11:55 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. PT / 1:55 p.m. – 2:15 p.m. CT / 2:55 p.m. – 3:15 p.m. ET

Closing & Looking Ahead – SCRR Staff

12:15 p.m. – 12:30 p.m. PT / 2:15 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. CT / 3:15 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. ET

Guiding Question: How might I experience and create collective care and renewal within my school community?

SCRR Welcome – SCRR Staff
9:00 a.m. – 9:20 a.m. PT/ 11:00 a.m. – 11:20 a.m. CT/ 12:00 p.m. – 12:20 p.m. ET

“Grief as a Tool for Sustaining Loving Community” – Sharim Hannegan-Martinez, Ph.D

Opening Words – 9:20 a.m. – 9:50 a.m. PT/ 11:20 a.m. – 11:50 a.m. CT/ 12:20 p.m. – 12:50 p.m. ET

Trauma, understood as a body’s protective response to danger (Menakem, 2017, p. 7), is one of the most significant inequities educators are currently trying to address in their schools, classroom, and practices. In response to this health crisis, over the last decade there has been burgeoning research on social emotional learning and trauma-informed pedagogies and practices in schools (e.g., Alvarez, 2020; Camangian & Cariaga, 2021; Hannegan-Martinez, 2019; Simmons, 2021; Shevrin Venet, 2021). While these bodies of scholarship have made important contributions to the field of education, there remains a gap between theory and pedagogical praxis. Garcia (2019) refers to this as a “healing gap,” created by the fact that many teachers are asking young people to do something they have not yet practiced in their own lives. In short, teachers are expected (and often want to) support the healing and well-being of children, but are themselves, unsupported and unwell. In this session, Sharim shares her own teacher-educator testimonio illuminating how she addressed the “healing gap” in her own life and practice, discussing how through integrating grief in her own life, she was able to grow as an educator. Sharim concludes by offering examples of how we might utilize grief as a tool for healing and for building the type of loving community we know is integral to well-being (Hannegan-Martinez, 2019, 2023). 

“Mapping Our Relatedness: Resourcing Ourselves in Expansive Community” – Candice Valenzuela, MA

Self-Attuning Practice – 9:55 a.m. – 10:25 a.m. PT/ 11:55 a.m. – 12:25 p.m. CT/ 12:55 p.m. – 1:25- p.m. ET

Renewal requires more than a shift in practice – it requires a shift in paradigm. We are invited to reflect: In what ways do legacies of oppression limit our healing imaginations?  How might we be unconsciously engaging in healing practices as commodities to acquire or transactions to complete, rather than returning to our inherent relatedness? How does this impact our self-concept, wellness and overall ability to access self & collective renewal? What resources lie beyond the limits of colonial imagination?

This exercise invites us to reflect on the expansive human and beyond-human resources that hold us each day whether we acknowledge them or not. Participants will be invited to map their unique ecosystem of personal & collective resources through drawing, writing or visualization and explore them as sacred relationships, while considering how this shift opens up space for personal & collective renewal.

“Acknowledging Our Humanity: Using Professional Development to Support Educator Emotional Wellness, Too” – Noor Jones-Bey, Ph.D

Collective Renewal Strategy – 10:30 a.m. – 11:15 a.m. PT/ 12:30 p.m. – 1:15 p.m. CT/ 1:30 p.m. – 2:15p.m. ET

Inherent to school culture is professional development. We go to it, lead it, dread it, or love it. And often, we are asked to provide or engage in professional development in a void that separates our real experiences as educators from what we’re being asked to learn or do. How might we, as both professional development facilitators and participants, cultivate a culture within our school teams so that attending to our emotional landscape is safe and possible? In this time together, we will give name to the reasons we are called to education and the learning opportunities we desire as well as begin to explore the culture and dynamics of the school spaces we currently exist within and uplifted the transformative power of “land-based learning” as a pathway towards humanizing education and our professional development.

“Heart Like A River” – José González, MS

Art-Based Healing Intervention – 11:20 a.m. – 11:50 a.m. PT/ 1:20 p.m. – 1:50 p.m. CT/ 2:20 p.m. – 2:50 p.m. ET

What are the ways that the language of ecology can help heal our severed connections with ourselves, each other, and the land? How can mentorship from the land be in service to social justice as educators, community stewards and school culture keepers? In this session, we’ll delve into some examples of ecological wayfinding with invitations, orientations, and provocations in service of our restoration.  Together we play with drawing and illustration to explore our experiences and use nature as our healing guide (e.g., being and thinking like a river, applying prescribed burning in our socioemotional spaces, and nurturing impact with mycelial leadership).  

Meaning Making & Integration Conversation – Oriana Ides, MA, APCC, PPS

11:55 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. PT / 1:55 p.m. – 2:15 p.m. CT / 2:55 p.m. – 3:15 p.m. ET

Closing & Looking Ahead – SCRR Staff

12:15 p.m. – 12:30 p.m. PT / 2:15 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. CT / 3:15 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. ET

Guiding Question: How might we create structural change to support authentic healing and renewal?

SCRR Welcome – SCRR Staff
9:00 a.m. – 9:20 a.m. PT/ 11:00 a.m. – 11:20 a.m. CT/ 12:00 p.m. – 12:20 p.m. ET

“We Got Outsiders Up In Here!‘ Ethnographic Research as a Resource for Critical Inquiry” – Savannah Shange, Ph.D

Opening Words – 9:20 a.m. – 9:50 a.m. PT/ 11:20 a.m. – 11:50 a.m. CT/ 12:20 p.m. – 12:50 p.m. ET

In both activist and academic circles, there is a growing awareness of the disproportionate targeting of Black girls in school discipline for behavioral concerns like disrespect,  as well as the relative dearth of research and intervention efforts directed towards them as opposed to Black boys. A common strategy used by ‘social justice’ oriented schools to derail the school-to-prison pipeline has been to double down on the intimacy of ‘community’ as leverage, using story circles, life histories, and community ethnographies in an attempt to build rapport and in turn ameliorate student misbehavior.  But what happens when this kind of intimate “community building” becomes just another lever for exclusion?  

In this talk, Dr. Shange will draw on ethnographic research from her book Progressive Dystopia to think through racialized exclusion and belonging in school settings. We will then apply the frameworks that emerge from the data to our own school settings in pursuit of one central question: what would it mean for every child to belong?  

“Somatic Practices for Liberation” – Sue Kuyper, LCSW

Self-Attuning Practice – 9:55 a.m. – 10:25 a.m. PT/ 11:55 a.m. – 12:25 p.m. CT/ 12:55 p.m. – 1:25- p.m. ET

Our relationships with our bodies mirror our relationship with the world.  What is happening in our educational institutions, communities and globally is literally too much one body to hold.  Under that pressure, we tend to individualize and disconnect from the life force and resource available in connection with our bodies, each other and the land/ground.  Politicized somatics is a body-up transformational lineage that builds embodied leadership for the sake of taking more choiceful and sustainable action and also to feel better and get free.  Join us in somatic practice together.

“Trauma Informed School Systems for Crisis Recovery and Renewal”– Jen Leland, LMFT

Collective Renewal Strategy – 10:30 a.m. – 11:15 a.m. PT/ 12:30 p.m. – 1:15 p.m. CT/ 1:30 p.m. – 2:15p.m. ET

As school systems continue to navigate uncertainty on a variety of fronts, the impacts of these challenges will continue to be felt by students and staff. This session explores an awareness of stress, trauma, and grief, their impacts on students, teachers and schools, as well as ways to effectively address them through the lens of recovery and renewal. Join us as we collectively create a space to acknowledge, hold, and shift the complexities and paradoxes of contributing to systems change while witnessing and experiencing systemic disorganization, moral injury and still holding the tender vision for healing-centered school systems.   

“Art Making for Educator Self-Care, Burn Out & Vicarious Trauma” – Tonia Herrero, MPS, ATR-BC, LCAT, ATCS

Art-Based Healing Intervention – 11:20 a.m. – 11:50 a.m. PT/ 1:20 p.m. – 1:50 p.m. CT/ 2:20 p.m. – 2:50 p.m. ET

Being an educator is overwhelming and stressful, and it impacts us on a deep level which is why it is important to take time to focus on ourselves and our own healing journey. The art making process is not only therapeutic, but the images we create can help us understand ourselves and our experiences on a deeper level. In this workshop, participants will actively engage in a visual art process that will be grounding, healing, and offer self-exploration and reflection. Brief psychoeducation about art therapy & vicarious trauma as an educator will be provided. Please have a sketchbook or a few sheets of drawing paper and basic drawing materials available (colored pencils, markers, pastels, etc).

Meaning Making & Integration Conversation – Oriana Ides, MA, APCC, PPS

11:55 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. PT / 1:55 p.m. – 2:15 p.m. CT / 2:55 p.m. – 3:15 p.m. ET

Closing & Looking Ahead – SCRR Staff

12:15 p.m. – 12:30 p.m. PT / 2:15 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. CT / 3:15 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. ET

Session Materials

Day 1 – August 6, 2024

Day 2 – August 7, 2024

Day 3 – August 8, 2024

Registering for the Summer Institute This Year!

There is one registration link for all three days: come to one session, come to one day, come to some, come to all! In or out or the whole experience – we welcome you for as much as you can and want. One link, one door.

The Summer Institute is offered at no cost (as usual). AND! We have a new move this year: we invite you to consider an optional, scaled payment for your educator healing experience. We welcome all participants, regardless of the option they choose.  

Review the information below, and when you register you’ll be able to select if you wish to pay, and the dollar value you wish to contribute if desired.

Why this and why now?

  • This is our final year in our current funding stream and all dollars that we receive from the Summer Institute go directly back into our Year 5 programmatic budget so that we can provide as many no-cost trainings, potential in-person retreats, and learning experiences that we can this year. 
  • We are not charging for profit; we are charging to increase services with our high-quality Faculty and our offerings for you and your community.

How does this work?

  • We are offering a scaled pricing structure for the 2024 Summer Institute for Educator Healing. 
  • To be clear, payment is optional! Attending at no cost ($0) is still available to you and you can select to pay or not pay at registration. 
  • The scaled pricing offers you options to consider rather than one fixed price. 
  • There is one registration link for all three days and we are inviting you to pay once for your entire experience (e.g., if you come all three days, you’ll still pay once!).

What am I getting by paying? 

  • The price covers the three days – August 6 – 8, 2024  (9:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. PT / 12:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. ET) of rich learning. 
  • If you need/want CEs, we pay for those fees. 

If you wish to pay for the Summer Institute, but aren’t sure how much, here are some considerations to help you decide your payment total.

Please note: based on our calculations, if payment were mandatory, the cost per participant would be $200.00

[Learn more about sliding scale pricing structures from National Equity Project]

Scale OptionWhat does this meanPayment 
SolidarityPay what you can$0.00 to $200.00
Sustain50% of the price $100.00
Full Cost100% of the price$200.00
Redistribution/Pay it ForwardMore than 100% of the price$200.00+
OtherUp to you! Any $ amount you wish 

We trust your judgment, reflection, and knowing of all your circumstances (either individual or organizational) to make the call. We welcome you no matter what!  Questions about what this is, why this is, or want help figuring out how much to contribute? Email: scrr@cars-rp.org

REGISTER HERE

Need to download or access this information all at once? Download our SCRR 2024 Summer Institute Registration Information here.

Frequently Asked Questions

  • Is this program eligible for Continuing Education Hours (CEH)? Yes, 3 hours of Continuing Education is provided for attendance for all three days.
  • Will this offering be recorded? Yes
  • Can I get a certificate of attendance? Yes
  • Do I have to go to all three days? No, but we hope you do!

In the words of the participants from previous SCRR Winter and Summer Institutes

“The three-day summer institute offered me an opportunity to engage in profound learning and healing simultaneously.  I have also been yearning to feel seen.  I felt seen these last three days.“

“I was grateful to be in community, even if just temporarily, with other educators, and to have our own needs acknowledged.“

“It reaffirmed my commitment to my wellbeing. It created an expansion of my idea of the importance of my wellbeing as being tied to the sacred WEB that we all belong to.”

Suggested Materials for the 2024 Institute

  • For our Art Based Healing Intervention sessions: Journals, pens, markers, paper, collage materials, glue, scissors, magazines, photos, elements from nature – or perhaps a digital space for you to capture your thoughts – a document, a slide deck, etc.

Extended Learning Content

What to know more about our framework for school crisis renewal? Check out the following resources:


Archived Materials from Our Past Institutes

Faculty

Lead Faculty

Oriana Ides, MA, APCC, PPS (she/hers)

SCRR Field Coach at Center for Applied Research Solutions (CARS)

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.

Guest Faculty

Alex Shevrin Venet, M.Ed (she/her)

Alex Shevrin Venet is an educator, author, and professional development facilitator based in Vermont. She teaches at the Antioch University New England, and Vermont State University. Previously, she was a teacher and leader at an alternative therapeutic school. She is the author of, Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education (2021) and The Process is the Point (forthcoming). She is the cofounder of Nurturing the Nurturers, a healing collective for educators. Alex wrote this powerful post “Navigating the anniversary of collective trauma” to help us think about commemorating the one year mark of COVID and “Role-Clarity and Boundaries for Trauma-Informed Teachers” that is always relevant.

Camden Webb, MA (he/him)

Camden currently serves as the Clinical Services Director for the Solano County Office of Education. Within this role, he supports numerous mental health and wellness initiatives that focus on school communities in Solano. Additionally, he has a private practice where he specializes in providing therapy to LGBTQ-identified youth. Camden has years of experience in providing trauma-informed, attachment focused, culturally responsive counseling to individuals from diverse backgrounds. His passion is providing leadership to clinical teams who conduct intensive mental health work in high-need communities. Recognizing the reality of vicarious trauma and burnout, he leads with compassion, understanding, and a growth mindset that encourages personal and professional development of staff within the mental health field. Camden was a 2023-2024 SCRR Leadership Fellow.

Candice Rose Valenzuela, MA (they/them/she/her)

Candice believes that ancestral, community and ecological healing are the most urgent issues of our time. They coach systems leaders, offer 1:1 counseling and facilitate healing experiences at justice-oriented institutions throughout the nation. In her free time, Candice enjoys writing, painting and sharing their enthusiasm for nature with their 7-year child.

Christine Ewing, MS, LMFT (she/her)

Christine is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (LMFT) as well as a credentialed School Counselor (PPS) for grades K-12 in both California and Oregon. After serving in both school and community settings in Southern California for over ten years, she moved to Central Oregon. For the last seven years, in Bend she is currently working to support the community in a variety of facets. Serving as a Marriage & Family Therapist for East Cascades Counseling Services, School Counselor for Bend Senior High School, and Suicide Prevention and Postvention Trainer for Deschutes County and Oregon as a whole. She has served previously as the School Response Program Coordinator for the High Desert Education Services District. In the last three years, Christine has worked to develop training education and consultation to support schools and communities during and after the wake of a crisis. She specializes in working with children, adolescents, and their families and has over thirteen years of experience. Having both personal and professional lived experience with crisis response, Christine takes her story and uses it as a catalyst, a chapter to be read from and learned from. To take those notes of this chapter story and make healing change in the world around her. She believes that HOPE is the only thing stronger than fear, that it can be a choice, a brave act of courage to keep going. Christine was a 2023-2024 SCRR Leadership Fellow.

Jen Leland, LMFT (she/her/fluid)

Jen Leland is a white, queer, licensed marriage and family therapist who spent her adolescence in psychiatric, substance abuse, and group residential care programs using abstinence and high control, coercive approaches. These experiences of harm spurred her 25 year commitment to working in public systems and youth programs, organizing around harm reduction and healing justice principles to create more stories of healing and fewer stories of institutional trauma and harm. She currently works at the RYSE Center in Richmond, CA as Clinical Director, working with young people to build the health justice spaces and practices they deserve.

Jesus Solorio, LMFT (el/he/him)

Jesus Solorio (el, he, him) identifies as Xicano and was born and raised in Los Angeles (Tongva territory) by migrant parents from Michoacán (Purépecha territory), Jesus earned his Masters degree in Counseling Psychology with a concentration in Community Mental Health from the California Institute of Integral Studies. He is the owner of the group private practice, Ollin Marriage & Family Therapy, Inc. Prior to that he has worked in various settings as a therapist, lead clinician, supervisor and program manager. These include Instituto Familiar de La Raza, La Familia Counseling Service, the Community Mental Health Certificate Program at City College of San Francisco and Kaiser Permanente. Jesus is a member of the Council of 13 for the Institute of Chicana/o/x Psychology and teaches in the Department of Counseling at San Francisco State University.

José González, MS (he/him)

José G. González is a professional educator with training in the fields of education and conservation. He is the Founder of Latino Outdoors as well as having served as a consultant at large as a Partner at the Avarna Group and through his own consulting. His work focuses on Equity & Inclusion frameworks and practices in the environmental, outdoor, and conservation fields. He is also an illustrator and science communicator. He currently serves as the Equity Officer for East Bay Regional Park District. He received his B.A. at the University of California, Davis, with teaching coursework at the Bilingual, Multicultural, Education Department at Sacramento State. He received his M.S. at the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources & Environment. He serves as a board member at Parks CA as well as a Commissioner for the California Boating & Waterways Commission. He also appreciates a witty pun. Find out more at: http://www.josegagonzalez.com/

Leora Wolf-Prusan Ed.D, (she/her)

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. Leora is dedicated to work focused on educator mental health, wellness, and trauma-informed approaches to education and operates through a framework in which public health, social work, and education intersect. Her research examined the impact of student death on teachers, what factors contribute to teachers building resiliency, and what supports teachers need from the school system in the event of a student homicide or other traumas. 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.

Noor Jones-Bey, Ph.D. (she/hers)

Noor Jones-Bey is a transdisciplinary educator, researcher and artist from the Bay Area, CA with over a decade of experience working within the field of education.  As a scholar and practitioner deeply interested in the movement between theory and practice, Noor has extensive experience designing humanizing programming and curriculum that is responsive and relevant to the global and local communities she works within. Noor currently serves as an equity and design consultant, providing technical assistance to client serving professionals and organizations nationwide. Noor received an PhD in Urban Education from New York University, a M.A. in Sociology of Education from New York University and a B.A. in American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley.  Noor’s interests engage across disciplines of sociology, education, Black and Native studies, and visual culture to examine issues of liminality, identity, space and power as they relate to education. Her dissertation work examines intergenerational knowledge of Black womxn and girls navigating in and out of schools. In her spare time, she loves to cook, dance, run marathons, travel, and stir up good vibes.

Roberta Marguerite Chávez, MA (she/her/hers)

Roberta Marguerite Chávez received a BA and MA in History from Stanford University, a graduate-level Certificate in Somatics from Saint Mary’s College of California, and a teaching certificate from Sacramento Waldorf School.  She has danced and performed locally and in far-away places across oceans, taught in liberal arts colleges and universities, and formerly served as Faculty Chair at Golden Bridges School in San Francisco, CA.  She is passionate about exploring the relationship between our individual and collective freedom. Roberta was a 2023-2024 SCRR Leadership Fellow.

Savannah Shange, Ph.D. (she/hers)

Savannah Shange is an urban anthropologist who works at the intersections of race, place, sexuality, and the state. She is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz with research interests in circulated and lived forms of blackness, ethnographic ethics, Afro-pessimism, and queer of color critique. Her dissertation, “Progressive Dystopia: Multiracial Coalition and the Carceral State” is an ethnography of social justice activism in San Francisco, focused on how anti-Black and settler colonial logics are both combated and perpetuated in multiracial progressive movements.  Savannah has been a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow, a Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Fellow, and a Point Scholar.

Sharim Hannegan-Martinez, Ph.D (she/her)

Dr. Sharim Hannegan-Martinez’s teaching-informed research examines the relationship between loving pedagogies, literacy, and student wellness, particularly as it relates to Students of Color. Her most recent study explores the pedagogy of loving relationships— cultivated in part by the literacy practices employed by teachers — as an intervention to traumatic stressors within the context of urban classrooms (From Punk Love to Compa Love: A Pedagogical Paradigm to Intervene on Trauma – The Urban Review). This research has been recognized by both the Ford Foundation’s Predoctoral and Dissertation Year fellowships. Before pursuing her PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles, she was a high school English teacher in East Oakland and worked with pre-service teachers in the University of San Francisco’s Urban Education and Social Justice (UESJ) program. She is an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky, a founding member of the People’s Education Movement Bay Area and has collaborated with other grassroots education organizations such as the Education for Liberation Network.

Shirley Johnson, LMFT (she/her)

Shirley Johnson is a licensed psychotherapist, energy & sound healer, budding herbalist, aspiring writer and retreat leader.  She brings 13 years of teaching yoga and 15 years of studying indigenous healing technologies to her work as a clinician. As the daughter, niece, and granddaughter of public school educators, Shirley began her clinical practice with middle and high school aged students within school settings. From working within schools, she quickly identified the nuances of holding space for students, adults and herself and the ways that there seemed to be little space for emotions within working in school mental health. She brings a range of clinical experience rooted in psychodynamic and relationship theories, multiculturalism, and being a movement practitioner over the last 13 years. Shirley is passionate about supporting adults in the helping profession with releasing codependent behaviors, learning to take care of oneself, and humanizing themselves and each other. To learn more about Shirley’s work you can follow her on IG at @soulisticwellness or visit her website at www.soulisticwellness.com

Sue Kuyper, LCSW (she/her)

Sue Kuyper is a 50-something white queer bilingual (Spanish/English) 50-something politicized somatic healer and therapist, licensed clinical social worker and organizational consultant who has been working in crossroads of social movements, community-based organizations and healing for the past 30 years primarily in the Mission District in San Francisco, Oakland and Guatemala. During the years of 2001-2009, Sue worked with rural, urban and indigenous survivors of genocide and political repression in Guatemala. She offers an in-depth multicultural, international and multidisciplinary perspective with expertise in community worker vicarious trauma, transnational families, immigration trauma and transforming embodied whiteness. She is a single mother with co-parents of two multiracial young people who teach her to stay humble and committed to deep change every single day. Sue lives and works on unceded Chochenyo and Muwekma Ohlone homeland also known as Oakland, California.

Tonia Herrero, MPS, ATR-BC, LCAT, ATCS (she/her)

Tonia Herrero, MPS, ATR-BC, LCAT, ATCS (she/her) is a Licensed & Board-Certified Art Therapist, Certified Art Therapy Supervisor and the owner of East Bay Art Therapy (EBAT). EBAT is a creative arts therapy group practice based in Oakland, CA serving communities all across the SF Bay Area. Tonia’s first decade-long career was as a public high school art teacher in Oakland. After years of witnessing the therapeutic power of art making in her own healing process and in that of her students, she decided to shift careers by obtaining a clinical master’s degree in art therapy from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. In her own clinical work at EBAT, Tonia specializes in utilizing creativity to help adolescent boys who have built up emotional walls, access, express and process their emotions as well as working with individuals with substance use and addiction concerns. Tonia also facilitates arts-based trainings and wellness workshops for educators, clinicians, and other professionals. To learn more about Tonia and EBAT, visit eastbayarttherapy.com.