I'm White - Now What?!

Facilitated by Debby Haase and Yael Petretti

Saturdays, March 4 - April 1, 2023 (Mar 4,  11, 18, 25 & April 1)

10:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. Pacific / 1:00 p.m. - 3:30 p.m. Eastern

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Compassion is not just feeling with someone,

But seeking to change the situation.

Frequently people think compassion and love are merely sentimental.

No! They are very demanding.

If you are going to be compassionate,

be prepared for Action.

~ Desmond Tutu

This 5-week online series will co-create a learning space for exploring our racial conditioning in the framework of Compassionate Listening, a heart-centered practice of deep listening and speaking from the heart. We hope that our inner healing will ripple out into the world through our actions.

This series is intended to be a place where people who identify as white can uncover their own whiteness, white privilege, white supremacy, implicit biases, white fragility, and white silence along with other white-bodied people aiming to do this same type of inner work. We will also practice speaking up to interrupt racism and practice being accountable in repairing racially problematic mistakes. We are offering this series as a step toward doing less harm and showing up with more skill when relating cross racially.

We’ll learn the following Compassionate Listening practices and directly apply them to help us reflect on and uncover our racial patterns:

• Cultivating courageous compassion and respect
• Listening with the heart with the intention of healing injustices and growing connections
• Increasing our awareness of our triggers, judgments, and biases
• Learning to listen reflectively, using inquiry and deepening questions for greater understanding
• Speaking up from the heart to interrupt racism and repair harm

Compassionate Listening supports us in helping each other access inner wisdom where new insights can emerge. From these new insights, we can then choose to take compassionate action.

We ask that you please attend each session since being together consistently enables us to build trust in one another and each session builds on the previous one. This online course will be held on Zoom and is highly experiential and requires your full presence, participation, and commitment to show up without distraction. 

Our hope is that everyone will be able to connect to the event using a device that has full video and audio capability because breakout rooms will be used to guide participants through our curriculum in small groups and we will be sharing screens throughout the course. 

We also ask that you read and view the materials that we will email to you prior to each weekly session so we can be ready to dive into our inner reflective work. This foundational preparation is important because we’ll be focussing our time together engaging interactively, not on informational lectures.

As Compassionate Listeners, we are dedicated to the ongoing lifelong work of uncovering our own racial conditioning and supporting other white folks in doing this inner work as well. As white women, we acknowledge the problematic nature of white folks earning income from offerings related to antiracism. Therefore, we donate at least 10% of our earnings to organizations that are led by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and which are working for racial equity.

The Compassionate Listening Project will donate an additional 10% of its revenue from this workshop to organizations that are led by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and which are working for racial equity.

Prerequisites

None: All experience levels are welcome.

Cost

The cost of this series is $275. A limited number of $225 tickets are available for those who require financial assistance in order to attend. $325 tickets are also available for those who would like to support others' attendance.

We are committed to accessibility and sincerely wish for all who wish to attend our workshops to be able to do so, regardless of financial means. Please submit a scholarship request if finances are a barrier to your participation.

Your generous donations make our scholarship program possible. If you have the means, please consider donating to our scholarship fund to enable others to attend who otherwise would not be able to do so.

Cancellation Policy

Cancellations made up to a week before the first session will be eligible for a 100% refund. Cancellations made within a week of the first session will receive a credit which may be used towards any future Compassionate Listening course or workshop.

Please note that due to the sacred container of trust that participants build with one another in this course, as well as the cumulative nature of the curriculum, we request that participants make every effort to attend the first session. Should unforeseen circumstances prevent this, your registration will be canceled and we will apply your tuition as credit toward a future course.

Facilitators

Debby Haase, Bainbridge Island, Washington

Debby remains in awe of the synergy that can unfold in a space with clear intention even after facilitating groups for 30 years. After careers in systems engineering and co-founding and teaching at Madrona Waldorf School, Debby became dedicated to facilitating healing circles and to anti-racism work. She offers Compassionate Listening merged with white people’s inner work of unpacking racial conditioning. Debby actively engages in the race and equity work in her community through cross-racial collaboration, activism, anti-racism workshops and supporting cultural events. She also facilitates Restorative Circles, Systemic and Family Constellations, ritual and healing circles, has extensive experience in group process, mindfulness, heart centering practices and holds an MA in Whole Systems Design. While on the Compassionate Listening Project delegations to Israel & Palestine and to Alabama, having witnessed the power of truly seeing the humanity in the “other” in some extremely difficult situations, Debby trusts that healing is possible.  She melds her breadth of experience with her respect for each person’s inner wisdom to co-create an atmosphere ripe for transformation.

Yael Petretti, Western Massachusetts

Yael’s connection to the civil rights struggle grew out of her participation in the 1968 Poor People’s March on Washington, her life-changing experience of helping build Resurrection City and tutoring children of color whose schools were being desegregated in southern Virginia. Certified as a CL facilitator in 2004, she led and co-led a number of CL delegations to Israel-Palestine where she lived for 29 years. Yael co-authored “Making Peace with Faith: The Challenges of Religion and Peacebuilding (Peace and Security in the 21st Century,”), 2018. She lives in New England where she facilitates CL trainings and volunteers as an Alternatives to Violence facilitator in a men's high-security prison. Witnessing the “new Jim Crow” there has brought her around full circle to rejoin the struggle for racial/social justice here in the U.S. In January 2020, she initiated and co-led the first domestic Compassionate Listening delegation, “Listening in the Heart of Alabama.”  She looks forward to many more such trips to explore the perfect “marriage” of Compassionate Listening and antiracism (and all other “isms”) work in the world. You can visit her website here.

Testimonials

"I found being coached through the practice of disrupting and interrupting racism and repairing racial harm extremely helpful! And of course all the other activities were engaging and participatory and embodied multiple ways of learning! Practical, useful and strengthened by the foundations of compassionate listening! yes!!!! thank you!" ~ maureen st.clair

"What a wonderful gift it has been for me to do the kind of work I have wanted to do regarding white privilege for years, but have been unable to find until now. As I said at the close of the class, being heart-centered was not what was available when I really wanted to do the work in the early 2000's. I am incredibly grateful to have experienced some of the most skillful facilitation of any group/training I have ever participated in!" ~ Workshop Participant

"You did such a good job preparing us for each exercise that we were ready for it (even if we didn't think we were) when it came. I marveled each time at how you were able to meld CL with antiracism work even for beginners to CL. Your skillful planning and experience were quite obvious! " ~ Susan

"All the other lessons were so well-considered, beneficial, and full of good learning that built as we went. There is so much good stuff, I can’t imagine how you tried to figure out what to fit in…It was so potent for me to learn that we ALL have stories about how racism has scarred us, how prevalent that is in the culture, and how little we talk about it. It added urgency and universality to this work." ~ LaBrie

"You are each warmly welcoming women, knowledgeable teachers/facilitators, exceptional in your teamwork and in creating a safe space to hold an exploration into the unknown. The work of creating a curriculum of such challenging material and THEN presenting/bringing people together in a zoom classroom to discuss and deepen is beyond my comprehension. To you each, my deepest gratitude and appreciation for your compassionate listening way-of-being, the life, the work - integrating, emerging, evolving. " ~ Wendy