Beyond Diversity 101: Whole System Transformation - Training 2

This page and registration form are for people returning for Part 2 of “Beyond Diversity 101.” If you are not part of the cohort that began meeting in March of 2025 at Kirkridge, please do not register using this form. If you would like more information, please contact Logan. (Use the button on the right.)

When you mean to radically change the system, including YOU!

The BD101 WST Series invites those who hold a deep commitment to liberation, wholeness, and the well-being of all. It is a response to a world crying out to remember. Some are called to sit on councils helping community to run smoothly, others bring artistic expression, some are led to teach while others master plant medicines and other forms of healing. Regardless of the particular role or the medicine that you bring, making the jump from dominator culture to realizing interconnection and shared responsibility – whole system transformation – requires re-engaging the imagination,  skillful practices and courageous movement.

While we are in absolute crisis as a society, there are also beautiful expressions of human interconnection, resistance, imagination, and nurturance.  While many hold on to the illusion of power based in separation and domination, some of us are called to not only reject and de-structure those systems but to boldly create and sustain life-affirming communities organized around radical truth and love.

BD101 – WST is a learning laboratory with a focus on organizational systems.  We learn and practice to increase our ability to consciously interrupt patterns of oppression that keep us stuck, read energetic shifts, and ride natural progressions.    We cultivate understanding, strengthen skills, and practice through application and feedback.

Cohort members work and play together inviting and developing conscious ‘creator-ship’ (to know self as creator within communities of co-creators).

The BD101 WST Series Structure: Niyonu D. Spann, Lead Teacher

Part 2 – June 26 – 30, 2025
[Guest Teacher – Dr. Darya Funches]
@ Kirkridge Retreat Center

• Understand the differences between incremental change processes, which are generally approached in a linear, rational fashion, and whole system transformation, which calls on imagination, creativity, and the capacity to release (and ride!) generative energy waves: to manifest on many levels at once

• What are you talking about, really? – Inclusion/Equity/Diversity/Belonging/Liberation

• The necessary elements of liberation/of liberatory ways of educating, counseling, creating, leading, worshiping, organizing?

• Why SPIRIT is essential

• Planning toward a practicum