HOW WE WORK
Practice Progress facilitates anti-racist learning to address and undo white supremacy. We lead our clients and participants toward sustained cultural shift in their institutions, communities, and themselves.
Our workshops have have four components that are customized for the needs of every population we work with:
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BIPOC Affinity Groups. BIPOC do not need to be educated about race—our lives are education enough. Instead, we create space for BIPOC to develop personal and community safety, healing and pleasure.
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White Working Groups. These groups allow white people to increase their pesonal and relational anti-racist analysis, without the hazards to BIPOC that accompany white people learning in multi-racial settings.
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Multi-Racial Coalitions Building. We lay the foundation for trust and accountability in order to create new patterns of action and change.Sustained Relationships. Undoing white supremacy takes endurance. We include thoughtful follow up communication, suggestions for continued learning, and invite our partners to continuously reengage with us to build community and deepen the results of our work.
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Accessibility. Our workshops model important ways to address many facets of white supremacy. We work in partnership with each workshop host to ensure an accessible space for those with physical disabilities, access to facilities for all genders, language interpretation as needed, and open lines of communications so individual access needs can be met ahead of time.
WHAT
IT'S
LIKE
Our workshops are built around guided discussion, reflection, and simple movement practices. No previous experience in dance, mindfulness, or movement is required to fully participate in a Practice Progress program. Our workshops are excellent for all bodies and backgrounds. In our affinity spaces / working groups:
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BIPOC will cultivate rest, pleasure, and community. Through guided discussion and movement exercises, participants will have their feelings and experiences witnessed in knowing community. Drawing on the wisdom of authors like Resmaa Menakem (My Grandmother’s Hands) and adrienne maree brown (Pleasure Activism), participants will be guided through rest experiences, build practices to care for their nervous systems, and set mindful boundaries to assert their value and their needs for healthy multi-racial coalition building.
White People will deepen their understanding of white supremacy and their roles in counteracting it. Participants will read critical race theory from thinkers like George Yancy, Sara Ahmed, and Resmaa Menakem, and map personal and structural racism. Through large- and small-group discussion and movement practices, participants will apprehend racialized oppression as an embodied experience. Accountability partnerships and individual action goals lead to a fuller anti-racist practice for both within and beyond your organization.
Our critical work in affinity spaces supports our sessions working toward multi-racial coalition building which focus on relational trust and accountability exercises.
WHO WE ARE
As body-based artists and activists with multiple decades of experience, both Kai and Sarah approach Practice Progress’ anti-racist work from their persepctives as embodied researchers and changemakers.
WHY EMBODIMENT?
White Supremacy is a lived experience, we carry historical political systems of oppression, like white supremacy, in all of our bodies. When we bring sensation and awareness to the ways these systems live in our bodies, we have an opportunity to change our relationship to them, to know them, and eventually dismantle them. This whole-person approach invites real transformation for individuals and organizations.
TESTIMONIALS
“My work with Practice Progress was transformational! Kai and Sarah did an incredible job facilitating discussion and body based inquiry around racism and white supremacy and how this lives in all of us. We processed and then made an accountability plan. We were nudged to look deeply into how whiteness and racism shows up in our lives and in our spheres of influences...and to then begin to be accountable for that oppression that we do as white folk. We were encouraged to stand inside the system of whiteness to begin to recognize and dismantle that system.”
“This experience provided me with a firm invitation to stay with and accountable to this work, and to pay attention to the ways in which white supremacy lodges in the [my] body and then ripples back out into the world. Practice Progress helped to expose this truth to me, helped me feel it at work in my own body, and offered tools that I will engage again and again in an ongoing effort to interrupt the insidious cycle.”
“Practice Progress is a fantastic resource for white people who are in the process of, or wish to start the process of, addressing, confronting and combating white supremacy, including their own.”
“Practice Progress was a place that I grew in my knowledge of healing, pleasure and rest. As a member of a BIPOC Affinity circle, I sat in a virtual room with strangers from California to New York and learned we were not alone in how we felt. We could relate as a marginalized group of powerful people in our industries and communities. For four weeks we listened to each other and ourselves. We grew in the knowledge that we are enough and continue to our journeys of healing. Gratefully together as a new community across the US.”
“The one hour per week that I spent with the BIPOC Affinity Circle was a peaceful time of rest, support and renewal during turbulent times. I returned to my world more centered, peaceful and able to move forward with my day. Thank you, Kai Hazelwood and Practice Progress.”
“Thank you Practice Progress for creating a truly safe and brave space. What vital work to be doing at such a pivotal time in history.”
