In-Person Afternoon Breakouts

October 7 | 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Institutes
PM Session A
PM Session B
PDF of All Sessions

Institutes

1:00 PM - 4:00 PM

Open to Everyone

  • Facilitated By: Sagashus Levingston
    Location: Hall of Ideas E

    Audience: Open to Everyone

    Our stories are some of the most valuable things we own—and some of the most expensive. The stories we inherit, the stories told about us, and the stories we tell ourselves shape how we see ourselves, what we believe is possible, and how we move through the world.

    Drawing from her memoir, A Pot to Piss In, Dr. Sagashus Levingston will lead participants through storytelling, writing, reflection, and conversation to explore the stories they carry and what those stories have cost, protected, and made possible.

    Together, we will use writing as a practice of Repair—not to erase what happened, but to ask what else is true, reclaim what belongs to us, and reimagine what comes next.
    What are you ready to write—and live—next?

    No writing experience is necessary. Just bring your story.

  • Facilitated By: Keena Atkinson

    Location: Ballroom A

    Audience: Open to Everyone

    In movements for justice and liberation, caring deeply for our communities and desiring change can exist alongside exhaustion, grief, overwhelm, uncertainty, and the very human experiences we carry with us. Sustainable action requires learning not only how to care for others and respond to the world around us, but also how to notice and tend to what is happening within us.


    You Can Do Anything, But You Can't Do Everything is an experiential mini-retreat that invites you to slow down long enough to listen to the needs, wisdom, questions, and possibilities that can become difficult to hear amid the urgency of everyday life and justice work. Through practices that support restoration, reflection, and self-discovery, including guided meditation, gentle movement, rest, journaling, and dialogue. You’ll have space to notice what needs your attention, identify where you feel stuck, explore what may be missing, and choose a courageous next step.


    From that place of greater attention, you’ll be invited to identify one area of your life, leadership, community, or justice practice where you feel stuck, unfinished, uncertain, or ready for change. You’ll explore the gap between where you are and where you hope to be, considering not only “What should I DO?” but “What might I NEED?” Instead of assuming that more effort is always the answer, you’ll explore what may actually be needed; knowledge, capacity, support, clarity, rest, boundaries, healing, courage, action or something you discover for yourself. You’ll also consider where the gap lives: within yourself, your relationships or community, the conditions around you, or across more than one of these.


    As insight becomes clearer, you’ll have space to discern what is and is not yours to carry and choose one courageous next action that feels both meaningful and sustainable. You’ll leave with a deeper understanding of what is asking for your attention, greater clarity about what may be needed to move forward, and a way to continue noticing and measuring what changes after you act.


    This retreat offers ideas, practices, guidance, and opportunities for collective wisdom while creating space for your lived experience and your own wisdom to guide what you discover.

Open to Specific Audiences

  • Facilitated By: Deborah Biddle

    Location: Hall of Ideas F

    Audience: Open to Everyone 18+

    We say we value justice. Our CEOs say it. Our mission statements say it. Across 22 organizations and more than 3,500 employees whose survey responses we studied to build this session, the story splits in two. Over 90% of people believe their leaders genuinely care about inclusion. Fewer than half of the people who actually reported harassment or discrimination say it was resolved well. That gap, between what organizations declare and what people live, is what this session is about.
     
    We'll start with what's true right here, this year, on our own streets: two men killed by Madison police on the same stretch of Williamson Street, eleven years apart, and a community that has now had to grieve this more than once. We'll widen out to what national data shows. This pattern isn't confined to policing, or to any one employer. It shows up in the nonprofit sector, where people of color still lead fewer than one in five organizations, a number that hasn't moved in fifteen years. Then we'll come back to a practical question every organization can act on: not "do we believe in justice," but "what happens in the moment someone needs it, and does that moment actually work?"
     
    This session pairs a short, honest data reveal with facilitated small-group dialogue. Participants will leave able to name where their own organization's justice gap actually lives, in belief, in access, or in resolution, and identify one concrete checkpoint for when they return to work on Monday.

Featured Youth Institute:

  • Facilitated By: Mya Rodriguez Williams, Micah-Jade Stanback, & Maggie Joyce

    Location: Ballroom D

    Audience: Youth, Young Adults, and Educators preferred but Open to Everyone

    Throughout history, the concept of liberation has manifested in various forms across cultures, ranging from dance to visual art to collective social justice movements. Honoring the Summit theme of Casting Bold Visions: Healing & Activating from the Roots, we invite high school youth, young adults, and K-12 educators to participate in a mixed media art co-creation that focuses on what liberation and healing looks like, sounds like, and feels like as both individuals and as a community. The session will also include open discussion on what adult accountability looks like in youth spaces and their overall communities, and how adults can not only support young people’s dreams, but also acknowledge the ways they may fall short in creating a world that affirms young people’s needs and desires. Inspired by the healing elements of water, Flowing Forward invites participants to explore how liberation can feel when we combine art, justice, and multi-generational discussion with the power of youth-led spaces.

PM Session A

1:00 PM - 2:30 PM

Open to Everyone

  • Facilitated By: Carl Fields, Melissa Ludin & Brittany Lee
    Location: Meeting Room O

    Audience: Open to Everyone

    Commutation can provide immediate relief for people serving long prison sentences—but meaningful access requires more than navigating an application process. This interactive session explores how commutation can bring people home while building relationships, leadership, and collective power for long-term racial justice and criminal legal transformation. Participants will learn the basics of Wisconsin’s commutation process, examine barriers incarcerated people and their families face, and map the ecosystem needed for more equitable access. Through facilitated discussion and collaborative exercises, we will explore commutation through four lenses: solidarity, abolition, mutual aid, and repair. Together, participants will identify gaps in information, communication, support, and decision-making, while considering the roles of directly impacted people, families, attorneys, organizers, reentry providers, community organizations, and public institutions. The session asks how we can support freedom and accountability while pursuing deeper structural change—and what we can build together that will last beyond any single administration or commutation process.

  • Facilitated By: Myra Kincade & Sara Alvarado
    Location: Hall of Ideas I

    Audience: Open to Everyone

    Rupture is inevitable in workplaces and communities, especially when we are navigating differences in identity, power, privilege, and lived experience. What matters is what we do next.


    In this interactive session, Sara Alvarado and Myra Kincade explore conflict, meaningful repair, and healing. Through teaching, real stories, reflection, and practice, participants will build tools for navigating rupture and moving toward repair. Healing becomes a way of living as we learn to stay grounded in discomfort, trust ourselves, prioritize repair, and develop practices that support our healing over time.

  • Facilitated By: Heather Sorenson & Toral Livingston-Jha
    Location: Meeting Room K

    Audience: Open to Everyone

    Racial justice work requires us to process deep information, but we rarely give ourselves the time and support to truly digest it. This interactive midday session provides a soft landing space where the morning’s learning can expand, settle, and integrate into purposeful action. Participants will be guided through somatic awareness practice, reflective journaling, and shared dialogue in community.

  • Facilitated By: Karen Urrutia Polnitz & Sol Kelley-Jones
    Location: Hall of Ideas H

    Audience: Open to Everyone

    Together we will explore what abolition can look like, sound like, feel like - free from the many forms of oppression, domination, and annihilation that ensnare our communities. As Ruthie Gilmore urges, "abolition is not an absence, it is a presence,” it is about making things, crafting new worlds. Drawing inspiration from solarpunk, afrofuturism, and activist-artists, participants will share their visions of liberated futures through an art form of their choosing, celebrate and learn from others’ creations, and collectively reflect on what it means to “get free.” The hard work of dismantling systems of harm requires that we also nurture bold, emancipatory visions and we invite participants to feel into what a world alive with justice, community care, and collective liberation can be. Join us!

  • Facilitated By: Araceli Esparza
    Location: Meeting Room Q

    Audience: Open to Everyone

    From Story to Movement: Turning Lived Experience into Collective Action
    Our stories do more than help us understand where we have been. They can help us identify injustice, build connection, create belonging, and move communities toward action.


    In this interactive session, Araceli Esparza will guide participants in exploring how lived experience can move from personal story to collective strategy. Through storytelling, reflection, and small-group conversation, participants will examine how our individual experiences connect to larger systems and how sharing those stories can build trust, relationships, and momentum for change.

    Participants will leave with a simple framework for moving from story → voice → connection → community → action, along with an opportunity to identify a story from their own life that could contribute to the movements and communities they care about.

  • Facilitated By: Karen Reece, Rob "Rob Dz" Franklin, and Pacal "DJ Pain 1" Bayley
    Location: Hall of Fame

    Audience: Open to Everyone

    Arts and culture shape a city's image. Who gets included, and who gets left out, is never an accident. Plans and visions for an inclusive creative community are easy to write. In this session, we'll show you what it actually takes to build one from the ground up with the artists and community members already doing the work.

    This session speaks directly to the summit's pillars of Abolition, by dismantling extractive practices, and Solidarity, by working toward shared power and mutual accountability for Madison's music scene. We'll open with a live DJ and emcee set giving a look at Hip-Hop's roots in mutual aid and collaborative culture-building, then discuss why the genre still gets misread as risk instead of recognized as infrastructure. From there we turn to Greater Madison Music City, UCAN's own effort to grow an equitable, community-built music economy in Madison, and what it takes to protect that kind of work once it becomes valuable enough for other people to want a piece of it. We'll talk about who gets credit, who gets a seat at the table, and what changes when the people who built something hold onto their own story. We ground the conversation in research, including the City of Madison's Task Force on Equity in Music and Entertainment and independent economic impact analysis of the local music scene.

    Aims of the session:

    • To understand how racial bias in arts and culture shapes economic opportunity for artists and the broader cultural identity of a city

    • To examine what happens when a community-built effort like Greater Madison Music City becomes something an institution wants to formalize, brand, or take credit for

    • To learn the mechanisms UCAN uses to hold onto its own story and keep driving systems change in Madison's arts economy

  • Facilitated By: Nick Berkley, Kiyanna Baylock, & Andrea Ritchie
    Location: Ballroom C

    Audience: Open to Everyone

    What does it take to build new worlds while transforming the conditions we live in now?

    Our 90 minute experimental facilitation and container invites comrades and communities to explore Milwaukee Beyond Policing through a multi-issue, Black, radical community centered approach to community safety/deference, collective healing, and liberation. Grounded in the work of Black, Trans Organizers within Sun-Seeker MKE, we will explore how communities can build infrastructures of care and safety without the cops and address the interconnected conditions impacting our neighborhoods: from food access and crisis response to violence prevention, grief, and collective healing.

    Using our hyperlocal, block by block framework, that activates and reinvest in radical political education and practical skills, participants will move through an interactive “Science Fair” featuring practical tools and approaches for community based safety and care. Fair stations include pod mapping and neighborhood relationship-building, Stop the Bleed, deescalation, harm reduction, and transformative/non-carceral justice practices. Participants will then enter a facilitated community grief space, learning the foundations of circle keeping and exploring how grief & care circles can support collective healing, accountability, and connection in their own communities.

    We'll draw inspiration from Audre Lorde’s multi issue approach, recognizing that racial justice and liberation require us to build across interconnected struggles rather than addressing issues in isolation.Participants will leave with practical frameworks, skills, and questions they can bring back to their neighborhoods, pods, and communities as we reimagine and practice formations of safety and care beyond policing.

  • Facilitated By: Cynthia Lin
    Location: Meeting Room M

    Audience: Open to Everyone

    Reproductive Justice Foundations is an interactive workshop for learning about reproductive justice through the history of resistance in the U.S. context.

    We hope this session will be an invitation to:

    • Learn what reproductive justice is

    • Gain insights about issues and actions in RJ history that are relevant to our present context

    • Spark interest to learn more and engage with RJ in ways that are relevant to your life

    This session is rooted in the pillar of solidarity - learning from histories of solidarity and our movement ancestors' wisdom, and connecting them with our own histories, can help uncover the possibility and necessity of solidarity in our present realities and actions. There are themes in the stories we will explore that also touch on abolition and mutual aid.

    RJ Foundations is designed to be accessible for people completely or quite new to RJ. AND we believe that exploring and engaging RJ history can have relevant and critical impact anywhere in folks' trajectories.

  • Facilitated By: Qiana Holmes
    Location: Meeting Room R

    Audience: Open to Everyone

    This session creates space for practitioners to move from intention to impact, from helping to relationship, and from avoiding harm to practicing accountability and repair. The goal is not perfection. It is building the awareness, courage, and relational practices necessary to contribute to an ecosystem where people are not simply served, but respected, heard, empowered, and treated as partners in their own liberation.

    This workshop centers the helper. Before we can consistently bring our best selves to our work, we have to recognize what the work is doing to us. Helping professionals often spend their days holding space for everyone else while overlooking their own emotional, mental, and relational needs.

    This workshop creates space for helpers to pause, breathe, recognize what they are carrying, and explore what restoration looks like in practice.

    We cannot create a just ecosystem while reproducing harmful relationships inside of it. Repair begins with examining how we show up for ourselves and one another.

  • Facilitated By: Alia Younes, Dahlia Saba, Hanna Homestead
    Location: Ballroom B

    Audience: Open to Everyone

    Growing out of the 2024 UW-Madison student protest of the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza, a community stitching circle has emerged as a site of continued resistance and resilience, where participants honor and share Palestinian culture by engaging in the communal practice of traditional Palestinian embroidery known as tatreez. Panelists will discuss the role and legacy of the student-led movement for Palestine, the living history of tatreez, and the relationship between occupation, war, art, and culture. The group’s collectively-stitched quilt that was recently exhibited at Art Lit Lab’s show "Threading Solidarity: Tatreez from Teejop to Palestine" will be on display. In addition, panelists will share information on how to support the movement for Palestinian liberation and resist endless war.

  • Facilitated By: Eric Newble of the Office of Multicultural Arts Initiatives & Members of the First Wave Touring Ensemble
    Location: Meeting Room N

    Audience: Open to Everyone

    How do you learn best? With pictures or words? 

    In this workshop participants will enter the visual world where they will build their own workshop persona, and become visual storytellers, learning how to make the truth tangible. Art has always been an important part of organizing and movement work, so together workshop goers will learn and engage with the contemporary moment of Black Citizenship and its relationship to ICE. In the end attendees will walk away with a visual journal, context for the current moment, and an understanding of how their art can inform their activism and vice versa.

    All skill levels are welcome and encouraged. 

Open to Specific Audiences

  • Facilitated By: Soumya Palreddy & Dekila Chungyalpa

    Location: Meeting Room L

    Audience: Those 18+ organizing, leading, and caretaking on the ground for justice

    We are living in a time of extraordinary stress—national, local, relational, environmental, and personal. For those organizing, leading, and caretaking on the ground for justice, the work to transform extractive and exploitative systems can often feel depleting, isolating, and eventually lead to burn out.

    Presented by the Compassion Collective (Loka Initiative, Palreddy-Lowe Learning Lab, Center for Healthy Minds, and YWCA Madison), this session led by Dekila Chungyalpa and Soumya Palreddy invites changemakers, organizers, and caregivers to explore why creating containers for deepening inner, community, and ecological resilience must be intentionally embedded into the fabric of our social movements.

    Grounded in the Deep Resilience framework developed by the Loka Initiative, this session asserts that abolishing and subverting harmful institutions and structures requires us to build intentional and supportive containers that heal and nurture ourselves, our community, and our environments. The Deep Resilience framework promotes a different model for self care; one that replenishes our inner resources through community care and compassion practices and re-rooting our interconnectedness with the Earth.

    In this session, participants will:

    • Explore why approaching self care through the lens of caring for a community and re-establishing our connection with the Earth is essential to moving towards liberation. 

    • Engage in a dialogue on how to create containers for care in their own lives, organizations, and communities.

    • Directly experience 1-2 contemplative practices aimed at deepening inner, community, or planetary resilience. 

    • Receive a resource kit with some curated practices, prompts, and tools to continue deepening resilience beyond the session.

  • Facilitated By: Julie Swanson & Marcela Kyngesburye
    Location: Community Terrace

    Audience: Open to Everyone 18+

    We will weave ritual, story, silence, song and witness in a collective practice to deepen and honor our relationship with grief.

    “What if grief is not something to endure or get over but a relationship that will reshape us in some fundamental way?"
    Wild Edge of Sorrow, Francis Weller

  • Facilitated By: Elisa Lopez
    Location: Meeting Room P

    Audience: Open to Everyone 18+

    In this session, the presenter will summarize the statewide efforts for identifying, contacting, and serving detained wisconsinites in immigration detention. The presentation will focus on legal services, but will also highlight excellent collaborations between organizations in fighting back against this administration's unprecedented and aggressive enforcement policy.

  • Facilitated By: Koren Dennison
    Location: Hall of Ideas G

    Audience: Black Folks

    What does it mean to learn, heal, and grow outside the gaze of whiteness? This session explores Black Liberatory Education as both practice and ecosystem — one rooted in Hush Harbor traditions, mutual aid, and communal care, and in direct opposition to the phantom promises of "connection," "rest," and "self-care" sold back to us without substance.

    Through the story of My Kousin's House: a community clubhouse, we'll examine what "village" can mean in 2026, and how we begin rebuilding it. We'll name the fears, media saturation, and limiting beliefs that keep us from curiosity and clarity, and ask what our subconscious is being trained to believe about what's possible.

    This is not a session about reform. It's an invitation to sit with harder questions: If you are a future ancestor, what are you leaving behind? What is your responsibility? What does radical transformation actually require of us — and how do we hold one another with care as part of that work?

    Rooted in solidarity, abolition, mutual aid, and repair, this session offers a communal space to process, unlearn, and reimagine — casting bold visions for Black liberation from the roots up.

  • Facilitated By: Sarah Shatz
    Location: Hall of Ideas J

    Audience: White People

    Growing up as a white female, my training (family, school, professional) has always had the flavor of "not making a fuss". Let's get curious about who benefits from this instruction in big and small moments of life. What might it look like to shift this pattern in our personal and collective lives? What might happen when we see our patterns of reactivity and instead of travelling down this deep groove of ingrained behavior we choose fierce vulnerability instead? What might "making a fuss" with fierce vulnerability look like?

PM Session B

2:45 PM - 4:00 PM

Open to Everyone

  • Facilitated By: Sarah Oberholtzer, Alberto Prado, and Erica Nelson
    Location: Meeting Room L

    Audience: Open to Everyone

    LIFT Wisconsin in partnership with Fined Out, proposes a session that includes: a short film which shows how cycles of fines and fees punish poverty and how communities are teaming up to help people restore their licenses. Our goal is to use our multimedia projects that exposes how unjust fees and fines punish poverty and how communities are fighting back against a system designed to keep them paying while honoring their dignity and self-agency.The systems that revolve around the compounding harm of unpaid debt that often ripples into barriers to employment, housing instability, and deeper complications in civil and criminal legal systems is often misunderstood.

    We will also showcase the Legal Tune Up tool and show how users can access free legal assistance that clears civil legal barriers for Wisconsin families. Everyone deserves access to justice, yet government resources dedicated to civil legal aid are dwindling, or nonexistent, while the need continues to grow at an exponential rate. Low-income individuals and their families, especially those in rural areas, are becoming further entrenched in legal deserts. 

    This session speaks directly to the Summit’s core practices:

    Abolition: fines and fees enforcement is a clear example of how carceral systems substitute punishment for care. The film, the game, and the Legal Tune Up tool point toward community-based and legal navigator programs that restore access and agency rather than extract debt.

    Repair: The session centers healing and restoration of relationships and trust for communities harmed by systemic overreach, and offers attendees a concrete, ongoing practice, such as becoming a legal navigator that can act on that repair.
    For our session, we want attendees to experience and see how the devastating impact of excessive fines and fees on working families in our communities, and how we can choose to change this unjust system. We want to create actionable work and foster new legal navigators from across rural and urban Wisconsin to help close the access to justice gaps.

  • Facilitated By: dr ananda parnaiba mirilli
    Location: Community Terrace

    Audience: Open to Everyone

    In a time when we are continually experiencing and witnessing violence, injustice, grief, and disconnection, we also need spaces that help us return to ourselves, reconnect with one another, and imagine what is still possible.

    From Grief to Possibility: Making the Future Visible is a restorative, art-based experience that invites participants to slow down, reconnect with their shared humanity, and create from a place of reflection and radical imagination. The session will open with breathwork and guided visualization, moving participants through an intentional arc of grief, restoration, and future-making.

    Two prompts will guide the experience: What does a bridge to restoration look like? and What is the future we are building together? Participants will reflect on restoration of self and relationship, while also imagining a future rooted in racial justice, belonging, care, and collective liberation.

    Using cardboard, magazine clippings, words, images, drawing, and other simple materials, participants will create an individual visual piece representing the future they want to help bring into being. The emphasis is not on artistic skill, but on making space for intuition, imagination, healing and possibility. Participants may choose to place their work into a shared collective altar or offering, creating a visible expression of the many futures being imagined in the room.

    The session will close in circle, with participants invited to share from their creation and reflect on what they are carrying forward. The intention is for participants to leave feeling a little more centered, restored, connected, and able to see more clearly the future we are building together.

  • Facilitated By: Everett Mitchell

    Audience: Ballroom B

    When a police officer takes a life, the question of accountability is often settled long before anyone enters a courtroom. It is settled by legal standards the United States Supreme Court has built over decades, most notably in Tennessee v. Garner and Graham v. Connor, which judge an officer's conduct through the eyes of a "reasonable officer on the scene." This presentation traces how that standard came to be, whose perspective it centers, and whose it leaves out. Participants will examine how these decision are centered within the expansion of police powers within the late 90's and those powers still remain. In keeping with this year's theme, Casting Bold Visions: Healing & Activating from the Roots, we will dig down to the legal roots of state violence and identify the pressure points where communities, advocates, and policymakers have pushed to expand the possibilities for real accountability.

  • Facilitated By: Alinne Ramirez Padron & Karmarie Martinez Moya
    Location: Ballroom C

    Audience: Open to Everyone

    Participants will learn about the Community Defense Network established and expanding in Wisconsin and Dane County. This session provides an overview of the efforts led by Voces de la Frontera to support and safeguard immigrant communities across Wisconsin. Topics include the purpose of the community hotline, available resources, and key procedures to follow when ICE agents are present in our neighborhoods. Additionally, the training emphasizes how allies can demonstrate solidarity and provide support to immigrant communities during such incidents.

  • Facilitated By: Dant’e Cottingham
    Location: Hall of Ideas G

    Audience: Open to Everyone

    This session connects most directly to Repair while also engaging Abolition and Solidarity. Drawing from my experience of being sentenced to life at 17, serving 27 years, taking accountability for the harm I caused, and now working in reentry and legal education, the session asks what justice should make possible beyond punishment. It introduces The Formula, six interconnected capacities that helped me survive, transform, and choose a different life. Participants will examine how change and repair occur across the self, relationships, culture, and structures, and consider whether our institutions support people’s capacity for accountability, transformation, belonging, and contribution…or continue to define them by their worst act.

  • Facilitated By: Samantha Green & Qiana Holmes
    Location: Hall of Ideas I

    Audience: Open to Everyone

    When Helping Hurts invites helping professionals to examine how their personal lens, assumptions, biases, boundaries, communication, and use of power can influence the experience of the people they serve.

    Through guided reflection, interactive discussion, and practical exercises, participants will explore the ways good intentions can sometimes produce unintended harm. The workshop encourages professionals to move beyond intention and consider impact, accountability, and the role of repair in maintaining healthy helping relationships.

    The goal is not perfection. The goal is greater awareness, intentionality, and the courage to repair when our helping misses the mark.

  • Facilitated By: Melanie Leyva & Laisha Ibarra
    Location: Meeting Room P

    Audience: Open to Everyone

    In this workshop, we’ll explore how our own stories shape what we care about and why we choose to take action. Participants will reflect on an experience that shaped their values around justice, community, belonging, or immigrant rights, and then have a chance to share their story with others.

    Using the Story of Self framework and lessons from Youth Empowered in Struggle (YES) and Voces de la Frontera, we’ll talk about how our individual experiences can connect to bigger struggles and help us build collective power. We’ll leave with a better understanding of how storytelling can help us build relationships, solidarity, and movements for racial justice, immigrant rights, and liberation.

Open to Specific Audiences

  • Facilitated By: Jessica Stovall & Micah Sagers
    Location: Meeting Room M

    Audience: Open to Black People, the people who love them, Youth, and people invested in Black Education

    What would it mean to design a Black-centered, Saturday Freedom School program in today's political climate?

    This session will introduce attendees to a lesser-known aspect of the Civil Rights Movement: Freedom Schools, radical community learning spaces created by and for Black communities to address educational inequities, cultivate political consciousness, and challenge antiblackness. Drawing from the history and organizing practices of Freedom Schools, the SoulFolk Collective will invite attendees to imagine what Black-centered education could look like today. Through interactive activities that include group analysis of historical freedom school lessons, themes from focus groups with Black Youth in MMSD, and collective imagining, participants will have the opportunity to envision new possibilities for education, community, and liberation. 

    This lesson is taught by members of The SoulFolk Collective, a community of researchers at UW-Madison dedicated to positioning Black space as a blueprint for more liberatory futures.
    The Collective plans to launch the SoulFolks Saturday School on Madison’s South Side in January 2027. Rooted in solidarity, the Saturday School seeks to create a space where Black students can freely express all facets and dynamisms of their Black identity, as well as develop the tools to think critically, ask questions, and connect their learning to their own lives and communities. 

  • Facilitated By: Mouna Algahaithi
    Location: Meeting Room K

    Audience: Women and Women-Identifying folks (18+)

    Fierce vulnerability. Joy. Experimentation. Visioning & Radical Imagination. Bridging. Co-Creation. Presence & Embodiment.

    These are all ingredients to the connective world-building that improv can nurture by practice. Improv gives you a way to tap into the perspective, creativity, and courage you already carry, and practice dreaming, reimagining and collaborating in real time.
    This workshop is offered specifically for women — improv spaces built around and for women are rare, and year after year I've watched this particular room fill with an electric and uniquely feminine energy.


    Whether you're a seasoned improviser or the word sounds a bit familiar, you're welcome to join us! This is a hands-on, playful, interactive workshop - be prepared to embrace courage in an uplifting and positive environment.

  • Facilitated By: Carla Williams & Dr. Giselle Argento-Berrio
    Location: Meeting Room O

    Audience: Women and Women-Identifying folks (18+)

    Who gets to be well, and what have women been taught to endure in the name of being women? This facilitated conversation explores how race, gender, culture, access, and other social conditions shape women’s experiences with health and wellness. Together, we’ll examine the roots of what women have been taught to normalize and imagine what wellness can look like when survival and endurance are no longer the standard.

  • Facilitated By: Ayomi Obuseh
    Location: Meeting Room N

    Audience: BIPOC

    Freedom dreaming asks us to imagine a world beyond the conditions that currently exist and challenges us to envision and create new ways of living, caring, and building together.

    Through this workshop, participants will explore how our grief, frustration, and experiences with current systems can become a starting point for identifying the conditions we want to transform and imagining what we want to build in their place. Drawing on Angela Davis’s reminder that “you have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world, and you have to do it all the time,” we will practice imagining what becomes possible when we refuse to limit our vision to what currently exists.

    Participants will examine how our understanding of systems can help us identify opportunities for abolition, practice mutual aid, engage in repair, and build solidarity. Together, we will explore what it means to move from individual experiences of harm toward collective healing, community power, and the creation of a world where our communities have what they need to thrive.