Afternoon Sessions
1:00 PM - 2:30 PM
Sessions are short and more focused, designed to highlight a specific issue, practice, or perspective. These offerings provide concentrated learning and conversation, giving you the opportunity to engage with a variety of topics throughout the day.
Open to All Audiences
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Facilitated by: Stephanie Roades
Audience: All - Open to Everyone
Description: Now more than ever, it’s going to take community to keep each other safe and minimize harm. No one is born with these skills; it takes lifelong learning and practice to keep the tools in your harm reduction toolbox sharp. Whether you’ve attended similar workshops before or this is your first time, this is a space for everyone to learn something new.
Bystander Intervention De-escalation training will focus on ways to intervene in public instances of racist, sexist, anti-Muslim, anti-Semitic, anti-Trans, ICE raids and other forms of oppressive interpersonal violence and harassment while considering the safety of all parties. The physical and vocal practice of various strategies is designed to change social norms and encourage people to find ways to interrupt violence and prevent further harm. This workshop includes a learning segment of tips and strategies, how to document, knowing your rights as an intervener, and practice scenarios constructed on ways to show up and support a diversity of identities, both as the intervener and the person experiencing harm.
Important Note: This session ends at 3:00PM
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Facilitated by: Cynthia Lin
Audience: All - Open to Everyone
Description: This will be an introductory session to grow your facilitation skills! We will focus on learning and practicing the fundamentals of facilitating meetings, in ways that support you to reflect on and ground in your own leadership, power, and vision for racial justice. We will cover and practice with: the arc of a process, embodied presence to hold the container and tend to power, and nitty-gritty tips.
Facilitation is a cross-cutting core competency that is essential to making solidarity, collective power, and transformation both possible and palpably felt - including inside of the actions, practices, experiments, and networks that advance racial justice. Starting from the very basic and concretely useful skill of facilitating meetings can support folks to reflect on and grow in their relational skills and facilitative leadership/presence overall.
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Facilitated by: Abha Thakkar, Noah Bloedorn, and Jess Guffy Calkins
Audience: All - Open to Everyone
Description: We all need food, and unlike other basic needs such as housing and healthcare, food represents an easily accessible, radical opportunity to lessen our dependence on the market economy and grow our own sustenance. The Dane County Food Action Plan has been in development for two years and will include formal policy and investment recommendations for helping us foster a resilient, equitable food system. Join us for this session to help us develop the grassroots recommendations for the plan, grounded in mutual aid and solidarity practices. How do we build a food system where we feed each other in ways that celebrate our distinct humanity, enhance our health and wellness and build community at the same time?
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Facilitated by:Hanna Homestead, Heba Mohammad, Hebah Kassem
Audience: All - Open to Everyone
Description: This session relates to the theme of becoming the liberation ecosystem by focusing on the importance of building trans-national, intersectional solidarity for abolition movements in the U.S. and Palestine. This is critical. Our collective liberation depends on our ability to collectively care and fight for each other. This panel goes into detail about how freeing Palestine is key to fighting against the war industry, oligarchs, fascists, and climate collapse — all of the forces that threaten a livable world for us all. It will also touch on how the same forces that perpetuate genocide abroad are at the root of racial violence at home. The panel will also cover how mutual aid and abolition are being fostered to unlearn these harmful systems and fight for a future rooted in liberation, humanity, justice, and ecological reciprocity.
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Facilitated by: Kai Brown, Octavia Ikard & Eric Newble
Audience: All - Open to All
Description: Try and remember a random question with a seemingly inane answer that you wouldn't share with anyone besides those closest to you, if at all. Think of a time you brushed off an imaginative moment for pragmatism; did it make you better?
This workshop is meant to offer an opportunity for participants to further understand the ways in which creative practice can be utilized as a tool for grounding and centering ourselves in order to bring the best of ourselves to the communities we inhabit. This 90 minute writing workshop and communal conversation is centered in practice and process, serving to show the necessity of creating moments for ourselves to use creative expression and writing as a tool for processing, unpacking and exploring. Using creativity to confront and interrupt potential negative thought processes or patterns. Through group conversation and writing prompts we will investigate what it looks like to write a world parallel and intersecting with the one we exist within. We will discover how removing ourselves from the contexts we exist within can serve as an opportunity to bring a more whole, healed and centered version of ourselves back to the communities we are a part of. -
Supported by: People Connected to the Loka Initiative
Audience: All - Open to All
Description:
After viewing Sacred Wisdom, Sacred Earth, participants will be invited into a grounded space to digest and reflect on what they've witnessed. The session includes time for inner reflection, and optional journaling or sharing.
As the film uplifts Indigenous voices and urgent planetary truths, this session supports participants in feeling those truths in their bodies—making space for grief, beauty, and clarity to arise. Together, we’ll practice slowing down, listening inward, and reconnecting to ourselves, the land, and the collective body. -
Facilitated by: Alinne Ramirez, Sol Thea Kelley-Jones, Karen Romo, and Francis Henn
Audience: All - Open to Everyone
Description: The escalating violence and repression against migrants we have seen this year requires a community response. This session will offer multiple practical and hands-on ways to be in solidarity with migrants in Wisconsin. Building on the decades of organizing that Voces de la Frontera has been doing with migrants, and building on the multiple pronged approach they have developed in response to the current anti-immigrant tactics present in our communities, participants will be invited to choose an area of solidarity they would like to engage with. We will explore specific areas of action such as in the realms of advocacy, mutual aid needs for legal and labor supports, tangible tactics for defense of migrants, engaging faith communities, or engaging organizations or businesses to act in solidarity with migrants. Participants will come away with concrete ways they can continue to support migrants in their communities.
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Facilitated by: Sarah Shatz and Colleen Butler
Audience: All - Open to Everyone
Description: At the end of the summit, it can be beneficial to pause and reflect on the moments throughout the summit that impacted you. In this session, we will use the summit booklet as a tool to reflect on these learnings by ourselves and with each other. Art supplies and the Summit booklet will be provided. We hope to provide a spacious container for reflection and connection.
Open to Specific Audiences
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Facilitated by: Adaku Utah - Featured Practitioner
Audience: BIPOC
Description: Conflict is a natural part of our lives, our communities, and our movements. For BIPOC organizers, healers, and leaders, the weight of unaddressed conflict can fracture relationships, deepen isolation, and weaken our collective power. Yet when we meet conflict with courage, curiosity, and care, it can open pathways to deeper trust, transformation, and liberation rooted in our shared histories and futures.
In this BIPOC-only interactive workshop, Adaku Utah of the Building Movement Project invites participants to explore conflict through a transformative justice lens—honoring the wisdom and resilience carried in our communities.Together, we will:
Develop a shared understanding of conflict across interpersonal, organizational, and movement levels.
Reflect on our own conflict styles, shaped by lived experiences of oppression and resistance, and imagine how they can be shifted.
Explore trust as a foundation for solidarity, safety, and collective power among BIPOC communities.
Participants will leave with tools for approaching conflict more intentionally, practical exercises to bring back to their groups, and reflections on how cultivating trust can help us sustain our work together as BIPOC people committed to justice and liberation.
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Facilitated by:
Mya Williams and Sam JeschkeAudience:
Youth OnlyDescription:
Honoring the theme of Get Together: Becoming the Liberation Ecosystem, we invite all youth attendees to join us in the Youth Room: a dedicated space for youth to relax, create, and share their collective experiences in and out of school. The session will open with a Welcome Circle, facilitated by Bayview Community Center’s Restorative Justice Club, and the remaining time will be dedicated to youth-led activities such as art, music, journaling, or even just resting. This space has an open-door policy, so youth may enter at any time if they feel they need a break from Summit experiences, or they are welcome to stay the entire afternoon. The youth of Madison, and all across the world, work hard day in and day out to speak up for themselves, for others, and for their community– this space is dedicated to honoring that they, too, need spaces to unwind and care for themselves. -
Facilitated by: Allison Dungan and Ginger Francis
Audience: White Parents and Caregivers
Description: As white-bodied parents and caregivers who value liberatory practices, we face the ongoing challenge of interrupting the dominance we’ve inherited and preventing its transmission to the next generation. In this session, we will draw on Tema Okun’s framework of White Supremacy Culture Characteristics and Liberatory Practices to reflect on how these dynamics show up in our parenting, caregiving, and family systems.
Together, we will explore:
How white supremacy culture lives in our bodies and everyday family practices
What it means to shift from “power over” to “power with” in our relationships with children
Skills for practicing repair when harm inevitably arises, so that our children learn trust, accountability, and reciprocity
By engaging these practices in community, we deepen our ability to parent and care in ways aligned with abolition, liberation, and belonging. Participants will leave with tools and embodied practices that support raising young people who can trust themselves, practice repair, and contribute to collective liberation.
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Facilitated by: Garrett Denning
Audience: White People
Description: White neurodivergent folx often boast a "strong sense of justice" as part of what brings us to social justice movements, yet often we find ourselves unprepared for what that work looks like and how messy it can be. Left unchecked, this leads to poking others' wounds and even hiding behind our identities when confronted with our actions. But it doesn't have to play out this way. In this experience, we will reframe this "sense of justice" and other neurodivergent traits to dream and reimagine what liberation, community, and solidarity could look like. Participants can draw on our own individual neurodivergent traits, interests, and wisdoms to reshape our social justice journeys by determining what could serve the cause and what could harm it if not watched out for. Through this work we can start working to imagine a better world, rooted in liberation and defended through uncolonized and unfiltered neurodivergent "chaos." While this workshop is tailored for neurodivergent folx who hold whiteness, these skills can apply to anyone with at least one dominant identity who wishes to better be in community at a time where everything is exhausting and o no one who wishes to be part of it will be turned away if there is room. We also honor all definitions of neurodivergence and journeys of connecting to neurodivergent identities. Self diagnosis is real and will always be honored.