Virtual Breakouts

October 8 | 12:30 PM - 2:30 PM

Open to Everyone

(Youth & 18+)

  • Facilitated By: Devyn Brown & Heather Schultz

    Audience: Open to Everyone

    Join us for an interactive discussion on creating a mental health crisis plan before a crisis happens. Although our session centers on parents, anyone could benefit from the content, and we welcome all those who are interested to attend. Together, we'll explore how to recognize early warning signs, identify personal triggers, and develop practical strategies for navigating difficult moments. Participants will learn how to create a personalized plan that includes coping tools, a support network, and preparations for the care of children and pets. We'll also discuss simple, manageable steps that can help when everyday tasks feel overwhelming, as well as culturally relevant mental health resources and self-help books written by Black, Indigenous, and other authors of color. This session is designed to empower participants with practical tools, increase self-awareness, and encourage a proactive approach to mental health and well-being.

  • Facilitated By: Alia Stevenson & Colleen Butler

    Audience: Open to Everyone

    Justice is our commitment, Liberation is our destination, but Joy is the way

    Abolition, mutual aid, repair, and solidarity ask more of us than critique. They ask us to build relationships, cultures, and ways of being that can sustain truth, care, accountability, imagination, and collective action. In a moment marked by violence, exhaustion, disconnection, and urgency, that work also requires an emotional ecosystem capable of keeping us connected to our humanity and to one another.

    The Joy Doctrine is a tool that was created and successfully piloted by the nINA Collective, offering joy as a disciplined and liberatory practice. Joy here is not toxic positivity or an escape from grief, conflict, or injustice. It is a way of staying in community while telling the truth about harm, practicing accountability without cruelty, and resisting the emotional habits of domination we are working to dismantle. Cultivating joy requires a different emotional ecosystem, one in which truth, disagreement, learning, and accountability can remain humane.

    In this experiential session, participants will reflect on their own relationship with joy and practice ways of cultivating it in community. Through guided reflection, connection, embodied practice, and collective meaning-making, we will explore how joy can strengthen the relational conditions that make solidarity possible, sustain the reciprocal care at the heart of mutual aid, support repair without disposal, and help us imagine and practice life-affirming alternatives to systems rooted in domination.

    Participants will leave with practical tools for protecting joy, grounding in values, strengthening connection, and returning to agency when the work feels overwhelming. Together, we will explore what becomes possible when joy is not treated as a reward for liberation, but as one of the ways we build it.

  • Facilitated By: Julie Swanson & Marcela Kyngesburye

    Audience: Open to Everyone

    Together we will explore how to create and hold a space that is strong enough, potent enough and welcoming enough to expand to a wider and deeper knowing of grief and sorrow. 

    In this space we will cultivate grief tending practices including reflective journaling, witnessing, circle practice, and ritual.

    What might happen if we approach our grief with reverence, curiosity and care in the company of community?

  • Facilitated By: Ali Muldrow

    Audience: Open to Everyone

    The root of the Revolution is our ability to be in relationship with each other. In this workshop, we will explore our relationships with ourselves and what it means to be in community with one another as we heal.

    The aftermath of Cory Ruiz‘s murder by police included 12 days of organizing on Baldwin and Willy Street. This tragedy brought movements and neighbors together in grief and resistance.

    In this workshop we will explore when celebrating our shared humanity becomes more powerful than state violence, and criminalization. We will take an intersectional approach to what it means to be in dialogue while uplifting practices for self preservation and sustainability solidarity. Come prepared to create and care.

  • Facilitated By: Ben Lober

    Audience: Open to Everyone

    Antisemitism is a form of injustice that impacts all of us. And today, authoritarians in power are twisting the fight against antisemitism to serve their own purposes-- stifling movements against Israel's genocide in Gaza, attacking universities, deporting students, and undermining democracy. Christian Zionism is one powerful, and often invisible force behind these campaigns, and behind US support for Israel more broadly. Millions of American Christians support Israel because of Biblical prophecies about the End Times, and these antisemitic, anti-Palestinian beliefs are also a cornerstone of Christian nationalism in America, the deeply exclusionary movement to turn America into an authoritarian 'Christian nation' that impacts women, LGBTQ folks, and practically everyone else. 

    Now more than ever, we can't let these forces divide us. We need an intersectional, justice-driven agenda to fight antisemitism, Christian Zionism and rising authoritarianism with solidarity. In this workshop, we'll work together to understand these intertwined forms of oppression and explore how to counter them together.

  • Facilitated By: Tony DelaRosa

    Audience: Open to Everyone but Educators, Education Policy Makers, and Education Administrators are especially invited

    This session examines part of a larger study on policy advocacy for Wisconsin Act 266, which amends Act 31 to include Hmong and Asian American history education in Wisconsin. This offers participants a window into the desires and intentions for organizing and advocating for statewide education policy. This helps educators, education policy scholars, and education administrators understand why they fought for this bill and why previous iterations of this policy in the past 20 years did not succeed. This study is part of a larger oral history archive being created with the Wisconsin Historical Society to store counterstories about the policy advocacy of Act 266. The archive will launch in Spring 2027.

Open to Specific Audiences

  • Facilitated By: Oona Mackesey-Green, Lizzie Bruno, Erica Ramberg & Erika Bach

    Audience: White People

    Building community safety and solidarity by bridging movements. What can we learn when we reflect on our responses to these overlapping crises? By tapping into their shared roots, what new possibilities can we practice? During this session, we'll invite conversation about how people are mobilizing around ICE, how we've responded to the murder of Corey Ruiz, and how we can resource networks built during moments of crisis to sustain the daily work of building alternatives to policing and punishment, block by block.

  • Facilitated By: Eva Wingren & Erika Bach

    Audience: White People

    Answering the call from Black organizers for white people to organize their own communities, Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) has brought thousands of white people in hundreds of communities into movements for racial justice. This session will introduce participants to the conversation skills used by SURJ organizers to move people from nearly anywhere on the political spectrum into anti-racist action. This is the third year that this session is being offered; it has been updated with the latest national strategy and research.

    SURJ offers concrete ways for white people to take action with their neighbors as part of national movements for justice. They emphasize a “shared interest” approach where white people identify what they stand to gain by fighting white supremacy and learn about the history of racism being used to disrupt class solidarity. Their phone banks have been recognized as best-in-class training for persuading undecided voters. 

    SURJ’s recent trainings have focused on supporting participants in building in-person groups that can mount actions and energize local campaigns, aiming for a cohesive balance between bold national vision and local nuance. They are giving people at the grassroots level the tools they need to become organizers who activate their communities into movements, while keeping alignment with national strategy as outlined by groups accountable to BIPOC communities.

  • Facilitated By: Shandra Bauer & Amanda Boerboom

    Audience: White People

    Are you a white bodied person longing to join social justice movements but notice perfectionism, fear, discomfort or shame preventing you from engaging? 

    Are you already engaged in movement spaces but notice patterns of freezing, shutting down, defensiveness or wanting to “get it right” show up in your body, mind and heart when in these spaces? 

    Are you curious about what betraying white supremacy and embodying accountability, belonging and repair looks like in practice? 

    This workshop is a fierce and tender invitation for white folks to face what stands between us and the work of truly betraying white supremacy and fully participating in the movement to end systemic racism.  Internalized patterns of whiteness and unmetabolized grief and shame from the harms we have caused (consciously or unconsciously), stop white folks from being trustworthy accomplices in the fight to dismantle systems of supremacy and reimagine a vision of collective liberation.  

    In this 2 hour workshop you are invited to explore the Sixth Gate of Grief: The Harms We Have Caused as a portal into more deeply embodying the values and visions of the world we long to inhabit.  Through teachings, guided somatic practice, journal prompts, and group sharing we will explore together what it means to betray white supremacy and embody true belonging, resilience and courage as we transform our communities, relationships and systems. This is a space to hold complexity, lean into discomfort and deepen into your relationship with grief, shame, dignity, humility and radical responsibility.    

    Participants will leave with: 

    • Practices to embody centered accountability, dignity, humility and belonging. 

    • A deeper understanding of the ways unmetabolized grief and shame shape us and practices for tending to grief/shame personally and in community. 

    • A commitment statement declaring your dedication to taking action as a trustworthy and accountable white person in the fight to dismantle racism and build a life affirming vision of collective liberation.

    This workshop honors the pillars of repair, solidarity and abolition.