Level #1: Feminist Leadership Workshops offer learning methods I synthesize from my research in feminist theory—much of which is indebted to the insights and rigor of women of color feminist history—alongside my training in psychodynamic and psychoanalytic theory and trauma research.

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What you experience

Workshops are typically a small group of leaders (6–12 people) and come with three weeks of homework before me meet. You receive feminist theory readings, customized recordings on the texts, and my contemplative feminist practices to prepare you for our time. 

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Who the workshops are for

These workshops are made for a variety of contexts and professions: leaders in innovative businesses, non profits, faith communities, activist spaces, K-12 education, and mental health and medical practitioners. 

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Level #1: Feminist Leadership Workshops

Level #2: Feminist Leadership Strategy Sessions

Level #3: Feminist Leadership Intensive Programs

In Level #3, I offer limited spots for 1:1 or 1:2 Feminist Leadership Intensive Programs that provide in-depth and ongoing feminist social theory training.​ There are two durations for the intensives: 

3.5 months ( 3 modules) 

~an introductory program~

or

16 months ( 12 modules)

~the equivalent of a master's degree level course work~ 

The 16-month, highly customized training is intended for those who plan to teach or lead others using my research, learning, and pedagogical methods. I typically can work with 3–4 people a year with this program.

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For clients enrolled in intensives, we will first discuss your personal,

intellectual, and professional goals (and spiritual goals if that applies to you).

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We assess

Why are you so drawn to this work and what is coming more alive in you as you move toward it? Describe your desire, creative pulse, grief, and ache for collective transformation and healing?​ Then, we commit to staying close to that alive energy inside of you.

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We will also assess your time, health, and energy limits for the work ahead.

​All my clients lead very busy lives, so we examine: How can you create moments of rich feminist study into the rhythms of life's fullness?

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After the initial assessments, I create for you an effective pathway, with weekly readings, recorded lectures, and contemplative feminist practice.

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The program

Based on my expertise and your unique constellation of goals, I carefully select readings from feminist history, drawing texts into conversations across many different fields of research.

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For each text you read, you also receive customized, concentrated recordings that quickly help you become oriented in the assigned readings. 

My clients asked for this resource back in 2011, and I have recorded hundreds ever since. These lectures distill down my training cross 4 academic disciplines and save you significant time in your reading process. 

(Plus, you can listen to them while commuting.)

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So, instead of picking up a text and not knowing the context of its history, the key terms it uses, or the effects of that feminist text on social change, you will engage the reading much more prepared to grasp the layers of meanings.

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The recorded lectures also help you to make connections in the research

(since feminist texts are always in dialogue with other ones).​

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Additionally, I create for you contemplative feminist writing exercises. These are from a carefully researched writing method I designed in my doctoral study, drawing on feminist ethnic studies, psychodynamic theory, critical pedagogy, and contemplative studies. The method helps you connect the intellectual, psychological, and emotional rigor of this work, supporting you as you find your own voice and purpose with the material.

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We meet twice a month for learning sessions over Skype or Zoom. We discuss both the texts and your personal and professional process of discovery, growth, grief, joy, and creativity. 

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Tuition 

Contact me for tuition price points. Tuition is targeted to the professional context of the work together, as well as whether you are working in a historically under-resourced community.

Our key question

What have been the costs to our lives and our world of excluding feminist intellectual history from most of our education?​ I believe it is precisely the knowledge of feminist foremothers that we most need to support the issues facing us at this moment in history.

Together we build bridges—so that a customized course of feminist study can support your leadership and gifts as you do your work for justice. 

Join the mailing list.

Contact me with questions.

Listen to the podcast.

For some people, experiencing feminist intellectual life and history is like walking through a new door for the first time and discovering a world of ideas that unexpectedly changes the course of their lives.

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For others, the intensive program helps grow buds and blossoms for old and long-held inner truths.

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For most, the integration of feminist coaching, study, and contemplative practices will introduce new and transformative ideas and also help to connect you to intuitions long held within yourself. These are internal and wise roots of knowledge, often inherited in our bodies and psyches from the stories we carry from previous generations.

In learning and reconnecting to the fullness of ourselves, we are part of a journey generations deep—and we are making change and creating healing for generations to come. 

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My Story: Why I Do This Work

at Harvard's Schlesinger Library

This is me as a baby feminist theorist. I am standing outside Harvard's Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. It is my very first time in the archives. The sun streamed in, and the hospitable librarian brought me the very dusty box I wanted. I held in my hands the archives of suffragist Alice Paul. I was ecstatic and wide-eyed to start to learn history in this way, with these archives in my fingertips—Alice's letters from jail to her mom. Alice was hunger striking in prison for the 19th amendment. Something awakened in me that day. I went onto apply to graduate programs to study with leading feminist scholars.

This is me more recently checking out 40 books from Columbia's Butler library to prepare a feminist theory class I am teaching. I promise I am still inwardly ecstatic (and grateful)—but I am tired because that is what rigorous scholarly engagement does to you! But I still savor the privilege to be inside academia, have access to resources, then redistribute these resources outside these spaces.

at Columbia's Butler Library

I will never forget the experience of becoming a feminist scholar.

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I was sitting around my first women's studies seminar table and my life changed. I was a graduate student at Yale and terrified to be there.

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Even though I had already done one graduate program studying to be a psychodynamic therapist, I had not had a feminist education before this program. The terms and theorists felt new and intimidating. 

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My friend Stacy had given me a paisley writer-girl book bag before I had moved across the country to New Haven (I still use it). And my sister had given me a water bottle for this daunting school adventure. It read:

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"She packed up her potential and all she had learned, grabbed a cute pair of shoes and headed out to change a few things."

Inside the bag of potential was the word "pluck."

I toted that water bottle around everywhere for support.

And I began to ask so many questions at the women's studies

seminar table.

How come I had gone to college and already done one graduate program and had never been taught a full lineage of women's thought? (It was as though women's intellectual history simply did not exist in 95% of my education.) True, I had always brought feminist questions and convictions to the classroom. I had had a few professors who had made a point to include women writers on their syllabi, and when professors did not, I spoke up and asked them to! 

But I had never been able to walk into a women's studies department and take an entire course devoted to learning feminist history from a top scholar in the field. What an astounding privilege.

Around that table, I savored every class, every new idea, every opportunity to learn to ask deeper questions.

This was mostly before feminist communities really existed online, or at least it was when those communities were first being built. Most of what I knew before that women's studies seminar I knew from trying to get my hands on anything I could find at my local library after college. I had found an Estelle Freedman 12-cassette series on the history of feminism, which I listened to over and over and over. 

(Feminism needs to always ask "which woman" Freedman had said repeatedly throughout those lectures. In other words, be specific about which women's experiences we are talking about. White middle class feminism can be entirely irrelevant to the majority of women's lives.)

About the time of these cassettes, I had also heard of a feminist psychotherapist in my city, emailed her, become her friend, and eventually raided her bookshelf. We also held feminist salons at her house. Red wine, red velvet couches, Simone the pup (yes, named after the famous feminist theorist), and feminist consciousness raising.

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All that to say, when I got to Yale on a scholarship, I was beside myself with joy to have an expert professor walk us through an entire syllabus of feminist history. (We started with the astounding text by Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.)

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I remember how my professor and TA gave me feedback on every paper and helped me believe I could, in fact, become an expert feminist theorist one day if I kept on studying, writing, and devoting myself.

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I still tote that precious syllabus around to every apartment I have moved to (and I have moved a lot to get all my training at different graduate institutions).

The pages are now worn out and dog-eared,  but they are their own feminist archive—the portal of learning that invited my life's path.

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I love this sacred path I have chosen of studying and holding the histories of women's written knowledge. I also cannot deny the realities of how getting access to these resources within academia has come at a high cost to my life and health because scholarly research is incredibly rigorous, not kind to our embodiment, and was not designed for people without generational wealth or partner wealth to sustain them.

But I know very well that this work matters. And I know that most people never get close to the experience of that seminar classroom, or the additional 63 graduate courses I have taken across four programs of training. I know it is very hard to access a study of feminist history on your own because it takes a great deal of time to orient yourself in texts  and lineages that you don't know even exist, or if you do know they exist, to understand the layers and nuances within the intersecting histories across different communities of feminist knowledge and practice.

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In patriarchy, we have been systematically denied a feminist education that preserves and passes down women's knowledge. 

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There have been so many costs.

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The current political situation we are facing is a direct consequence of the systematic erasure of the intellectual history of feminist foremothers, especially Black women, Indigenous women, and women of color who led the way in rigorous analysis of all the layers of these systems we live inside. 

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(So, for example: Alice Paul's labor was part of giving us the 19th amendment, but it also matters to know that she didn't fight for the voting rights of African American, Asian American, and Native American women. Feminist history needs to be learned with great attention to intersections of race, class, sexuality, religion, and colonialisms and settler colonialism, or we reinforce white supremacism in the telling of history.)

I believe that if we make the depth and breadth of feminist  knowledge available, social and political transformation will happen at deep levels in our society—just as it did in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

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And while there are certainly more online resources now than ever before, encountering the fuller range and nuance of feminist theory and history is a different matter. There is still no replacing the experience of sitting with a  teacher who has given their life's work to studying the texts and the contexts those texts were born from— or gave birth to.

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Together, we collaborate to create pathways for people in a range of life experiences and vocations to engage and come alive to this knowledge. Knowing the history of women's contributions to history and intellectual thought will change the world—and will change you as you change your world.