Beyond Diversity 101 Gender and Sexuality: A Healing Transformation Workshop for 2SLGBTQIA+ People

If you are seeking funds or alternate payment options to participate in this program, please apply to the program first and then request funds through the  Financial Assistance Application.

All registrations are due by 1/27/25.

This BD101 Gender and Sexuality workshop intends healing transformation for participants who identify as 2SLGBTQIA+ (2 Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer/Questioning, Intersex, and Asexual, and more!). ​Our bodies are sites of liberation, and of harm, as we travel through a world not intended to uplift and honor all of who we are. Come together for connection, healing, and an invitation into the work of increasing the vibration for liberation in your life.

Participants will:

• Identify and understand patterns of queer and trans antagonism, gender oppression, racism, and colonization within ourselves and throughout society;
• Recognize and remove blocks that hold you back as a 2SLGBTQIA+ facilitator, artist, leader, healer, teacher, or organizer;
• Increase your range of motion (understanding resistance and resilience) as you shift patterns within, calling on inner and ancestral guidance in order to practice being a brave and heart-centered transformer;
• Practice body-based knowing and exploration of obstacles blocking our freedom and pathways to liberation; and
• Develop skill in speaking and acting from YOUR knowingness– in your body, in your heart; speaking truth out loud in service of personal and societal liberation.

Download the flyer to share with your community

This program is intended as an affinity space for participants who share a lived experience as a 2SLGBTQIA+ individual. If you do not share that experience, we thank you for your interest in this program, and for supporting this community by considering a different opportunity. 

Leaders

Niyonu Spann is a member of Chester Monthly Meeting in Chester, PA.  She is a singer-songwriter, organization development consultant and a mom of three amazing sons and three amazing granddaughters!  In 1999, Niyonu designed and led the first Beyond Diversity 101  Intensive after some 10 years or so of working as a diversity workshop facilitator.  She was beginning to see “a disturbing pattern in myself and in my fellow trainers. When we facilitators measured “success” during and after a workshop, it was frequently by a yardstick which correlated to the following: on one side, how guilty had the white folks—especially white men—been made to feel; and on the other side, had the people of color, women or some other designated oppressed group gotten sufficiently in touch with their pain and expressions of anger?”
Niyonu began to notice that many activities in our workshops were either geared to encourage traditionally oppressed groups to tell their story of victimization or to bring the groups who have been the primary oppressors to the brink of tears and shame. I began to ask the question, “Is there anything beyond this cycle?” Creating Beyond Diversity 101 was born out of that question.
Since that time, there have been over 50 BD101 intensives: BD101 Training for Trainers, BD101 Race, BD101 – Whole System Transformation and now, for the first time: BD101 Gender & Sexuality!

Courage V Pearson (they/them) holds an M.Div. in Feminist Liberation Theologies and has been holding space as a facilitator, conflict holder, witch, and community builder since 1993. Courage was first introduced to BD101 in 2003. Their current work over the past 5 years is as a queer and trans youth organizer and school-based facilitator and trainer in rural communities in Vermont.

Zhenevere Sophia Dao, a transgender woman, is a poet, novelist, playwright, and existential and cultural philosopher. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University in Poetry and Literature, before leaving academia for the equestrian professions and to become an independent scholar. She is the founder of Mythosomatics, an original body of mythopoetic movement art, and the philosophies of Post-Daoism and Neo-Romanticism. She teaches workshops in INTEGRITAS: Inversions of Power Through Spiritualized Martial Arts, as well as VOICE & VOICE: Profound Experimental Theaters of Body & Song, with her partner, vocalist Willa Roberts. She makes the better part of her living as a blacksmith, farrier (horse shoer), and horse trainer.

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