Explore Our Courses
Live, cohort-based courses taught by scholars, artists, and practitioners. Small groups of 10-25 learners. Real dialogue. Deep transformation.
Weaving Webs of Care
In this 2-day intensive experience, we will explore how we can begin to weave relational webs of support as we tend to ourselves, care for one another, and cultivate the conditions needed to cultivate and sustain a more liberated world. We'll unpack how saviorism, martyrdom, and purity politics shape our lives and leadership; tend to our deeply human need for connection, interdependence, and belonging; and explore how we can weave wider webs of solidarity and support through our relationships, communities, and movements for change. So often we devote ourselves to helping others because there was no one there to help us. It’s a beautiful attempt to right the wrongs of our past, but it too often comes at the expense of ourselves. The work we do in the world really matters, but we are not here to single-handedly save it, nor do we have to martyr ourselves for causes we care about. Even in the times when we come together to fight for a more liberated future, we’re too often fighting each other. Moral perfectionism and threats of cancellation lead to self-censorship and the fear of exile. When activism becomes authoritarian, our need to be “right” eclipses our capacity to be relational. We have to become aware of how we’re unconsciously reinforcing and reproducing colonial, capitalistic, and patriarchal patterns of harm toward ourselves and with one another. Because without the inner work, the outer work won’t work. We are being called to co-create a world where responsibility is shared, reciprocity is valued, and diverse gifts come together to build something none of us could ever accomplish on our own. The only way out is through, and the only way through is together.
Modern Food: How we are what we eat
This course thinks about modern food and our connection with it – who makes it, what goes in it, and how this affects each and every one of us. It examines how our personal choices are shaped by our contexts and environments. This is not a course on “clean” eating or dieting. Instead, we are interested in the intersection of convenience and food – both its importance and its cost when it comes to how we decide to feed ourselves. Over the 2 days of this weekend intensive, we will focus on bread as an example of a food. We will examine how ultra-processed food disrupts the connection between the food we consume and our bodily responses to it, and consider the labour involved in preparing real food using whole ingredients. We will consider how we might re-establish our connection with food as well as the real opportunity costs of doing so. Put simply, who can do the cooking? Finally, by reflecting on our individual contexts, environments, and food choices, we will establish ways that we might want to change the way we eat. Each day, we will end the session with a bread-making workshop led by Josefina Venegas Meza, a professional baker & pastry chef who has worked in some of London's best kitchens. In addition to acquiring a practical and valuable skill, we intend this practice-based session to be an opportunity to reflect on the work of making food and what re-establishing a connection with food entails. You will also receive a comprehensive and exclusive bread-making handbook with all the essential information you might need to refer back to should you wish to continue baking in future.
A Life That Can Hold The Work: A Practical Introduction To Wellbeing For Changemakers
Social justice work is deeply meaningful, but it can also be emotionally, mentally and physically demanding. Many of us are trying to build lives that reflect our values while navigating burnout, financial pressure and systems that were never designed to support our wellbeing. This course offers a practical introduction to the foundations of wellbeing for changemakers. Across four live sessions, we will explore four core areas that shape our capacity to do meaningful work over time: - Foundations: Clarifying what a sustainable life and career look like for you - Nutrition: Understanding how food influences energy, mood and focus - Movement: Building strength, mobility and recovery into everyday life - Mental and emotional wellbeing: Developing practices that support reflection, resilience and self-compassion Throughout the course, we will combine evidence-based wellbeing principles with reflective exercises and small weekly experiments. Rather than pursuing perfection, participants will be encouraged to notice what works for their own bodies, circumstances and values. This course does not suggest that individual habits can solve structural problems. Instead, it focuses on practical ways to strengthen the personal foundations that help us stay engaged in the work we care about.
Tending to the Roots of Conflict in a Divided World
Most approaches to conflict and systemic harm focus on the external, without addressing the deeper fears and desires that keep these larger patterns in place. Through a trauma-informed process of guided self-inquiry and embodied exploration, participants in this course will gain a personally transformative, in-depth understanding of how self-suppression sustains the oppressive systems that shape our personal and collective realities. By illuminating how these hidden patterns shape your sense of self, your relationships with others, and the wider web we all belong to, you will gain invaluable insights into what *really* drives conflict while building your capacity to address the roots of division in your life and in our world. Civil rights activist James Baldwin said, “I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hatred so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.” Unless we learn how to confront that pain, we'll only create more of the same.
The Values Lab: Living What You Stand For
The Values Lab is a 4-week relational learning experience for people who want to better understand what they stand for and how to live in closer alignment with those values. This course is rooted in the understanding that values are not abstract concepts floating somewhere above our lives. Values live in our relationships, our decisions, our boundaries, our habits, our reactions, and the ways we move through the world every day. While many learning spaces focus on analyzing systems from a distance, The Values Lab invites participants to ground themselves in what is within their direct proximity: their inner world, their immediate relationships, their routines, and the environments they help shape. Inspired by the emergent strategy principle “small is all,” this course centers the understanding that meaningful change often begins locally and relationally. Many people move through life carrying values they inherited but never examined. Others know what matters to them but struggle to live in ways that reflect it because of expectations, burnout, survival, or systems that pull them away from themselves. This course offers space to slow down and explore those tensions. Together, participants will explore: • What values are and how they shape our lives • The stories and experiences that formed our values • The gap between what we say we value and how we actually live • How values influence relationships, work, identity, and decision-making • What it might look like to move through life more intentionally This is not therapy, leadership training, or productivity coaching. The Values Lab is a relational, reflection-based learning space rooted in conversation, witnessing, storytelling, and experimentation.
Building Our Capacity for Resistance
While it is imperative that we resist the oppressive systems we currently live in, intergenerational and racial trauma often tricks us into believing that assimilation will keep us safe. In the workshop, we will unlearn these harmful narratives, dig deep into our roots to learn from ancestral knowledge and sustainably increase our capacity to advocate for our communities. The class will cover our past, present and future – the history of how we got here, the present fears that hold us back, and how we can overcome those to build a better future. Why take this class? Without doing the important work of learning from history and healing from the past, we are doomed to continue our cycles of violence. Moreover, the work of resisting oppressive systems and reimagining them is a long and arduous journey. We need to build our resistance muscles if we want to sustain the long fight, and healing from our racial and intergenerational trauma will help us get there.
Relational Leadership as Design
Course Description This course invites learners to shift from the Status Quo Paradigm (positional authority, extractive practices, and metric driven decision making) into a Relational Paradigm where leadership is understood as a collective capacity, not an individual role. Participants reimagine leadership as something we build with communities rather than perform over them. At the heart of the course are four guiding themes: Power, Ethics, Truth, and Reciprocity, which serve as a diagnostic tool for understanding how leadership shows up in real time. Participants will explore how these themes operate across the seasonal cycles of sustainable leadership, moving from rest to experimentation, action, and harvest. This seasonal lens challenges the myth of “eternal summer” and supports leaders in cultivating practices that prevent burnout and strengthen long term resilience. What the course is about • Shifting from hierarchical, extractive leadership models to relational, community centered ones • Understanding leadership as a social, collective process rooted in trust, reciprocity, and shared responsibility • Exploring how power, ethics, truth, and reciprocity shape leadership decisions • Practicing sustainable leadership through seasonal cycles rather than constant output • Building relational culture as organizational infrastructure Topics covered • The Relational Leadership Design Framework o Principles and pillars that define relational, liberatory leadership o How collective sensemaking, cultural grounding, and shared power function in practice • The BAL Framework (Boundaries, Alerts, Limits) o A practical tool for sustainable leadership and preventing burnout o How to use BAL to maintain integrity, clarity, and relational alignment • Relational Culture Building o Designing conditions for belonging, psychological safety, and mutual accountability o Understanding culture as structural architecture, not interpersonal preference • Seasonal Leadership Cycles o Embracing rhythms of rest, experimentation, action, and reflection o Rejecting extractive norms that demand constant productivity Why this course matters right now Across sectors, leaders are navigating fragmentation, burnout, polarization, and rapid change. Traditional leadership models, which are rooted in hierarchy, individualism, and control, are no longer sufficient for the complexity of today’s world. Communities and organizations need leaders who can design systems needed for communities and institutions to thrive amid complexity, disruption, and change This course offers a timely, necessary alternative: a relational, lineage rooted, and sustainable approach to leadership that strengthens collective capacity and supports systems level transformation.
Being Human: The Path for Change
Political, economic, and communications systems strip humanity away, by turning us into data points, consumers, and users. Social media and digital technology have polluted everyday life making us more disconnected. The number of sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) tools rapidly grows for doing simple and complex things like writing, communicating, thinking, calculating, analyzing, diminishing our ability to live fully and flourish. While we can do anything we set our mind to — learn, change, solve, adapt, survive, flourish — we choose to overvalue AI technologies rather than see them as complementary. Most people are racing to build coding capabilities and mastering AI. However, they struggle to engage in a face-to-face conversation with another person, be authentic to their values, imagine a better life, or empathize with a person who thinks differently. We are forgetting how to be human — how to feel, to think, to listen, to imagine, to understand, to converse — which is limiting our capacity to care for others and envision more sustainable, fair, and diverse futures. We are angry and more impatient; we feel disconnected, hopeless, lonely, sad, and anxious. To cultivate conditions for change — personal, community, organization, planetary change — we must embrace our humanity. Human skills are our interpersonal and intrapersonal capabilities that enable the development of our identity and interactions with others, which are unable to be replicated by technology. This course is an invitation to be human and reconnect with the skills that make us unique as well as to live with compassion, responsibility, love, and empathy. Positive psychology frameworks and cognitive behavioral therapy strategies will equip you to engage in honest conversations with yourself and others. Futures literacy will enable deeper understanding and more diverse uses of the future to better navigate the present. Through dialogue-based learning, we will engage in mindfulness-based practices, digital detox strategies, and movement practices to make daily living more meaningful. You will gain mental clarity, feel more alive, and strengthen emotional intelligence. By becoming more present, you will engage in deeper listening and build more authentic relationships. This is a transformative experience back to our roots.
The World on our Plates: Culture, Politics, and Food Systems
This course takes as its starting point something we all need in order to survive - food - and examines how the personal is entwined with the social and the political. It must be clear this is not a course on “clean” eating or dieting - rather, it aims to examine how our individual choices are shaped by the larger food systems around us. Together, we will examine the various systems and processes leading to the food that ends up on our plates - where it comes from, what it is made up of, who is involved in putting it together - to reflect on larger questions around culture, cuisine, and community. Figuratively speaking, we are less interested in the breaking of bread than in the actual baking of bread. That is to say, whilst the symbolic and cultural elements of food are generally known, this course aims to focus squarely on the material dimensions of how food is made. We will consider how questions around labour, migration, race & gender, coloniality, capitalism and the climate crisis are wrapped up in the production of food. Together, we'll consider how our choices around the food we consume are shaped by the larger social and political contexts we are a part of. We'll see how these contexts affect our lives - not just nutritionally, but socially and environmentally as well. Our weekly sessions will culminate in a bread-making workshop led by Josefina Venegas Meza, a professional baker & pastry chef who has worked in some of London's best kitchens. In addition to acquiring a practical and valuable skill, we intend this practise-based session to function as an opportunity to personally reflect on the various topics we've covered together, and how they might apply in our individual lives. You will also receive a comprehensive and exclusive bread-making handbook with all the essential information you might need to refer back to should you wish to continue baking in future.
Find Your Voice
In this class, we unpack racial and generational trauma as a community, explore the roots of our identities, and learn to find our voices in a world that often wants to silence us. We retrace history to understand how modern society upholds white supremacy and causes extensive harm to BIPOC communities. Using that knowledge, we consciously move away from white models of success, learn how to become more comfortable with our identities, and re-design our life based on the values that matter most to us. We will also learn how to leverage our voice and power to organize in community and create the systemic shifts we need to usher in a better world. Topics covered: - Understanding systems of oppression and its effects on the present world order - How western imperialism rewrote the history of the world - The psychological damage of the white gaze on our identities and self-esteem - Reconnecting with our identity and reclaiming our voice, confidence, and power - Uncovering racial and intergenerational trauma to start the healing process - Dismantling the lie of meritocracy and white models of success and professionalism - Redefining success based on our own values and terms - Strategies to counter racism and uplift the most marginalized voices - Understanding how our liberation is connected and learning to create a network of allies - Making space for joy and internalizing that rest is an important part of liberation work
Beyond Sustainability: Connection, Wisdom, and Regenerative Leadership
We are living in a time when environmental conversations are often dominated by crisis, urgency, and fear. The narratives we hear most frequently focus on collapse, destruction, and emergency. While these realities cannot be ignored, constantly operating from this place can leave us feeling overwhelmed, drained, and powerless. What if there was another way to engage with this work? This course invites you to explore the environmental and sustainability space from a different perspective, one rooted in empowerment, connection, and renewal rather than stress and overwhelm. Over time, the sustainability field has increasingly been shaped by institutions, corporations, and NGOs. While many important efforts happen within these spaces, the deeper essence of environmental stewardship, the relationship between people, land, culture, and ancestral knowledge, can sometimes get lost. This course creates space to reconnect with that essence. Rather than approaching sustainability purely as an intellectual or technical subject, we will explore how to embody other ways of being that allow us to engage with the environmental field from a place of authenticity, care, and inspiration. Drawing from environmental psychology, behavioral change, storytelling, and ancestral wisdom, participants will explore how inner transformation can lead to more meaningful external impact. When we lead from this place, we are able to contribute to healthier systems while showing up with less guilt, less pressure, and more clarity, purpose, and power. By the end of the course, you will feel more empowered to engage with environmental work from a place of inspiration, grounded in a deeper connection to the land, to community, and to the wisdom that has guided humans for generations. Throughout the course, we will reflect on questions such as: - How can we engage with environmental work from a deeper, more life-affirming place that invites both ourselves and others into the conversation? - How can we move from intellectual understanding to embodied practice in sustainability? - How can personal transformation shape broader transformation in global systems? - How can we design and share initiatives, ideas, or projects that emerge from inspiration and authenticity rather than pressure or urgency? - How can we lead and communicate in ways that reconnect people to the land and to each other?
Living with Imagination and Optimism
Imagine having the courage to think and act more authentically, letting go of expectations. Imagine living each day your dream life and with a clear purpose. Imagine becoming the most influential leader because of your compassion and ethics. Imagine that your seemingly wild ideas are instrumental to addressing climate disasters. This is possible if you dare to imagine it. Imagination is human’s superpower – it allows to see beyond current limitations to create unseen and hopeful realities. Optimistic imaginings can increase positive emotions, boost well-being, and lead to empowerment, fostering constructive individual and collective change and impactful action. However, imagination is still mostly associated with children and artists, but unrelated to everyday adult life. As a result, our imagination has become constrained and underdeveloped. While we spend most of our time thinking about the future, our tendency is to imagine apocalyptic scenarios – e.g., worse pandemics – or negative situations rooted in current trends – e.g., AI takes over humanity. We struggle to imagine positive paths forward and often look at others for validation – that is, we follow the familiar and conventional, even if this path does not make us happy. This creates a vicious cycle of pervasive pessimism and hopelessness about the future that increases our insecurities and feelings of anxiety and loneliness, which hinder our imaginative powers. The good news is that imagination can be reclaimed, strengthened, and harnessed. Sitting at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, and well-being, this course is an invitation to explore the symbiotic connection between imagination and well-being, as well as to discover what is getting in between us and reaching our potential. In addition to inner development gains, reinforcing human skills — listening, imagining, conversing, empathizing, paying attention, collaborating — will better equip learners to succeed as employees are increasingly looking for these skills in candidates. Through a blend of mindfulness-based practices and reflection, experiential exercises (visualization, role-play, futuring, pretend play, sensory engagement), and hands-on creativity activities (drawing, sketching, collaging) learners will journey inwards, slow down, identify their barriers, and experience the transformative benefits of imagination for mental and physical health. In each session, learners will practice tools and skills to unlock their barriers and deliberately tap into their imagination as well as to integrate and foster imagination skills in their life, their community, and their work. By the end of the course, learners will feel a sense of freedom, courage, compassion, and optimism. They will walk away with the inspiration and confidence to live with imagination – and to nurture it in others.
Embodying Liberation
This course offers a transformative journey into embodied resistance and collective healing. Developed under siege and exile, Ashira Active Meditation draws from Sufi whirling, somatic release, and indigenous Palestinian practices to support healing from trauma on both personal and collective levels. Participants will: - Explore how continuous trauma shapes the nervous system - Learn how the body can be a site of both memory and liberation - Engage in movement practices, grief rituals, and storytelling - Reclaim joy as a form of resistance Guiding Questions: - How do we grieve while building resilience? - How can our bodies become vessels for transgenerational healing? - What does it mean to be radically alive in times of collapse? This course centers voices from SWANA and global majority communities, offering tools that are culturally rooted, somatically empowering, and spiritually sustaining.
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