Decolonizing the Heart Workshop

Event Details

Decolonizing the Heart: Deep Learning for Deep Change

So, you’ve done a KAIROS Blanket Exercise, now what? You feel helpless at how messed up the world is, what do you do? You want to work with people – but they seem so different. Where do you begin?

This is a workshop to address questions like these. Reconciliation requires building relationships; building relationships requires more than coming together over issues; decolonizing our own hearts is necessary before we can work together for transformation.

We begin by sharing our stories.

We tell stories to make sense of our world. Using geno-graphing, we explore the stories into which we are born – the struggles of our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and further into our lineage. We strive to understand their lives within an historical, social, economic and political context. We need this grounding so that we can move beyond sympathy into empathy and compassion.

We consider our own stories through William Ury’s proposition that “all conflicts arise from the failure to have needs met.” We use a scarcity-needs-based conflict analysis approach using the Medicine Wheel framework whereby we examine the spiritual, emotional, physical and intellectual aspects of our human needs.

Our aim in this day-long workshop is to explore ways of being that keep us apart and ways that bring us together. Through this process we hope to understand the work we require for balance and harmony.

Some of the topics we cover are motivation, identity formation, media literacy, privilege, concepts of spiritual, emotional, physical and intellectual intelligence, critical communication strategies, understanding the political economy of the production of knowledge, and more.

Some of the tools we’ll be using are storytelling, role-playing, mapping social relationships, effective facilitation skills, fundamentals for having difficult conversations, and more.

This workshop is also appropriate for people and organizations that are dealing with issues of lateral violence.

Join us in understanding scarcity-needs-based conflict and how it informs all of our interactions. Gain insight into understanding why people resist and how they can be motivated towards social change.

When: Saturday July 20th, 9:30am – 5pm
Where: Toronto United Mennonite Church, 1774 Queen Street E.

For Pay What You Can registrants we ask you pay the minimum $25.00 to guarantee your attendance – we’ll make adjustments with you at the end of the day of the workshop.

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