Reflections from the Racial Healing Initiative Team
by Brenda Salgado, RHI Program Director,
and Ben Scott-Brandt, RCC Program Director
We all belong in the circle of human concern. Othering is the problem of our time. Belonging is the solution.
- john a. powell, The Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley
Retreat centers cultivate and nurture spaces of sacred hospitality, contemplative practice, and deep transformation. Despite their genuine efforts to ensure “all are welcome,” there are many ways that retreat centers also perpetuate othering and white supremacy in individual and collective patterns and behaviors. To support retreat centers in addressing these patterns and building capacity for racial healing and equity, the Retreat Center Collaboration partnered with the Center for Healing and Liberation to launch the Racial Healing Initiative (RHI) in 2021.
For folks who aren’t familiar with this program, the RHI is a nationwide racial equity initiative grounded in retreat centers across rural and urban geographies in the United States. This initiative fosters healing and transformation for retreat center staff, board, and organizational partners, offering a menu of resources including retreats and small group experiences provided on-site, virtually, and within local communities. Led by Brenda Salgado, program director for RHI, and Ben Scott-Brandt, program director for RCC, the Racial Healing Initiative team has worked directly with six retreat centers in the initial piloting phase, and is now expanding efforts to serve six more centers in the second phase.
We (Brenda and Ben) gathered with the team for a retreat in the spring of 2023, to reflect on what we’d learned thus far, and plan for the future of this work. During our conversations over those few days, we explored why we’d each chosen to join this initiative, and why we were choosing to stay. What were we learning together, and what did we feel was most important to attend to next? Some of our reflections are recorded in this short video.
As a team, we’re learning how to more clearly describe our program’s approach to racial healing, and we’re finding creative and responsive ways to support and challenge our retreat center partners as they work to align their actions more deeply with their values, at each step of their organizations’ racial healing journeys. Unlike DEI training and racial equity workshops that focus on education and compliance, the RHI’s focus is healing, and cultivating cultures and communities rooted in belonging.
Because our focus is healing and our approach is relational, the initiative draws on support and resources for healing that exist beyond systems and structures – in the more-than-human realm of faith, spirit, land, ancestors, and intuition. This work calls us to listen deeply, to be vulnerable, and to bring the whole of ourselves into meaningful and accountable relationships with each other. To support communities in building these skills, the RHI team is grounded in fluid and responsive ways of holding and exploring how generational harm and trauma live within the body, are passed down through our lineages and institutions, and perpetuate themselves.
Our relational approach to healing values embodiment, reciprocity, internal transformation, being open to change, kinship and relationship with each other and the land, accountability, repair, and emergence of healthier ways of being in beloved community. Participants of all racial identities explore the ways retreat centers perpetuate othering and white supremacy in individual and collective patterns and behaviors, and gain the opportunity to be in greater values alignment, build stamina and endurance to do this work, co-create cultures of belonging and beloved community, and respond to the times in which we live.
As the Racial Healing Initiative grows, we’ve learned how important it is to include a range of participants from the leadership, board, and staff of each center in their racial healing work, so that learning isn’t isolated to a small group. We also recognize that thus far, primarily white-led and white-attended centers have been engaged in RHI. We know that the RHI work will be stronger and more authentic with the engagement and leadership of BIPoC-led organizations, and we’re committed to growing those partnerships.
Our Racial Healing Initiative team is committed to co-creating a society filled with equity, belonging, wholeness, and collective wisdom and beauty. We’re grateful to be supporting retreat centers in building communities of practice for collective healing and liberation, and building cultures of belonging.
The practice of retreat calls us to remember ourselves as part of a larger whole and to reimagine both our work and our stake in the healing of the whole.
- A Commitment to Universal Flourishing, one of the RCC’s core values
There are several ways that people at your center can participate in the Racial Healing Initiative. We invite you to join the conversation at racial healing workshops during regular RCC Community Calls, and check out the great articles and videos we’ve shared from past calls. We invite people of color to consider joining us for monthly meetings in upcoming sessions of our BIPoC People in Retreat Spaces affinity group. If your retreat center is interested in working directly with the RHI team to support your organization’s racial healing journey with onsite programming, please contact Ben Scott-Brandt.
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