Racial Healing Initiative
The Retreat Center Collaboration and the Center for Healing and Liberation are partnering to bring the Racial Healing Initiative to retreat centers across the United States, with the support of our fiscal sponsor, Commonweal. This initiative is made possible through the generous support of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, the Fetzer Institute, and the Hemera Foundation. We hope to build relationships with additional funders as the program grows.
Leadership
Brenda is an author, wisdom keeper and organizational consultant. She has experience in transformative and spiritual development, nonprofit management, facilitation, interspiritual dialogue, mediation and circle work, movement building, and community health and social justice. Brenda has trained with various elders in ceremony and traditional medicine, and she draws on the healing powers and relationship with the natural world to guide her work. She also holds degrees in Biology, Psychology, and Animal Behavior.
In the past, she has served as Director of the East Bay Meditation Center, Associate Director at Wisdom & Money, and Senior Fellow at Movement Strategy Center. She has also served on the boards of Movement Strategy Center, Lion’s Roar Foundation and Unity San Leandro. She currently serves on the Advisory Board for The Charis Foundation for New Monasticism & InterSpirituality, as well as The Center for Healing and Liberation. She is author of Real World Mindfulness for Beginners: Navigate Daily Life One Practice at a Time.
Brenda is committed to co-creating a society filled with community wisdom, belonging, wholeness and beauty. She is focused on racial healing work, land and ancestral healing, sacred economics, and the weaving of mindfulness and indigenous teachings for the times we are in. She is grateful to her ancestors for their support in collective healing and liberation work.
Founders and Advisors
Victoria Santos
Victoria’s work is rooted in a far-reaching vision of human potential. She has a deep commitment to our collective liberation.
Victoria has trained in the fields of psychology, conflict resolution, meditation, rituals and embodied practices. She brings over thirty years of experience and leadership in community-based engagement. With a Master’s degree from SUNY-Albany in Political Science & Latin American and Caribbean Studies, she also holds certifications in transformative and healing practices.
Victoria leads groups and individuals in meditative explorations drawn from the Realization Process®. Developed by Judith Blackstone, this process is a body-centered approach to personal and spiritual healing and maturity. For ten years, Victoria assisted Sobonfu Somé in leading grief rituals according to the Dagara traditions of Burkina Faso, which also informs Victoria’s work. Victoria has studied multiple approaches to healing trauma, incorporating somatic awareness and meditative practices. She weaves together methods that engage the energy of our hearts, minds and lived somatic experience, and that invite us to attend to our intuition.
Victoria knows the power of community and the wisdom that can emerge from it. Her work is guided by the fundamental perception that everyone is needed, and that when we offer each other our compassionate listening, we cultivate our collective freedom.
Oren Slozberg
Executive Director
Oren is the executive director of Commonweal and the program director of the Center for Creative Community at Commonweal. He joined Commonweal in 2013 as the chief strategies officer, to develop sustainability and organizational development strategies for future programming. Oren has been a senior program developer for more than 30 years.
Michelle Scheidt
Senior Program Officer
Michelle serves as a senior program officer in the Spiritual Transformation area at the Fetzer Institute. Her research interests include spiritual formation, LGBTQ spirituality, and spirituality among people who identify as spiritual-but-not-religious. Michelle's background includes program development, strategic planning, nonprofit boards, pastoral ministry, and group facilitation.
Core Consultant / Trainers
Lorren Buck
Core Consultant / Trainer
Rev. Lorren Z. Buck, MDiv. is a sexual liberation theologian whose healing activism reflects her bold sentiments that the Creator desires people to experience pleasure and healing from the legacy of sexual violence and repressive ecclesial pedagogy. This to her is a holy act of resistance. Lorren is an embodiment healing practitioner and certified pole instructor. She is living out her pastoral call as a spiritual entrepreneur through her LLC, The Theological Institute for Sexology. There she supports seekers on a pilgrimage towards self-acceptance, sexual exploration and spiritual discovery.
Marissa Metelica
Core Consultant / Trainer
Marissa Metelica is a queer, white racial equity educator and artist. With her background in Applied Theatre, Marissa weaves body-centered learning and healing into all of her justice work. Marissa strives to welcome the shadow and centralize the most marginalized narratives in order to heal and grow into our highest capacity for grace and equity. Her work in theatre for peacebuilding and reconciliation has taken her to Rwanda, Uganda, and Northern Ireland. Marissa is the founder of Equity Allies and serves on the Board of the Kirkridge Retreat and Study Center.
Arleen Peterson
Core Consultant / Trainer
Arleen is a nonprofit leader and community organizer with over 20 years of experience. She is the president and founder of ENZI and Associates, and currently serves as executive director of relational services for the Poor Handmaids of Jesus Christ/Ancilla Domini Sisters Inc. Arleen continues to dedicate her life’s passion and commitment to philanthropic causes that support the most vulnerable in our communities.