[image description: a flyer reading “calling all social workers, energy & body workers, counselors, physicians, wellness educators, doctors, sex liberators, therapists & other diverse healers: Join the YES! wellness jam to nourish yourself & contribute to the innovation of our collective healing; Friday, 10/23 – Wednesday, 10/28 via Zoom with this page URL; the background of the flyer is beige and in the center is a ring of ten hands of various skin tones intertwined with a green, leafy vine. the center of the circle of vines and hands is golden and contains the title of the jam “Wellness & Healing Justice Jam!” in all caps. art by Chetna Mehta.]
Calling social workers, therapists, body and energy workers, mental health professionals, counselors, wellness educators, sex liberators, physicians, doctors, and other diverse healers to the 3rd annual Wellness and Healing Justice Jam — a gathering for people working at the intersections of healing arts, community building, and personal and systemic transformation. We’ll come together to share our challenges and breakthroughs in our work; nurture ourselves; support and inspire each other; explore our identities as practitioners, healers, and whole people; figure out ways to be more sustainable; find intersections for future collaborations; build a more resilient community and network; and much more!
In the midst of the global pandemic and global uprisings for racial justice, there seems to be an ever-deeper calling and need for wellness and healing justice work. The desire for community and connection is real, and we are rising to the occasion, remembering that we are the ones we have been waiting for.
We invite you to our first-ever Zoomy Wellness & Healing Justice JAM. We are excited to be gathering virtually with a community of healers from all around the world as we grapple with questions around what wellness, healing, and justice can look like in our current world and within our communities.
The Zoomy Jam will take places from Friday, October 23, to Wednesday, October 28, with five sessions held on October 23, 24, 26, 27, 28 (no session on Sunday, October 25), from 2 pm to 4/4:30 pm PST / 5 pm to 7/7:30 pm EST. Sessions will be two hours long with an optional 30 minute hangout afterward, and we recommend you set-aside the entire 2.5 hours as well as scheduling as little as possible over the duration of the Jam days, to really take in the full experience and engage in spontaneous, organic offerings with other members of the community.
For alumni of the Wellness & Healing Justice Jams 2018 or 2019, here is a special application for you!
Priority deadline for all applications: September 18, 2020
Final deadline for all applications: October 2, 2020
What is a Jam?
In music, a jam is a creative, live gathering of musicians who together, spontaneously create a new sound. Similar to that, YES! Jams are places where diverse leaders and visionaries bring together their passions, openness, and unique perspectives. In spontaneous connection, we weave layers of experience, wisdom, heart, and spirit to create some real magic. The Jam asks that all the players are present and ready to listen deeply to each other.
YES! Jams have been happening since 1999. YES! collaborates with other like-hearted peers around the world to co-create Jams where diverse visionaries and social changemakers combine their inspirations and skills to create something greater than the sum of their parts. To date, more than 150 Jams have been held on six continents, bringing together young and intergenerational leaders from more than 80+ nations.
The Jam is not a conference, seminar, or a typical meeting — it is something unique. It is dedicated time at a beautiful retreat center to think and feel deeply about transformation in this field, in our world, in our communities, and in ourselves. There are in-depth conversations and there is a lot of fun, art, and creativity. There is dancing and embodiment, group explorations, and co-creations, as well as solo time and internal reflection.
The Jam works on 3 three levels:
- On the personal level, we enter into an open space to reflect on our life journeys and what makes us who we are today. Here, we have an opportunity to deepen our purpose, ask meaningful questions, eat nourishing food, unlearn our fears and blocks, access our hearts, and open our minds to move more boldly in the world.
- On the interpersonal level, we come together to share our cultures, our creativity, our collaborative spirits, our stories, and our struggles across similarities and differences so we can deepen in our understanding of and connection to each other. We practice slowing down as we learn to re-humanize both ourselves and each other.
- On the systemic level, we become clearer about the importance of our work in the world and its potential for even deeper and more meaningful impact.
Every Jam is an open space where the gifts and needs of the people who show up can emerge. For the Wellness and Healing Justice Jam, we anticipate exploring and deepening into these questions:
- How did I come to be a practitioner in this field?
- What does healing mean to me?
- How do we work with and/or through existing institutions, especially if they don’t align with our values all the time or they have harmed or perpetuate harm?
- How are we to be sustainable and valued in the field?
- How do we collaborate as healers/practitioners across mediums, modalities, identities, and issues or work focuses? How do we create an enduring support network of people using their healing passions for social change?
- How do we reclaim wellness and healing justice as a generative movement, especially at this moment in history?
- How do we manage burnout and vicarious trauma — individually, collectively, and intergenerationally?
- How can we co-create different and visionary systems of care, locally and beyond? How can we create spaces that welcome and honor our full complex humanity in transformative and generative ways?
What questions are you bringing to the Jam? Your questions are ALL welcome.
Who is this Jam for?
Because we seek to bring together as diverse a group of healers and practitioners as possible, we are looking for a range in:
- Healing modalities (micro, macro, western, traditional, emerging and ancestral)
- Years of experience (from ‘a couple years into the journey’ to ‘been at it for a good part of your life’);
- Issues or work focuses (i.e., community, intergenerational, family, cross-cultural, holistic, social justice, mental health, etc.)
- Identities and worldviews (i.e., class, ethnicity, race, disability, religion, culture, gender, sexuality, age)
- Work with clients and community populations (i.e., single mothers, elderly, folks experiencing homelessness, incarcerated youth/adults, macro-level systems change, etc.)
When and how much is the Wellness and Healing Justice Jam?
The Zoomy Jam will take places from Friday, October 23, to Wednesday, October 28, with five sessions held on October 23, 24, 26, 27, 28 (no session on Sunday, October 25), from 2 pm to 4/4:30 pm PST / 5 pm to 7/7:30 pm EST. Sessions will be two hours long with an optional 30 minute hangout afterward. We recommend you set-aside the entire 2.5 hours as well as scheduling as little as possible over the duration of the Jam days, to really take in the full experience and engage in spontaneous, organic offerings with other members of the community. We ask that you participate in all the sessions from a computer with a steady wifi connection and that has a camera that you can keep on during the Jam.
Tuition to participate in the Jam is offered on a sliding scale of $50 – $250 to support organizing time and honorarium for facilitators. We invite you to give what you can and to give generously. Any surplus over $250 supports partial scholarships for other participants and that extra amount is tax-deductible.
Money should never be a reason to not apply: partial scholarships are available on a limited and first-come, first-serve basis. We also invite work trades and monthly payment plans. We aim to figure out with each applicant the right combination of tuition, work trade, and scholarship that can work for you. The sooner you apply, the sooner we can mutually create a plan that works and the better your chances are of receiving a partial scholarship if you need one.
For alumni of the Wellness & Healing Justice Jams 2018 or 2019, here is a special application for you!
Priority deadline for all applications: September 18, 2020
Final deadline for all applications: October 2, 2020
Who is behind the Zoomy Wellness and Healing Justice Jam?
We are lucky to have an amazing team of organizers and facilitators for the Wellness and Healing Justice Jam:
Hyoyoung Minna Kim has found herself back in her home-state of Maryland, after teaching in elementary public schools for six years, in New York City. She has also worked with youth and young adults in other capacities, such as facilitating yoga and mindfulness experiences for teenagers and inquiries of social justice in an undergraduate business course. During her last year in a social work graduate program, she has explored avenues to bridge partnerships with immigrant merchants and residents of disinvested, predominantly Black communities of Baltimore City. Recently, she has initiated an exploration of collective care. She is big believer of radical honesty, body-wisdom, community-driven initiatives, and children’s literature. Last but not least, Minna started getting her Jam on at the 2017 Education Transformation Jam and has since been a part of the planning team for the Wellness and Healing Justice Jam and the Asian Jam – she can’t stop, won’t stop!
Lillian Hanan Al-Bilali has been inspired to deepen her understanding of how diverse communities can become more interconnected and, particularly, how shared experiences create space for dialogue — ever since she participated in the 2010 Leveraging Privilege for Social Change Jam. Since her college years, one of her most consistent passions has been issues of youth empowerment. Her student activism at Hampton University focused on societal inequalities especially in regards to substandard education and high incarceration rates for youth of color. Following graduation, Hanan became an administrator at Children’s Arts and Science Workshops (CASW), a non-profit agency in New York City. Here, she mentored young people from the Washington Heights and Harlem communities by preparing them for college and for the work force. Currently living in New York City, Hanan received her Masters in Social Work from the University of Michigan. Her concentration in Social Policy and Evaluations allowed her to focus on strengthening services offered through the non-profit sector at the state and local levels. She continues to make people her priority as a committed collaborator with organizations and initiatives that support underrepresented communities.
Chetna Mehta is a folk mixed media mystic, founder of mosaiceye, and creative wellness consultant originally from South Africa. She is impassioned by merging psychological education with spirituality and the arts; her purpose is to invite more awareness of our interconnection- with one another, mother earth, and beyond any ideology- through radical self-reflection. With a devotion to artistic expression and a master’s in counseling psychology from the Wright Institute in Berkeley, she’s creating spaces for communities around the country to explore and create their own healing. Her intentions for this Jam are to cultivate conscious community, deepen into compassion, and find clarified purpose in our collective work within the fields of health and wellness.
Roan Coughtry is a writer, facilitator, and healing artist based out of Atlanta, GA. With a background in healing justice, sexual liberation and community organizing, they’re passionate about kindling truly interdisciplinary approaches to liberation. With over 10 years as a queer & trans sex educator, they center the importance of desire, pleasure and reclaimation of the body as liberatory practices. They’re a co-founder of the national Sexual Liberation Collective, and they’ve helped produce conferences such as Sex Down South, Facing Race and Money for Our Movements. Since 2011 they’ve served as a gender and sexuality consultant for the UN, specializing in violence prevention and queering language (also known as “editing”). Roan is most enlivened when they’re co-conspiring with folks to weave together threads of decoloniality, ancestral healing practices, re-embodiment and liberation. They facilitate conversations around the country on gender, race, sexuality, spirituality and violence prevention, and they also provide coaching and healing sessions for clients. You can find out more about their work at www.roancoughtry.com.
Sky Yardeni is a Social Worker, Wilderness Therapist, and Clinical Mental Health Counselor originally from Israel. Sky works with individuals, families, and groups with backgrounds of grief, trauma, addictions, incarceration, systemic marginalization, and mental health in outdoor settings on a daily basis, and approaches his work with an open heart to facilitate healing and change. His passion lies at the intersection of nature, healing, and social justice. Sky is a climber and adventurer at heart and is passionate about being a part of beloved community.
Gert Comfrey does healing labor and facilitation at the intersection of psychotherapy, spiritual care, and anti-oppression activism. They are deeply committed to liberation movements, to consciousness-raising, power-generating practices, and to the healing spirit of abolition. These commitments are present in their work as a licensed therapist, where they serve individuals, couples, families, groups, and organizations in Nashville, TN. Gert offers trainings to health care practitioners, therapy interns, and students about best practices when working with queer folx. They also spend time in radical spaces exploring the ways we can organize well, bringing our whole selves to the movement. They are passionate about community care, community-based decision-making processes, and community visioning.
Yoo-Jin Kang is a DREAMer advocate based in the DMV. She currently works in collegiate recovery and substance abuse prevention with college-age students. Her background is in trauma-informed care, gender-based violence prevention, and creating spaces and communities for radical self-care and healing. Yoo-Jin is currently a staff member and part-time graduate student at American University where she is centering students’ of color experiences in a private, white dominant institution. Outside of work Yoo-Jin likes to take photographs, travel, dance, and meet a lot of new people on public transit. Community can be found everywhere, she is learning.
Shilpa Jain is currently rooting herself in Oakland/Berkeley, CA, where she serves as the Executive Director of YES!. YES! works with social changemakers at the meeting point of internal, interpersonal and systemic change, and aims to co-create thriving, just and balanced ways of life for all. Prior to taking on this role, Shilpa spent two years as the Education and Outreach Coordinator of Other Worlds and ten years as a learning activist with Shikshantar: The Peoples’ Institute for Rethinking Education and Development, based in Udaipur, India. Shilpa has researched and written numerous books and articles, and facilitated hundreds of Jams, workshops and gatherings in over a dozen countries and on topics including creative expressions, ecology, new economies, and innovative learning and unlearning. She is also co-author of “Connect. Inspire. Collaborate”, a highly sought-after facilitation manual. Shilpa has been using tools like self-awareness, listening, appreciative inquiry, speaking from the heart, eye contact, breathing, and more, to support individuals and communities in reclaiming their own healing powers.
Please reach out to us with any questions at <healingjusticejam[at]gmail.com>
We are looking forward to Jamming with you soon!
Chetna, Gert, Hanan, Minna, Roan, Shilpa, Sky, Yoo-Jin