Study Groups for White Folks:

SUMMER and FALL, Options Below
White Facilitators:  Abbi Jaffe, Amanda Franz, Hazel Turrone 

SUMMER 
June-Aug 2024
Wednesday Evenings 9 WEEK Series
Wednesdays 6-7:30pm
June 5-Aug 14th, no group July 2 or 24th
Location: Hubbard Park 
Facilitator: Amanda Franz

​Registration Info:

  • Pre-registration required by May 28.
  • We will notify you of your enrollment status by May 29th.

FALL 
Oct-Nov 2024
Wednesdays 5:30-7pm 9 WEEK Series
Oct 2nd- Nov 27th
Location:  INDOORS- The Everything Space- 15 State Street #303
Facilitator: Amanda Franz

​Registration Info:

  • Pre-registration required by Sept 18th.
  • We will notify you of your enrollment status by Sept 25th.

More Info:
  • Many optional learning activities and additional reading and podcast assignments are offered throughout the series to support deepening engagement and integration of the material as you are inspired.  ​

Cost: Sliding scale $150-550
  • The cost pays for experienced facilitation and includes a gift of reparations to cover the cost of the Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) My Grandmother's Hands study group and a donation to a Vermont based racial equity cause.  
  • If you are able to pay more on the sliding scale, your fee will support our groups to run, including our scholarship fund.  
  • The Montpelier Community Gospel Choir in the past has offered scholarships for their members.  Let us know if you are in the Gospel Choir.
  • Scholarships may be available.  We want this work to be accessible and will do our best to support your attendance.  No one will be turned away.  Please let us know if you would like a scholarship.
  • Send payment to your facilitator.  Address provided in the registration form.

Absentee policy:
  • We ask that you do your best to attend ALL sessions. 
  • Please email the instructor to let them know if you will be missing a session. 
  • To keep the integrity of the learning container, we ask that you miss no more than two sessions. 
  • If you miss 3 sessions, our policy is to ask you to stop attending the course.  Some exceptions apply.

Info About Purchasing the Book:
Covid-19 Expectations: 
For OUTDOOR Sessions: Theses study groups for white folks will occur in-person, outside and physically distanced (unless consent is personally navigated), with 12 people maximum per group.  Everyone is required to wear a mask when not able to maintain at least 6 feet distance from other people. Do not attend the study group if you are feeling ill in any way or have been exposed to Covid-19. 

For INDOOR Sessions: Theses study groups for white folks will occur in-person, inside and physically distanced (unless consent is personally navigated), with 12 people maximum per group.  Participants agree to a TEST-to-UNMASK policy.  If choosing to not test/unmask, a KN-95 or N-95 mask is required.  An air filter will be running.  Do not attend the study group if you are feeling ill in any way or have been exposed to Covid-19.
​
SUMMER
June-Aug 2024

Pre-registration required by May 28.





​FALL
Sept-Nov 2024

Pre-registration required by Sept 18.
​

​Questions? Please contact the facilitator of the group you are interested in.  Amanda: amandamfranz (at) gmail.com.
​


HOMEWORK for first group meeting:  
  • Read through page 36 in My Grandmother’s Hands.  
  • Please also read White Supremacy Culture for our first meeting
  • ​Optional homework:  Podcast with Resmaa Menakem.

Meet the Organizers / Facilitators:

Abbi Jaffe / AJ  (she/they)
(White, cis-gendered, queer, Jewish, living on unceded Abenaki land in Montpelier Vermont) 

Abbi is a politicized somatic movement educator/therapist, social worker, trauma informed bodyworker and is training as a Real Dialogue Specialist.   Abbi co-runs The Everything Space, a somatics studio dedicated to social and environmental justice in Montpelier Vt.  Abbi stewards Reciprocity: Vermont Embodiment Center in Underhill Vt.  Abbi co-created and co-teaches the professional development course Growing Resilience: Being Trauma Informed.  Abbi is a former Parallel Justice Specialist for Victims of Crime for the City of Burlington.  As a long time wilderness guide, Abbi has been leading people on expeditions in the wilderness and within themselves since 2000.  

Abbi is a certified Somatic Body Practitioner, a certified Somatic Movement Educator/Therapist through ISMETA, and has a Bachelor's of Social Work from the University of Vermont.   Learn more here.  
Amanda Franz (they/she)
(White, cis-passing queer, Germanic and Czech ancestry, living as a renter on unceded Abenaki territory in Vermont)  

Amanda is a politicized somatics educator/therapist, embodiment activist and changemaker working at the intersections of somatics, the trauma informed movement, social justice, environmental justice and cultural co-creation.   They/She is a certified Somatic Body Practitioner and is an  ISMETA certified Somatic Movement Educator/Therapist, as well as a certified Level II Collab trainer and facilitator.   She/They collaboratively run  The Everything Space, a somatic education studio weaving together personal growth and dynamic social change, co-creates/facilitates curriculum on Growing Resilience through being Trauma Informed, and co-leads a collective community Garden Project that reimagines community through tending the non-human Alive and growing food and medicine together.  

Amanda is committed to learning and unlearning the lived and woven places of privilege and oppression, embodied and enacted in each of the sites they hold influence.  Guided by their positionality and through trauma informed/resilience oriented, anti-racist and decolonial practices, Amanda is invested in re-culturing whiteness, redistributing power, and re-centering relationship to address the past and present harms they have perpetuated.  Her work weaves together many revolutionary forms as threads of a deep listening to the self as body in service of the Great Turning.  She holds a BA in Visual Arts from Oberlin College and forever holds the big skies of Missouri (lands of the Osage, Kickapoo, Peoria and Očhéthi Šakówiŋ peoples), the place of her birth, dear to her heart.
Hazel Turrone (she/they)
(White, European descent)

Hazel is a massage therapist in Montpelier VT.  The past 25 years of study of alternative healing has led them to get curious about all that our bodies hold and how to support releasing these layers and reconnecting to who we truly are.  The study of trauma and ancestral healing are significant threads they continue studying and weaving into their practice.  In all the complicatedness of our world and how deeply entrenched the patterns of oppression and disconnection are, how amazing it is that perhaps the most significant work we can do starts right here in the sacredness of our own bodies.


​Contact Us
The Everything Space                15 State Street, 3rd Floor, Suite 303          Montpelier VT 05602       (accessible by elevator)

Unceeded Homeland of the Abenaki People ​