My Grandmother’s Hands
8-Week Facilitated Study Groups
Groups offered for BIPOC Folks and for White Folks
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Summer 2022, Many groups forming, Specific dates below
Organized by: Shanda Williams, Abbi Jaffe and Kim Pierce Facilitated by: Opeyemi Parham, Abbi Jaffe, Amanda Franz or Hazel Turrone Location: North Branch Nature Center or Hubbard Park Featuring: My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem, MSW, LICSW, SEP Join together to engage deeply with Resmaa Menakem’s potent book My Grandmother’s Hands. Experienced facilitators will guide important conversations and somatic practices. To dismantle racism we must collectively address the racial trauma held in our individual and collective bodies. Learn how all bodies are impacted by the collective trauma of racism, though each body is impacted differently and disproportionately. My Grandmother’s Hands offers steps to embody vitally important change. This facilitated study group will offer a container to do this necessary work. Many of these study groups will occur at North Branch Nature Center. Thank you North Branch Nature Center for the generous donation of your beautiful outdoor classroom for this vitally important work. Please consider joining them as a member. Learn more here. Covid-19 Expectations: The study groups for white folks will occur in-person, outside and physically distanced, with 12 people maximum per group. Everyone is required to wear a mask at all times 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. The study group for BIPOC folks will occur indoors in the Fall. We will provide covid expectations soon. |
Study Groups for Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) Folks:
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BIPOC Facilitator: Opeyemi Parham
Sunday nights from 4:30-6pm Sept 11-Nov 6, back up date Nov 13, *not meeting on Oct 9 8 Week Series *Childcare may be available. Please inquire with Abbi. Location: North Branch Nature Center, indoors Cost: free (The cost is being covered by gifts of reparations from the participants in the study groups for white folks and from a grant from the Montpelier Community Gospel Choir.)
Absentee policy:
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BIPOC Group: Sept 11-Nov 6
Pre-registration required by Aug 28th. We will notify you of your enrollment status by Aug 31st. We hope to accept all that apply. Questions? Please contact Abbi Jaffe with any questions. Abbi is a facilitator for the study groups for white folks and is a main organizer of this project. abbi.jaffe@gmail.com Email is best or text/phone call at 802-318-3927. She can also get you in touch with Opeyemi if needed. HOMEWORK for first group meeting: Read through page 36 in My Grandmother’s Hands. Please also listen to this podcast of Resmaa Menakem. |
Study Groups for White Folks:
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White Facilitators: Abbi Jaffe, Amanda Franz, Hazel Turrone
8 Week Series Session 1 Monday Evenings: Monday nights 6-7:30pm June 6-Aug 1, backup date Aug 8 Off: July 4 Location: North Branch Nature Center Facilitator: Abbi Jaffe Session 1 Tuesday Afternoons: Tuesdays 1-2:30pm May 17-July 12, backup date July 19 Off July 5 Location: Hubbard Park Facilitator: Amanda Franz Session 1 Tuesday Evenings: May 24-July 19, backup date July 26 Off July 5 Location: North Branch Nature Center Facilitator: Abbi Jaffe or Hazel Turrone Session 2 Tuesday Afternoons: Tuesdays 1-2:30pm Aug 30-Oct 25, back up Nov 1st Off Sept 6 Location: Hubbard Park Facilitator: Amanda Franz Session 2 Tuesday Evenings: Tuesdays 6-7:30pm, October dates will meet 5:30-7pm Aug 30-Oct 18, back up Oct 25 Location: North Branch Nature Center Facilitator: Abbi Jaffe or Hazel Turrone Registration Info:
Cost: Sliding scale $100-350
Deposit Required:
Absentee policy:
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Session 1: May-July Pre-registration for Session 1 required by May 31st. We will notify you of your enrollment status on June 1st. Deposit required. Session 2: Aug - Oct Pre-registration for Session 2 required by Aug 22st. This group will run, so please sing up even after the deadline. Questions? Please contact Abbi Jaffe with any questions. Abbi is a facilitator for the study groups for white folks and is a main organizer of this project. abbi.jaffe@gmail.com Email is best or text/phone call at 802-318-3927 HOMEWORK for first group meeting:
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Info about purchasing the book:
- Check the author's website.
- Order from your local bookstore
- Look for the book on INDIE BOUND
- Find the book on Amazon.
Thank you to our partners:
This study group series is supported by:
- The Montpelier Community Gospel Choir
- North Branch Nature Center
- S D Marketing and Communications Consulting Group
- The Vermont Kindness Project
- The Everything Space (Abbi Jaffe and Amanda Franz)
Meet the Facilitators:
Top Left: Opeyemi,
Top Right: Abbi, Bottom Left: Amanda, Bottom Right: Hazel
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Opeyemi Parham
Opeyemi is a family physician who moved from feral to rogue status over her 22 years of conventional doctoring. For the last 16 years she has advocated for health consumers to explore the gaps in their wellness strategies: –adding more sensuality –acknowledging the roles our sexuality and our spirituality can play in health/disease — owning our suicidal/homicidal tendencies (e.g. WAR), She “edu-tains” as a healing artist and an artist, healing, happily retired and living in Montpelier. Abbi Jaffe / AJ (White, she/they pronouns, cis-gendered, queer, Jewish, living on unceded Abenaki land in Montpelier Vermont) Abbi is a politicized somatic movement educator/therapist, social worker, community builder and embodiment activist. 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 (White, she/they pronouns, cis-gendered 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 (White, she/they pronouns, 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. |
“The first self-help book to examine white-body supremacy in America from the perspective of trauma and body-centered psychology. The body is where our instincts reside and where we fight, flee, or freeze.
My Grandmother’s Hands is a call to action for Americans to recognize that racism is not only about the head, but also about the body.
Menakem introduces an alternate view of what we can do to grow beyond our entrenched racialized divide and takes readers through a step-by-step healing process based on the latest neuroscience and somatic healing practices. "
- Resmaa Menakem, MSW, LICSW, SEP, from My Grandmother's Hands
My Grandmother’s Hands is a call to action for Americans to recognize that racism is not only about the head, but also about the body.
Menakem introduces an alternate view of what we can do to grow beyond our entrenched racialized divide and takes readers through a step-by-step healing process based on the latest neuroscience and somatic healing practices. "
- Resmaa Menakem, MSW, LICSW, SEP, from My Grandmother's Hands