My Grandmother’s Hands
Facilitated Study Groups
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Organized & Facilitated by:
Sister Sankofa, Abbi Jaffe, Amanda Franz, Hazel Turrone Dates: Many groups offered every year since 2019. Featuring: My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies by Resmaa Menakem, MSW, LICSW, SEP Welcome to a learning community. We have collectively facilitated 16 study groups and are heading into this 5th year ready to begin again, share from our experiences, and keep learning and growing with you. Reading this book with others, in a container supported by experienced politized somatic educators, helps create new pathways that can only be forged together. Invite your family, friends, neighbors, legislators, fellow board members and co-workers to do this work with you. |
Dismantling the systemic oppression of racism requires collective actions.
These study groups are a potent opportunity to deconstruct white supremacy from the inside out and work towards co-creating embodied liberation. The study groups are not just about unlearning racism. The study groups are about uncovering the ways that white supremacy continues to live in bodies and to do the collective work to support necessary changes. Join together in practice. 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 Study Groups offers steps to embody vitally important change. |
Meet the Organizers / Facilitators:
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Sister Sankofa (she/her)
Sister Sankofa is a small business visionary, creator, and owner of SD Communications and Marketing Consulting Group LLC. She is also the one of the Assistant Directors of CROs (Community Resilience Organizations). Her innovative business venture offers social justice programs, small business consulting, networking events, event facilitation and creation, and talent promotion to conscious-minded businesses, organizations, and artists in Vermont and beyond. Sister Sankofa is committed to increasing equity opportunities toward BIPOC homeownership while helping people heal their financial trauma. She produces financial liberation programs and is the creator of the Money Matters: Financial Liberation and Wellness series, for which she was awarded “2023 Innovator of the Year” by the Central Vermont Economic Development Corporation. She is also active with An Economy of Our Own as a collaborator and program presenter. As a changemaker, reparations activist, equity strategist, and BIPOC community advocate, Sister Sankofa facilitates and co-organizes the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, & People of Color) groups for The Everything Space's My Grandmother’s Hands Study Groups. She is a teaching assistant for The Everything Space’s Growing Resilience: Being Trauma Informed course. Sister Sankofa curates BIPOC affinity spaces throughout Vermont and is the founder of the Central Vermont BIPOC Advisory Group. Sister Sankofa is active in both the Vermont Professionals of Color Network and the Vermont ReLeaf Collective, serves on the Hunger Mountain Coop JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion) Committee and the Center for Crime Victim Services Advisory Council. Originally from Hartford, Connecticut, Sister Sankofa came to Vermont in 2017, bringing with her over 15 years of experience in the banking and insurance industry. Her background in financial services and relating to people from diverse cultures and social-economic backgrounds brings highly transferable skills and perspective to her current endeavors. Sister Sankofa studied communication science at the University of Connecticut and is a courageous experiential learner through her willingness to both advocate for justice and to heal from historical, intergenerational, persistent institutional, and personal trauma. Her combined career expertise and her personal journey of financial and racial healing is the inspiration behind her passion and dedication to healing and social justice as both a practicing manifester and small business consultant. Sister Sankofa loves animals and connecting with people from all walks of life. She enjoys Sun and Moon gazing as well as pet sitting. A community singer and actress, Sister Sankofa loves singing gospel, funk, and jazz. She also performs with the Montpelier Community Gospel Choir and Lost Nation Theater. A natural networker and web weaver, she prioritizes bringing people together through the power of love, song, word, and healing. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
Thank You to Our Sponsors:
This study group series is supported by North Branch Nature Center.
Many of these study groups past and present occur at North Branch Nature Center. Thank you North Branch Nature Center for the generous donation of your beautiful indoor and outdoor classrooms for this vitally important work. Please consider joining them as a member. Learn more here
Many of these study groups past and present occur at North Branch Nature Center. Thank you North Branch Nature Center for the generous donation of your beautiful indoor and outdoor classrooms for this vitally important work. Please consider joining them as a member. Learn more here
Quote:
“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
Testimonial:
"The information and guidance Resmee Menakem shares in My Grandmother's Hands is hugely relevant to our collective moment- a paradigm shift on how we approach racial justice and the social/cultural/personal/ancestral healing we all so deeply need in our hearts, communities and bodies.
Abbi Jaffe embodied the ethos of this movement with utmost care as she led our study group, modeling careful listening, gentle presence and deep commitment to this work. I've learned so much from her and hope to continue.
The group provides an intimate space to do the tender work of being with our own discomfort and learn from our body's wisdom, while in connection with a consistent support network, so that we may slowly discover how to show up in a gentler way on this earth. The experience deepened my sense of belonging to the human experience in all its complexity, wonder and grief.
Some weeks I felt overwhelmed trying to make it to the group, but once I sat down on the land and was offered space to calm my body, I recognized it was a very wise choice to have made it. Honestly I'd love to do the study group again!" ~K, 2022 participant
Ancestor Potluck:
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Many groups end with a potluck where folks bring a food item their ancestors (if known) would have appreciated eating. Pictured to the left is a potluck one group shared. The stories about the foods and the ancestors they were connected to were as nourishing as the food. |
