Trainings | Workshops

Trainings and Workshops – Overview

I am excited to offer trainings and workshops designed specifically with the goal of maximizing socially-conscious inter-personal, professional, and community growth and wellness. All trainings are offered from a foundation of healing-centered engagement and are oppression and trauma-informed.

Dear Lovely Humans:

There’s been a lot going on recently: international uprisings due to the murder of George Floyd and long-time racial injustices, increasing economic inequities, an insurrection at the Washington D.C. Capitol, and (as of this writing) the USA is expected to have over 570,000 COVID-19 deaths by April 2021. Simultaneously, on the positive side, we start 2021 with an expanse in progressive grass-roots coalition-building, an increase in conversations, trainings, and actions related to systemic racial and economic injustices, and national elections that resulted in a humane, just, and inclusive shift in the perspectives of Congress, and the Office of the President. 

At times, our current social-political climate can leave us feeling frightened, hopeless, triggered, fatigued, cynical, and isolated.

It has also galvanized and inspired connection, resistance, and action in thousands of people across the country and around the globe.

Being socially conscious people, we have a drive and dedication to try to be the best versions of ourselves that we can be and to be active participants in making our world more just. 

An essential ingredient to keepin’ on with making personal and community change is meaningful healthy connection – with ourselves and with like-minded others.

I do offer trainings and workshops that help us engage with ourselves, and with each other. My trainings are not limited to learning facts and concepts. Whether the topics are about compassion fatigue or unlearning racism, my trainings “get real,” are reflective, interactive, and personal. Participants leave with meaningful action steps and strategies.

Please continue to be the strong, self-aware, and compassionate humans that you are. Be active, take breaks, make joy. Then, get back out there.

It takes us all…one at a time. 

Take good care,
Irene

Overview

Designing and presenting workshops, lectures, and trainings are some of the most satisfying and gratifying parts of the work that I do. Over the past thirty years, I have given hundreds of presentations. I offer workshops and Community Education Unit (CEU) trainings to mental health, social service and medical providers, educators, non-profit agencies, social justice, and community groups. 

I have a casual, relaxed, fun, personable, down-to-earth style, and am known to be organized, thorough, and well informed. When I present, I am cognoscente and inclusive of issues related to privilege, justice, oppression, access, race, class, ability, sexual and gender minorities, diverse family configurations, misogyny, transmisogyny, cissexism, and heterosexism. I incorporate these themes into each presentation. 

All of my workshops are three-pronged: (1) information-sharing, (2) interacting, and (3) developing personal takeaway action plans and strategies. Through discussion, lectures, and activities, participants will learn and share information about the topic, each other, and themselves. Additionally, everyone will leave with practical strategies and action steps to incorporate their learning into their daily personal and professional lives.

Training and consultation topics include:

• white-body privilege and working to be an active anti-racist ally for white helping professionals;
• workplace stress, burnout, and resiliency;
• COVID-19 workplace self-care and wellness;
• vicarious trauma, oppression fatigue, moral injury, compassion fatigue, and burnout for helping professionals; and political trauma stress.

Anti-Racism Trainings for White Helpers and Helping Organizations

These trainings can be tailored to your organization.

For White LGBTQPAI+ Helping Professionals: Facing Our Whiteness, Unlearning Racism, and Decolonizing Mental Health  Fee: Donate what you can to a BIPOC organization: 20-hour weekend intensive training: Friday, March 12, 2020 (noon – 5p), Saturday, March 13 (9-5p), and Sunday, March 14 (10-530p) CST. Followed by an optional 10-week White Affinity and Accountability Group. FULL.  Similar trainings to be scheduled for late summer 2021. I do offer a similar version of this training that is open to people of all genders and sexual identities.

These trainings are intended to be uncomfortable. You will be challenged. You will be asked to stretch outside of your white comfort zone, and to face and examine your (our) white entitlement, defensiveness, shame, guilt, and rage.

• Pre-training Personal Race Assessment: Each participant is required to take this 40-minute pre-training written assessment which will explore your racial beliefs, judgments, bias’, stereotypes, and knowledge (developed by Irene). We will use this assessment to inform our discussions.

The agenda of this training includes:

• Firmly, honestly, humbly, and compassionately challenge, and be challenged, by the other members of the training group
• Increase your racial literacy
• Explore the insidious and comprehensive nature of patriarchal, capitalistic white supremacy, and identify how it exists inside of your body, mind, and heart.

• Face your “white savior” and entitlement, especially as it relates to your work as helping professionals
• Identify how racism and white supremacy hurt us, and share strategies to heal our moral injury, and reintegrate our bodies, minds, and hearts
• Explore how our personal and professional values can fortify our anti-racism work

• Role-play personal and professional scenarios that challenge our white-body privilege, conscious and unconscious biases, and white discomfort with conflict
• Imagine the wonder, health, wellness, and joy of a truly liberated multi-cultural community and world
• Develop our gained anti-racist perspectives into meaningful anti-racist professional and personal practices

Go here, for more specific information about the anti-racism trainings Irene is currently offering.

Compassion Fatigue, Burnout, and Moral Injury

Beyond Self-Care & Work-Life Balance: Compassion Fatigue, Burnout, and Moral Injury for Socially Conscious Helping ProfessionalsMarch 2021: 830am-2p on Zoom

The following topics can be tailored to your group or organization:

Self-care, Vicarious Trauma, Burnout, Trauma, and Compassion Fatigue for Helping Professionals and Workplaces: 

When Our Personal Trauma and Oppression Fatigue Come to Work: Increasing Our Professional Self-Care and Workplace Dynamics to Reduce Burnout, Political Trauma Stress, Secondary Trauma, and Moral Injury (PDF)

Example of Compassion Fatigue and Self-Care of Helping Professionals Training (PDF)

Our Trauma and Oppression for Social Justice Organizers: Training (PDF)

Workplace Stress, Resiliency, and Burnout during COVID-19 

• • COVID-19 Self-Care for Helping Professionals, Medical Workers, and Community Organizers
  • Organizational Resiliency & Wellness – COVID-19 (PDF) 
  • Self-Care, Wellness & Resiliency: Helping Professionals’ Online Wellness Groups (archived training outline)
  • Self-Care During COVID-19 and Beyond: General Issues Psycho-educational Groups
  • Use Your Words and Colors: A COVID-19 Resiliency & Trauma-Informed Creative Expression Support Group for LGBTQAI+ Health and Wellness Professionals. (Archived description)

Examples of Past Trainings:

These can be modified for your organization

Political Trauma Stress: Turn Anxiety and Fear into Resiliency and Resistance (archived outline)

LGBTQ+ Relationship Workshop: Connection and Communication Through Differentiation (archived outline) Minneapolis

Mental Health and Social Service Professionals: Self-Care During COVID-19 and Beyond (archived description): These online Psycho-Educational Coaching & Wellness Groups run in 5-weeks rotations. Up to 18 people per group. (Up to 7.5 CEUs are available with your board’s approval.) No one is turned away for inability to pay. Grounded in healing-centered engagement, and oppression and trauma-informed.