10th Annual Summer Intensive and Anniversary Celebration

About Our Work

At Courage of Care, we focus on building communities and cultures of compassionate, truth-telling, healing-centered, visionary, and transformative practice as a means of strengthening the relational tissue of our movements for liberation, healing, and justice.

We focus on relational work because we believe the crises of our time are relational crises that require not only relational solutions, but the ability for us to build meaningful solidarity across sectors, issues, identities, and geographies.

About the Intensive

Our annual summer intensive offers participants an engaging, grounding, and restorative dive into our relational framework, CourageRISE. This event is designed to welcome new folks to our community and approach, while also offering returning kin an opportunity to deepen their practice and our collective ties.

Join us for the two-day intensive and Saturday evening celebration! (There is an option for folks to Zoom into the opening part of our celebration on Saturday, July 12th!)

Registration by April 11th is most helpful for our planning process!

Who This Training is For

This year's two-day intensive is focused on themes of pluriversal practice. The event builds upon our new collaboration with The Arrow Journal, and its forthcoming 2025 issue on this theme.

We have found this training particularly helpful for folks committed to healing, justice, and liberation, including trainers, mediators, DEI professionals, community organizers, educators, creatives, NGO leaders, coaches, and healers. We welcome and encourage folks interested in this work and committed to meaningful community building and solidarity to join us, even if you do not formally work in this arena. This work requires many of us, and we all play a role in shaping the culture of our communities, organizations, and movements.

About the Intensive

The program meets IN PERSON from 10am-4pm EST / 2p-8p UTC on Friday and Saturday, July 11th and 12th. The special anniversary celebration will begin on site at 6pm on Saturday, July 12th, after a break and reset. Your ticket to the celebration is included in your registration. We are also offering an online-option for the anniversary celebration only at this time.

Through contemplative and somatic practice, reflection, story, movement and art, we’ll learn tools and practices to help resource us in our lives, our relationships and our work. Specifically, we'll:

• deepen our capacity for compassion, connection, and confrontation;
• sharpen our ability to "catch" cultural frames that shape our embodied experience;
• practice loosening the grip of conditioned frames, shifting frames, and embodying complexity;
• sense what other ways of seeing and relating are possible in plurviersal practice
• recalibrate and recommit to practices that support our relational connectedness and solidarity.

Our Agenda

Day 1: Friday, July 11th, 2025 | 10-4pm Eastern

10:00-10:30

Setting the Relational Field: Welcome, Orientation, and Introductions

10:30-12:30

Courage: Connection and Confrontation: Towards Solidarity in the Pluriverse

12:30-1:30

Lunch with Contemplative Reflection

1:30-3:30

Reveal Truths: Catching the "One-World-Worlding" in our Bodies, Communities, and Movements

3:45-4:00

Practice & Ritual Closing

Day 2: Saturday, July 12th, 2025 | 10-4pm Eastern

10:00-10:30

Contemplative Practice

10:30-11:30

Invest in Healing: Frame Sensing and Shifting

11:30-12:30

Sense Alternatives: Embracing Complexity and Multiplicity

12:30-1:30

Lunch

1:30-2:30

Sense Alternatives: Collective Imagination and Pluriversal Possibility

2:30-2:45

Break

2:45-3:45

Embody Beloved Community: On Recalibration and Commitments to Solidarity and Freedom

3:45-4:00

Closing & Commitments

Saturday, July 12th, 2025 | 6-9pm Eastern

Join us for an evening of heart-warming story-telling, kin-making, toasting, and dancing.

Registration for the summer intensive includes one ticket to the event, also held at our community house.

If you cannot attend the summer intensive but would like to join the event, you may register for the celebration only.

About Your Hosts

The weekend will be led by a team of facilitators from the Courage of Care Coalition - a global community of social justice activists, contemplative practitioners, educators, health and social service professionals, committed to co-creating a more loving, just and liberated world.

Maha El-Sheikh (she/her) brings her experience in international humanitarian work with studying and teaching trauma-informed yoga, somatics, and meditation to explore the interconnection of healing, social transformation, and justice. She is the Co-Director at Courage of Care Coalition, and partners with leaders in economic, racial, gender and climate justice movements to reimagine the world through compassion-centered, counter-oppressive, liberatory frameworks.

Brooke D. Lavelle, Ph.D. (she/her) is the co-founder of Courage of Care. She holds a Ph.D. in Buddhism and Embodied Cognition, and is committed to ways in which individuals and communities develop cultures of practice that support love, health and liberation. Brooke has consulted to various human rights, education and spiritual organizations, and has experience leading national and international political, educational and climate justice projects. Through her work at Courage, Brooke understands the challenges of trying to build alternatives to the status quo, and remains steadfastly convinced that another way is possible.