Co-Created Services > Affinity & Healing Circles

Every conversation is an opportunity for understanding.

Radical Optimist designs and facilitates affinity and healing circles to create safe spaces for tough conversations that are structured to challenge particpants’ thinking while providing an opportunity to share openly and honestly. This method of constructive group learning is driven by a commitment to acquiring knowledge, a willingness to be vulnerable and accountable, and a desire to consider new ideas and perspectives.

BIPOC Healing Circles

This is a sacred space for Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) to collectively grieve, process, and express emotion surrounding the impact of racism and white dominant culture. The Circle is centered on the practices and experiences of people of color and is a space where said experiences will be recognized and honored. The Circle is not a space to discuss education or action. Instead, our focus is solely on expression and healing.

Ready to start a BIPOC group? Contact us to get started.

Seeing Whiteness for Anti-Racist Action

This short-term series is skill-building for White people, so most participants identify as White or white-passing. This is a space where white people practice noticing, naming, and disrupting racism within themselves and the world. This is a space for building stamina and honesty to engage in anti-racist choices more of the time. We encourage a weekly practice of listening to Black voices and experiencing Black spaces.

Interested in being part of a Seeing Whiteness group? We are here to help!

Through dialogue and discovery in a supportive environment, participants find commonality and learn to develop tools to affect change in themselves and others. To customize a group or conversation for your team, reach out to us below.

Mindful Moment

Let's Talk

Every relationship starts with a conversation.

"*" indicates required fields

Co-Created Services > Affinity & Healing Circles

Every conversation is an opportunity for understanding.

BIPOC Healing Circles

Seeing Whiteness for Anti-Racist Action

Through dialogue and discovery in a supportive environment, participants find commonality and learn to develop tools to affect change in themselves and others. To customize a group or conversation for your team, reach out to us below.

“People are opting out of vital conversations about diversity and inclusivity because they fear looking wrong, or being wrong. Choosing our own comfort over hard conversations is the epitome of privilege, and corrodes trust, and moves us away from meaningful and lasting change.”

“No one who has ever touched liberation could possibly want anything other than liberation for everyone.”

“Prejudice is a burden that confuses the past, threatens the future, and renders the present inaccessible.”

“Ours is not the struggle of one day, one week, or one year. Ours is not the struggle of one judicial appointment or presidential term. Ours is the struggle of a lifetime, or maybe even many lifetimes, and each one of us in every generation must do our part.”

“The beauty of anti-racism is that you don’t have to pretend to be free of racism to be anti-racist. Anti-racism is the commitment to fight racism wherever you find it, including in yourself. And it’s the only way forward.”

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

“The most addictive drug known to America. Racism. It causes wealth, an inflated sense of self, and hallucinations.”

“Humanity is not without answers or solutions regarding how to liberate itself from scenarios that invariably end with mass exterminations. Tools such as compassion, trust, empathy, love, and ethical discernment are already in our possession. The next sensible step would be to use them.”

“A real apology requires some labor.”

“We can’t meaningfully proceed with healing, with restoration, without ‘re-story-action.’ In other words, our relationship with the land cannot heal until we hear its stories. But who will tell them?”

“If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

Every relationship starts with a conversation.