Shaping the Future of Healing Justice

Communities of color and aspiring allies need time to breathe, relax, re-orient themselves with their authentic self, tend to legacies of harm and untreated trauma as well as connect to lineages of resilience. This interactive virtual workshop is designed to provide a community of support where participants may practice techniques to slow down and reconnect to their strength, creativity, and spirit.

Session Objectives:

To provide participants with information about the natural responses to and effects of stress, vicarious trauma, and the various healing modalities used to reduce its impact as a form of sustaining the wellbeing of advocates and those they are of service to.

Panelists:

Maria del Rosario Franco Rahman

Maria del Rosario Franco-Rahman, RYT 200, is sustained by visions of a loving, harmonious world where healing and liberation resound and we all thrive. She is the founder and CEO of Con Todo Corazon where she works locally and nationally offering heart-centered holistic healing services designed to support personal and social transformation. Her work centers the healing and liberation of women of color survivors, advocates, activists and service providers and our fellow communities on the margins. Maria’s healing work includes yoga and Dance from the Heart, an intuitive form of healing body movement. She is a student of cross-cultural healing methods including shamanic apprenticeship. Her fifteen years of service to survivors of gender based violence includes direct service to undocumented domestic violence survivors in her role as the Residential Program Manager at a Latinx culturally-specific transitional shelter, offering holistic healing retreats to survivors and service providers as well as co-authoring “A Holistic Healing Model for Counselors, Advocates and Lawyers Serving Trauma Survivors: Joyful Heart Foundation Retreat” published in Traumatology, 2017 and currently serves as a consultant for Women of Color Network and Women Empiwerment Teaching Artist with Critical Mass Dance Company.  Maria is a Xicana moving through this world honoring her ancestors and the coming generations con todo corazon. 

Zoë Flowers

Zoë Flowers is author, content creator and writer with the Huffington Post. Her poetry and essays can be found in Stand Our Ground; Poems for Trayvon Martin and Marissa Alexander, Dear Sister: Letters from Survivors of Sexual Assault and the new anthology, Love WITH Accountability: Digging Up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse. Her articles and interviews can be found on The Grio, Bloom Magazine, and several online journals.

In 2004, Zoë interviewed women about their experiences with domestic and sexual violence. From Ashes to Angel’s Dust: A Journey Through Womanhood is the book that emerged. ASHES – is a play that breathes life into the original stories chronicled in Zoë’s book and includes new stories about the media, campus sexual assault, body image, and the journey to self-love. ASHES has had many successful performances including; Yale University’s Fearless Conference, The White House’s United State of Women Summit in
2016, National Coalition against Domestic Violence’s National Conference, Smith College and Brown University in 2018.

For the past twenty years, Zoë’s worked at several state domestic violence coalitions and spent the last 8 years at the Women of Color Network where she started as a consultant and transitioned to the Director of Survivor Programs. Zoë also served as a holistic healer at the Joyful Heart Foundation (JHF) which was founded in 2004 by Mariska Hargitay (aka Det. Olivia Benson on Law and Order SVU).

In 2012, Zoë left JHF to launch Soul Requirements, Inc. a healing centered consulting company that combines her artistic endeavors, domestic violence expertise and holistic healing practices. Since then, she’s facilitated individual and group healing sessions, retreats, and workshops from New York to Ecuador. She returned to JHF as a consultant to run the trauma center the organization shepherded after the Newtown school shootings. Months later she joined the organization’s retreat team. The organization’s retreat model and healing techniques conducted by Zoë and hercolleagues were evaluated by Georgetown University and can be found in Traumatology, 23(2), 143–152.

Zoë has appeared on National Public Radio, was the keynote speaker for The Florida Coalition Against Sexual Violence statewide conference, The New York State Coalition Against Domestic Violence, and The Maryland Women of Color Network’s Conference.

In 2019, she presented a workshop entitled, “Utilizing Performance as an Intersectional Response to Violence Against Women in Fez, Morocco and conducted listening sessions in London, UK and Edmonton, CA. She was also the keynote speaker at SUNY Adirondack’s We. Say. No Conference, Delaware’s Victim Service Conference, and returned as keynote for The New York State Coalition Against Domestic Violence
Prevention Summit.

In 2020, she’ll be speaking in front of 4 classes at the University of Florida and will speak and teach 1 class at Skidmore College. This fall, she will be keynote speaker at the National Latin@ Institute in New Orleans, LA, the Victim Justice Symposium on October 5, 2020 in Des Moines Iowa, and for the Oregon Coalition Against Domestic Violence on October 7, 2020.

Registration is closed.

Please check the The Way Forward: Emerging Strategies for Crime Victims of Color resource page for the recording.