Rupture and Repair:

A learning cohort for white people with wealth

Rupture and Repair: A learning cohort for white people with wealth

The Weavers Project is excited to announce our inaugural 2022 cohort of Rupture and Repair: A learning cohort for white people with wealth. This cohort will be in-person and meetings will take place in New Orleans, Louisiana. New Orleans and Louisiana have deep histories of extraction and violence that have benefited white wealthy families across the country for generations. We begin this work as Weavers within our local context, to acknowledge the ruptures in this geography, historically and presently, and ask together, what can we do to create sustainable repair? Rupture and Repair will blend feminist political education, family history research, healing and embodiment work, 1:1 coaching and leadership development. Participants will learn about how racial and gendered capitalism has shaped our world, our families, ourselves, our relationships and our relationships to giving and money, exploring the ways that we have both benefited from and been harmed by systemic injustice. The program is oriented toward increasing participants' capacity to hold these truths and act more powerfully, consistently, and joyfully in alignment with our longing for racial, economic and gender justice.

The Weavers Project is a multidisciplinary feminist organization that bridges arts and culture, movement building, and resource mobilization. We hold these different fields as essential tools for transforming intergenerational harms caused and perpetuated by racism, misogyny, and capitalism. Drawing upon feminist scholarship and praxis, transformative justice movements, abolitionist movements, and solidarity economy movements, we center collective wellness and are rooted in a belief that systemic transformation is both needed and possible in our lifetime. This learning cohort is part of how we live our values and resource other aspects of our work. 

Rupture and Repair will support participants to work with shame and change from an embodied place. We need sustainable movements for change, focusing on transformation, care, and building the skills politically, emotionally, and spiritually to be able to transform generations of harm. The change that we are being asked to make as white, wealthy people is not to be taken lightly and we approach this work with deep love and rigor, to build sustainable communities where we can all thrive. Please apply here to join us!

Goals: 

• Create a generative learning environment for wealthy people to explore their relationship to money, wealth, and land.

• Build embodied tools to deal with shame, dissociation, fear, distrust of self/others, inaction, and any other behaviors that impact people to align with change.

• Build a sense of belonging amongst the group.  

• Build political understanding around race, capitalism, gender, and build understanding as to how this relates to participant’s inheritance or earned wealth

• Build a community of practice around money and race that can continue to develop in New Orleans

Who is this for?: 

• White people living in New Orleans with access to wealth (current access or anticipated access) 

• People who have a historic connection to wealth accumulation in their families, even if they don’t have money now. 

• White people with wealth interested in deepening their commitment to social justice movements from an embodied, supported, and feminist grounding.

• If this class speaks to you and you do not fit the descriptions above, please reach out to willa@theweaversproject.org.

Sliding Scale Price: $750- $5,000

All Proceeds (outside of covering costs) go directly to The Weavers Project. Your donation will support the Black feminist leadership of the Weavers Project and the launching of our Black feminist artists Fellowship in 2023. 

The financial commitment is on a sliding scale determined by the amount of wealth you have access to (Thank you to Morgan Curtis for modeling this payment model) 

• If you have $10M+ assets or $300k+ income :$5,000 

• If you have $2M+ assets or $150k+ income: $3,500 

• If you have $500k+ assets or $75k+ income: $1,500 

• If you have <$500k assets or $35k+ income: $750

Fall 6 week Program: 6 Tuesdays, 6 - 8:30 in person in the Fairground Triangle

• November 1st: Opening Ritual: Sharing family money stories and healing ritual (3 hrs) 

• November 8th: History of Gendered and Racial Capitalism 

• November 15th: Deep Dive: Family History

• November 22nd: Creating Repair–Repairing history, repairing relationships to people, land, and community

• November 29th: Identity and wealth: What is holding us back from taking action? Where do we source our sense of belonging? 

• December 6th: Closing Ritual –next steps, being held in community, and transforming harm (3 hours) 

In addition to these six sessions, each participant will receive 2 coaching sessions with Laura Livoti of Spark Lab between November 1st and January 31st 2023. These sessions will be a mix of coaching and philanthropic advising/mentoring, depending on participants’ needs and goals.

Apply here by October 21st 2022. Space is limited.

Meet your Facilitators:

Willa Conway comes from a lineage of fierce women – white settler colonial capitalists, writers, artists, addicts, mystics, truth tellers, humans who have harmed and been harmed. Willa is a co-founder of The Weavers Project, a multidisciplinary feminist organization that bridges arts and culture, movement building, and resource mobilization. Willa has developed and facilitated campaigns and donor education programs with Solidaire Network, Resource Generation and Shakti Rising that hold a feminism, intersectionality, transfomation and sustainable leadership development at the center. Willa believes that it’s hard to move anything into action without experiencing it in the body as well as the mind and strives to create work that creates that integration. Willa is a graduate of the Shakti Rising Apprenticeship program, a certified Level 1 and 2 Movement for Trauma Practitioner, and serves on the board of Solidaire Network. Always eager for learning more ways to deepen her work, she is currently enrolled in the Trauma of Money learning cohort. As a resident of the Gulf South, Willa spends her time thinking and working on issues connected to climate justice, radical feminist thought, abolition, and sustainability. Working on her writing practice, dancing, and harvesting from her garden are just some of the ways that she tries to make world-building and liberation daily practices.

Laura Livoti operates Spark Lab, a wealth coaching and philanthropic advising firm that benefits from her decades of experience working with families, individuals and institutional donors to move resources for grassroots strategies to win intersectional justice, as well as her own volunteer movement-based work. As a leader in the philanthropic sector, she practiced trust-based philanthropy, supported the spend-out of a family foundation and promoted the concept of integrated voter engagement, which focuses some of the vast resources that are mobilized during elections on organizations with a membership-base among the often-overlooked rising American electorate of low-income and BIPOC voters. Laura enjoys the creativity of designing values-aligned programs. She serves on the steering committee of the Kindle Project and, has guided a variety of experiments in participatory grantmaking, including co-designing Native Voices Rising, a pooled fund that disburses grants based on the recommendations of Native community members. Laura is descended from European immigrants who arrived in the US in the 1900’s with little. Aspiring to assimilate, her forebears benefitted from the hierarchy of racial and ethnic acceptance that allowed them to climb the ladder of economic mobility. Born in New York, raised in California, living in the South and with strong ties to West Africa, Laura’s cultural background infuses her consulting practice with a mix of candor, softness and flexibility that result in presence and an aptitude for emergence. Her coaching practice reflects training with Lumia. She studied with the People’s Institute for Racism and Beyond and completed the Kingian Nonviolence program. Ecofeminist, Charlene Spretnak and deep ecologist, Joanna Macy were among her key teachers. She is looking forward to continuing her professional development this Fall as a student of the Trauma of Money. Laura has deep respect for all beings and ecosystems. She believes in immanence, and the healing power of poetry, music and movement.