Understanding Racial Justice

Title Track and We The People – MI are happy to present Understanding Racial Justice (URJ), a five-week course for white people ready to lean into the racial justice movement. URJ was co-created in 2020 by skilled, longtime organizers and facilitators Simon Wolff and Seth Bernard (see full bios below). We just completed our fourth cohort of Understanding Racial Justice in 2023 and are looking forward to welcoming more committed folks into our URJ alumni community this fall, now almost 300 strong. Learn more and register below.

Our next cohort of URJ will be offered via zoom on Monday evenings from October 16 – November 13. This virtual cohort will meet from 5:30-7:30pm via zoom and be facilitated by Lucy Waechter Webb and Chris Good.

Stay tuned for future in-person cohorts to be announced.

Scholarship for URJ 17 (Online): Oct 16-Nov 13

Interest Form for Future Cohorts

This course is sure to be a transformative community and capacity building experience that supports your quest to join the movement for racial justice. This course is appropriate for white identified people who have had little to no prior antiracism or anti-oppression training. Themes explored will include race, racism, identity, solidarity, accountability, collective liberation, cultural healing, and embodied antiracism practice. The third week will feature special guest presenters who will share stories and insights from their lived experiences as BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) people. This course includes creative and somatic practices that support integration, connectivity, and resilience.

Are you curious to learn more about the importance of caucus or affinity group work as an integral part of the quest for racial equity? “For white people, a caucus provides time and space to work explicitly and intentionally on understanding white culture and white privilege and to increase one’s critical analysis around these concepts. A white caucus also puts the onus on white people to teach each other about these ideas, rather than placing a burden on people of color to teach them.” Read more at racialequitytools.org.

Participation in this course requires attendance at all five two hour sessions except for the case of emergency situations. Due to the high level of interest in this course, please only register if you are able to attend all sessions. There will be an average of one hour of additional work per week that will compliment the live sessions.

The payment structure for this course is sliding scale: $125 – $500 ($25-$100 per week). We have set the pricing as low as we can to make this work accessible to all who are interested, understanding that the upper end of the sliding scale is an excellent value for two hours of live session time per week with experienced facilitators, one session featuring three or four special guest BIPOC presenters, as well as invitations for deepening and support resources between sessions. We are grateful for your interest and if you are able to contribute beyond the sliding scale, your donation will go into a scholarship fund for this program.

Grant Piering, a recent alumni of Understanding Racial Justice, shares about his URJ experience and why he feels like the course is important. “This cohort was a great stepping stone for me to put some of the tools in place and get a lot of resources to know what to do next.” (video: April 2023)

Logo design by Dani Renwick of Charmellow Design.

“URJ changed the course of my life and ultimately gave me a whole new perspective.”

Many thanks to URJ alumni Taryn Indish for sharing some powerful reflections on their Understanding Racial Justice experience. (video: September 2023)

Curious about racial justice? Could you use more tools to respond to the systems of oppression that exist in the world? Interested in joining a growing community of folks committed to healing and the dismantling of these systems? Title Track co-executive director and URJ co-creator Seth Bernard shares an invitation to join us for an upcoming cohort of Understanding Racial Justice. (video: March 2023)

URJ organizers and facilitators Lucy Waechter Webb and Tess Waechter Smith share some powerful reflections from the Open Space in Traverse City, where 2000+ people gathered in the summer of 2020 in defense of Black lives in the wake of the George Floyd murder. Understanding Racial Justice was one of the efforts that emerged from this collective yearning for racial justice and healing with many people showing up for the first time saying ‘no more’ and ‘what can I do?’ (video: Jan. 2023)

URJ’s co-creator, Simon Wolff, talks about the origin story of our Understanding Racial Justice program and what’s it’s been like to return to their home community of Northern Michigan to help nurture the work of antiracism. (video: Dec. 2020)

Understanding Racial Justice in the news

Northern Express: Finding “Beloved Community” – The impact of Title Track’s Understanding Racial Justice Program
Northern Express: The Good Fight: Northern Michigan E3 and Title Track Reflect on Their Efforts for a Safer, More Inclusive Community
Greater than Code Podcast with featured guest, Mae Beale: Contributing to Humanity and Mutual Aid – Solidarity, Not Charity
Traverse City Record-Eagle: Erlewine crafts coffee inspired by song to benefit Title Track
9&10 News interview: “Understanding Racial Justice with Title Track”
Traverse Ticker article by Craig Manning: “Bernard and Wolff Aim High With Title Track”
Title Track receives URJ grant from Cherry Republic: “Opening Hearts and Minds” by Cherry Republic’s Bob Sutherland
Traverse Ticker article by Beth Milligan: “Antiracism Programs Expand, Including Virtual Book Fair To Support Diverse Authors in TCAPS Libraries”

We recently completed a year long “Train the Trainer” program that will expand our capacity to offer more Understanding Racial Justice cohorts from a skilled and experienced team of white anti-racism leaders.

We are also developing a BIPOC Healing Ourselves space that will promote growth and change offering a safe space for BIPOC leaders to share stories and experiences. The training will acknowledge trauma and create space for healing from the effects of oppression and explore ways BIPOC leaders can concretely support one another. The space will also create stronger networks and partnerships within BIPOC communities to collectively develop strategies for BIPOC leaders to survive and thrive while navigating spaces rooted in white supremacy.

It is our intention to grow healed and anti-racist white and healed BIPOC community groups side by side so that they may join as a larger community that is actively working towards an inclusive, loving, healing, anti-racist, anti-oppressive, de-colonized society.

BIPOC Collaborators

Understanding Racial Justice has been designed and implemented in consultation with BIPOC colleagues and community members. An integral part of each URJ cohort is week three, where special guest BIPOC presenters join us to share stories and insights from their lived experiences. Here are a few reflections from recent presenters.

“It has been an honor to provide a small tidbit of me with one of the ‘Understanding Racial Justice’ cohorts. Being able to convey just a bit of what it has meant being a woman of color in this world to a group of people who are mindful and kind enough to listen and process the information and then later sit in the knowledge to become a better human is a wonderful thing. For some, it is seemingly troublesome to have a white affinity space when addressing matters of race, but I’d like to challenge, mainly people of color, to think about these questions: do you always want someone asking you about the racial troubles of this world? Are you someone who always needs to be the sole entity with the answers for the masses? I personally do not have all of the answers, nor do I wish to, but I appreciate a group of people knowing things about their oppressive histories wanting to dialogue and learn. To do their own inner-work, to seek out and learn from the stories being told by those who have been oppressed. Yes, I think we need to step forward in this together, but there needs to be an acknowledgement of ignorance, that “we don’t know what we don’t know”, and then a movement toward changing that.” -Jennifer Jones, Artistry Connector and Title Track’s Co-Executive Director

Jennifer Jones

“As a regular Indigenous guest facilitator for URJ, I am always impressed with the impact of the experience. As a member of the BIPOC community that experiences a great deal of erasure within U.S. education, government, culture, and politics – it is refreshing to be able to give voice to the issues affecting Indigenous people in a supportive and interactive educational environment. I am able to teach about both the historical and contemporary struggles that we as Indigenous people face in North America, without holding back or whitewashing. This recounting can often be very emotional for both me and the participants. However, the safety of the container created by URJ, makes feeling into those occasional collective emotions of shock and grief to become part of the healing process. I often observe and get feedback from participants and others in the community about how my contribution to URJ told them many things that they weren’t aware of and really helped to open up their journey to active understanding and anti-racism. I am so thankful for this program.” – Holly T. Bird , Title Track Co-Executive Director

Holly T. Bird

“Deep breaths. It is hard to put into words what it has meant to me to be a part of the past half dozen or so cohorts with this group. As an artist of color, the dialogues with you all have been invaluable to my sanity on some levels and my sense of hope on the other. I participate in many art and writing activities, as well as being a coach and a teacher’s aide at our local school. Besides interactions with kids, some of the most genuine interactions I have had have been with the Title Track group as a whole, from workshop participants to the facilitators, many of which have been or are quickly becoming friends and family. Coming from a community of color, and ethnic variety, I grew up in Chicago, I often moved into communities where I would be the only person of color, and therefore some sort of beacon and or token brown person. As I get older, I am still working on how to process those feelings of otherness which were circomposed on us as children. I hold no regrets or ill feelings and further, I impose no guilt on others for their racism. We are ALL learning and unlearning the lessons of how to treat one another, and that process is difficult to say the least. Even as a person of color I feel like I have lots of work to do in confronting my own prejudices as well as how I treat others in my daily interactions with them. After all, we are not only trying to be better and do better individually, we are trying to make the world a better place for all of the children of this 7th generation of mankind. It is time to light the eighth fire. Thanks for being part of the spark.” -Robin Kissinger, Little Feather Traveling Art Gallery/ Up Inspired/ Robin’s Recycled Art

“The piece I sent a pic of is called “The Eyes of My Ancestors”, it is one of the first recycled headdresses I put out to show as an artist. It is made from 100% recycled materials, except the glue, and it represents my attempt to connect the traditional with the modern. It represents for me the idea that we throw nothing away that can be used. What we can’t make into art, we recycle, what we can’t recycle we dispose of in ways not harmful to our Mother Earth. Chi migwiich.”

“The Eyes of My Ancestors” by Robin Kissinger

Past participants say…

URJ Creators & Facilitator team

Simon Wolff (they/them) is a queer, non-binary Ashkenazi Jewish antiracism organizer and facilitator, cultural worker, somatic healing practitioner, creative, and earth-based ritualist based on Anishinaabe land known to settler colonial people as Northern Michigan. They earned a BA in Human Development and Social Relations from Kalamazoo College in 2004 and have been working toward social change and collective healing for the past 20 years. Simon has been engaged in racial justice work since 2010 and served as Co-Executive Director of ERACCE in Kalamazoo, MI and as a Core Trainer with ERACCE’s national partner organization, Crossroads Antiracism from 2014-2018. Originally trained in dance and yoga, they tend a politicized somatic, cultural, and ancestral healing practice where they support local, regional, and national groups and individuals in healing from the effects of lived and intergenerational trauma and oppression. Simon’s work is grounded in the lineages of Somatic Experiencing, generative somatics, Cultural Somatics, Ancestral Healing, and multi-faith spiritual practice. In their spare time, they enjoy printmaking, working with herbal medicine, dancing, and spending time in nature and with family and friends. Simon co–created URJ in 2020 and recently co-facilitated Title Track’s first URJ Train–the–Trainer, along with Kara Bender and in partnership with Title Track leadership.

Simon Wolff

URJ co-creator, facilitator, Train-the-Trainer facilitator

Seth Bernard is the Founder and Co-Executive Director of Title Track. Seth co–created the Understanding Racial Justice program in 2020. He has curated, facilitated and participated in workshops and panels related to Racial Justice through the Anishinaabe Racial Justice Conference, the Michigan Music Alliance, the Earthwork Harvest Gathering, the Deep Winter Men’s Retreat, the Youth Empowerment and Sustainability Summit (YESS), the Earthwork Songwriters Retreat, and SXSW.

In 2019, Seth was awarded a Rotary Charities Changemaker Fellowship to support Anti-Oppression work in Northern Michigan and his ongoing project “Collaborative Songwriting for Collective Liberation”, in which Seth guides groups in the creation of original songs built around anti-oppression themes.

As a result of his years of work in collaboration and solidarity with community leaders in Detroit and Flint, Seth was invited to member of PolicyLink’s Water Equity and Climate Resilience Caucus, a national network of Environmental Justice leaders working to address water equity and climate resilience, centering frontline communities of color and low-income communities.

Seth is also the host of “State of Water”, a podcast on clean water issues and their relationship to policy, equity, community, and climate, featuring in-depth conversations with some of Seth’s mentors at the forefront of Michigan’s Environmental Justice movement.

Born and raised in rural Northern Michigan, Seth is also a musician and arts educator, bringing a unique orientation to place and creativity into the work to build antiracist community in our region. Over the past several years, Seth has guided many entry-level conversations about Racial Justice with fellow white folks, cultivating spaces that nurture compassion, courage, and community building.

Seth Bernard

URJ co-creator, facilitator

Lucy Waechter Webb (she/her) is a politicized faith leader who believes the work of engaging our spiritual life is not so very different from engaging in our shared public (political) life. She understands all of humanity and earth bear wounds and she seeks to build a world in which all are free by means of tending to those wounds so we may together birth healing for ourselves and the world. Lucy is particularly committed to engaging other white-racialized people in the work of dismantling white supremacy and especially loves to think about creative strategies for organizing our community to fight for a different reality. She currently organizes with a northern MI interfaith group called The SALT Coalition and with the national organization Presbyterian Peace Fellowship. She is also in training to become a somatics coach. She is ordained in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and living in Leelanau County, Michigan on Anishinaabe land. Her children are some of her best teachers, as are the trees and her garden.

Lucy Waechter Webb

URJ facilitator, organizer

Tess Waechter Smith (she/her) is a politicized somatic practitioner-in-training grounded in the lineages of generative somatics and the Strozzi Institute. She is committed to creating alternative communities of care for the sake of ending cycles of violence that exist in our world and for the liberation of all people. After years of working as a social worker in the field of addiction and witnessing the impact of harm and trauma caused by the criminal legal system on the people she worked with, Tess found her way to racial justice organizing from the desire to dismantle these systems of oppression. Tess organized with Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) in Portland, OR and worked with SURJ national as a coach for SURJ chapters in Oregon. Tess is organized and moved to action by a long historical call from BIPOC folks for white people to go get their cousins. She is dedicated to supporting white people in learning what it means to be anti-racist and to choose a path of recovery from white supremacy culture for the sake of collective liberation. Tess is a mother who moves at the pace of her children and nibblings (niece and nephew), raising them in radical love, embodiment and without shame. She loves being in or near water, baking, throwing pottery, and singing.

Tess Waechter Smith

URJ facilitator, organizer

Chris Good (he/him/his) is an Ann Arbor, MI-based musician, community organizer, avid gardener, devoted dad, founder/co-coordinator of the Sing Me Home Festival, member of the Earthwork Music Collective, and the founder/producer of the newly launched HOOPTONES Podcast. Chris has more than two decades of community organizing and facilitation experience having worked in a variety of roles in the areas of peace & conflict resolution, racial justice, youth empowerment, creative practice, immigration reform, localism, and environmentalism. Chris has served as Communications Director for the Clean Water Campaign for MI since its 2018 launch and has continued in that role with Title Track since its 2019 inception. Chris has been a part of the Understanding Racial Justice team since the program began in the summer of 2020.

Chris Good

URJ facilitator, organizer

Wendy von Courter is an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister, human rights activist, and professor of Interfaith Leadership. She’s also a farmer in Grand Traverse County where she and her wife, Gini, live with three cats, 25 chickens, a small orchard, maple forest, and garden. A New England transplant, she continues to have ties to Massachusetts where she visits family and teaches Interfaith Leadership at Boston University School of Theology, mentors UU seminarians, and consults with seminarians and ministers around issues of white privilege, race, and power. Wendy served as President of UU Allies for Racial Equity, member of the UUA Council on Cross Cultural Engagement and chair of the UUA Journey Toward Wholeness Transformation Committee. Her spiritual practices are rooted in the outdoors where she is happiest with her hands in the dirt gardening, chatting with her chickens, or taking pictures of birds —– and plunging into any nearby body of water!

Wendy von Courter

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URJ facilitator

Gini von Courter (s/he are both good) was raised in a suburb of Flint, Michigan after parents Guy and Erma joined the “white flight” from our cities during the 1950s. She is a musician, theatre fan, builder, barbecue enthusiast, author, and proud owner of a pickup. Gini served eighteen years on the Board of Trustees of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA), including ten years as Moderator (Board chair) and Chief Governance Officer. The UUA had just committed to active anti-racism work when Gini was elected to the Board. The years that followed were generative and turbulent, and she provided support and leadership for a revolution designed to ground, expand, and sustain that commitment. Gini’s current justice work is more regionally focused. Gini has worked as a private detective, security manager, loader at UPS, television cameraperson, public school teacher, and small business owner. For the past decade she has worked as an author for LinkedIn Learning. Gini is a sixth generation Michigan farmer. Gini and her beloved wife Wendy are the owners of AngelBear Farm in Buckley, south of Traverse City, where their family includes three cats and two dozen chickens.

Gini von Courter

URJ facilitator

Kara Bender(she /her) is a systems thinker, organizer, skillful and playful facilitator, participant-centered educator, and is energized by cultivating intentional community and creative conversations as ways to grow our collective imaginations. With roots on the east coast, she now lives at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, in St Louis MO, on Osage, Illini, Chickamauga Cherokee, and Ioway land.

Deeply committed to naming her stake and responsibility as a white cis-gendered woman in ending oppressive systems, she has committed over 15 years to learning with and from anti-racist communities of color and anti-racist white folks. Her biggest influences have come from working as an affordable housing organizer, co-directing a legislative advocacy program, being an anti-racism facilitator and consultant, and participating in creative projects like the Carnival de Resistance, that bridged art, activism, and faith to engage communities in conversations about environmental justice. Kara is actively curating curriculum in online and retreat settings for white folks going deeper on their anti-racism journeys as well supporting multi-racial organizations in innovative and equity focused systems re-design.

Kara Bender

Train-the-Trainer facilitator