Equity & Accessibility
Updated March 10th, 2024
I’m a white, transgender, queer Jewish human in a small body. I exist on the disability spectrum as a “little person,” and I live with scoliosis and chronic pain. I am otherwise non-disabled. I am middle class, I own a home and a car, and I currently live debt-free. I have a master’s degree, am a U.S. citizen, and I learned English as a first language. I experience some neurodivergence, and my mental health is mostly stable. I’m a survivor of domestic violence and sexual assault, and I am in ongoing recovery from disordered eating.
Because of systems of oppression and harm—namely, white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, and settler colonialism, and the dominant cultural norms that stem from them—informing racism, transphobia, homophobia, fatphobia, ableism, and more, along with my own intersecting identities, I am both learning about the practices of dismantling these systems and I’m living this dismantling with my very body.
As part of my values and ethics, I am dedicated to studying with teachers, educators, facilitators, and activists who offer their own lived experiences to inform my understanding of what is required for us to dismantle systems of hierarchy and harm and achieve collective liberation. I consider myself part of a lineage of radical Black, Indigenous, People of Color, queer, trans, and disabled thinkers and leaders, all of whom I name and honor regularly in my work. I believe that none of us function in isolation and I aim to emphasize collective care and accountability along with the truth that we cannot guarantee safety for any individual. These tenets, among many others, are reflected in the Community Agreements I practice in my offerings (detailed below).
I update the list of trainings, workshops, and certifications on my About page to reflect my ongoing commitment to these studies and practices.
Land Acknowledgement
I seek to do more than acknowledge the peoples whose the land I currently reside on—the land of the Cayuse, Umatilla, Walla Walla, Cowlitz, and Clackamas peoples; the land of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians—land known colonially as Portland, OR. I recognize that land acknowledgements can often be performative and empty of meaningful action. My intention is to continually uncover ways I can live into the process of honoring the original stewards of this land while simultaneously taking action to repair the harm caused by settler colonialism. I recognize that I am one person, and that I directly benefit from the forced removal and historical/ongoing erasure of Indigenous peoples.
Currently, my honoring and action looks like paying money directly to Native populations and organizations, learning about the landscape of language and requests/needs as they continue to grow and evolve, and engaging in conversation and direct action with friends, family, and community when possible.
For more information on Native lands, I recommend beginning with this website as an initial resource, and for more information on moving from land acknowledgments to #LandBack, I want to uplift emi aguilar of @indigenizingartsed who regularly educates on this work.
Edited to add: As of late June 2023, I own a home. I recognize the complexities, and violence, involved in this. I am committed to taking action over time as I gain more understanding of how to be in right relationship with this fact, whatever “right relationship” might mean.
Financial Access
Apart from offering a sliding scale or three-tiered pricing model for all of my public workshops, programs, and trainings, along with scholarships for those who need additional financial support, I am also always available to discuss price and access to my work. I never want cost to be an obstacle and yet I am also living within a culture and system that requires I create pathways for income in order to exist. As such, I am committed to both charging equitably for my work and offerings (as in, in accordance with and consideration of my own time, training, and labor—emotional and otherwise) and I am equally committed to making my work as accessible as I can while creating sustainability.
I regularly contribute to mutual aid and fundraising efforts, particularly for QTBIPOC and disabled folks, and I consistently separate 10% of my income from the trans and queer equity-inclusion work I offer to send to organizations that support, represent, and work with QTBIPOC communities. Thus far, some of the organizations I’ve contributed to include: the Trans Justice Funding Project, the Native Justice Coalition, the National Black Trans Advocacy Coalition, the Marsha P. Johnson Institute, the Native American Youth and Family Center in Portland, OR, the Embodiment Institute, and many more.
Disability Access
I am committed to making my offerings and work accessible and I am an ongoing learner in this process. Currently, I ensure that all Zoom meetings—live spaces and recordings, are captioned, I provide transcripts of every podcast episode I host and produce, and I provide recordings of all workshops and trainings for folks who register as I’ve been informed that recordings help make the work more accessible for neurodivergent learners.
On social media, I caption all videos, use CamelCase when employing hashtags, regularly note trauma warnings for potentially activating content, and I include image descriptions and alt text with every post.
I also regularly study color contrast and font accessibility to make the graphic design elements and visual representation of my work as accessible as possible.
I welcome hearing of other needs as they arise.
Yoga
have had the privilege—financially and otherwise, to invest in a great deal of yoga training and study spaces (including teacher trainings, immersions, retreats, workshops, and more) over the course of my two+ decades as a student. My whiteness means that I have no direct ties to the lineages of these spiritual teachings and practices and, while I do not consider myself a “yoga teacher,” I am committed to understanding what it means to honor the lineages as I continue to learn about them.
Currently, this looks like showing up for South Asian and Desi-led yoga spaces—both in terms of my time as a student and in relationship to my financial resources and offerings, building relationship with Indian, Desi, and South Asian yoga teachers, practicing all eight limbs and challenging yoga spaces that perpetuate the notion that yoga is exclusively asana, and questioning my role and responsibilities in the work that I offer, particularly when partnering with yoga studios or trainings and/or educating students and teachers.
Accountability
I believe accountability is a form of self and communal-care, and I seek to receive critical feedback and engage in cross-difference dialogue and relationship as much as possible. This takes many forms, including but not limited to: studying with and financially supporting Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, disabled comrades, trans and queer siblings, and so many others; uplifting their work and naming the lineages from which my work emerges; inviting students, clients, and learning communities I’m part of to share critique, thoughts, needs, and reflections with me on a regular basis—both formally, through feedback forms sent after all long-form offerings, and informally through live group conversation, private conversation, email, etc.
I also believe it is my work, as a white-bodied person who holds other privileged identities, to tend to my own trauma and nervous system healing in order to receive critical feedback and call-in moments and to hold myself through whatever fragility and/or discomfort might emerge rather than expecting folks experiencing greater marginalization to hold that process with me. As such, I embrace modalities and forms of support such as therapy—individual and group, naturopathic medicine and regular bodywork, personal inquiry and a dedication to my own grounding practices which currently include yoga and asana, meditation and mindfulness, and I am continually grateful for the support of friends and community who hold me and hold space for me.
Community Agreements
In almost every space I facilitate, I begin by inviting participants to practice a set of community agreements, which can also be described as “community care practices.” These agreements often evolve with each group, depending on individual and/or collective needs. The agreements I typically use as a starting point are borrowed from and inspired by the work of Michelle Cassandra Johnson—a mentor, teacher, colleague, and friend, along with her involvement in the organization dRworks. Over time, I’ve adapted these agreements based on learnings I’ve gleamed from and with other educators, including the Transgender Training Institute and Resolutions Northwest.
Speak your truth; ground in your own experience with I statements.
Ask questions in the language you have.
Listen to understand; listen with curiosity.
Be willing to do things differently and experience discomfort.
Confidentiality.
Move in, move out.
Accept and embrace non-closure.
Brave space not safe space.
When harm happens, we will respond with care when we can. There are different ways to respond.
Mia Mingus
I don’t want us to just make things 'accessible,' I want us to build a political container that access can take place in and be grounded in. Access for the sake of access is not necessarily liberatory, but access for the sake of connection, justice, community, love and liberation is. We can use access as a tool to transform the broader conditions we live in, to transform the conditions that created that inaccessibility in the first place.
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