about us
Who we are at Rooted Global Village
We create spaces where meaningful connections flourish, enabling individuals and communities to build bridges across divides and foster a new social paradigm. What makes Rooted unique is our focus on the deeply relational work necessary to uncover and shift the internal barriers that prevent authentic engagement. By prioritizing this transformative inner and interpersonal work, we cultivate an environment where personal and collective growth is nurtured, allowing us to navigate complexities and embrace the full potential of human connection.
Rooted envisions a world where relational trust, reciprocity, and mutual regard shape the foundation of collective transformation.
In a world marked by polarization, we recognize that the greatest challenges to progress are often found in the relational plane. The values of reciprocity and mutual regard are essential, yet the embodied patterns we carry can unknowingly reenact division and limit our capacity for true connection. Rooted’s work is dedicated to transforming these patterns to build trust, friendship, and shared understanding.
What sets Rooted apart is our deep focus on relational dynamics. While inspired by global efforts that foster solidarity and gift economies, we see our purpose as distinct.
our vision is our mission
The starting point can be traced back to an online event in February 2020, the Embodied Trauma Conference, a five-day event that drew over 27,000 participants from around the world, all eager to explore the context out of which trauma emerges. What stood out most from that gathering was the profound sense of community that emerged—a ground of connection that resonated deeply.
our history
From our earliest program inside the Rooted Village, My Grandmother’s Hands Book + Body Study, which engaged over 1,200 participants in a year-long journey, to our Belonging Ambiguity program that embraces the experiences of bi/cultural individuals, Rooted has continually pioneered initiatives that weave together learning, practice, and community. Each step has built upon the last, creating an evolving ecosystem of exploration, connection, and relational growth.
Rooted began with a vision to bring people together in a space that honored the complexity of human experience and sought to challenge conventional ways of being.
The prevailing question was: How do we keep this going?
What began as an effort to carry forward that shared sense of connection, longing for community, and co-learning led to the birth of Rooted Global Village. Rooted has also hosted multiple subsequent public gathering spaces: In 2021, Tending the Roots: A Free 4-Day Festival of Resilience & Reimagination, Culture & Community, and in 2022: Tending the Roots: Our Bodies at the Borderlands. In 2023, we hosted two shorter public events: Expanding Possibilities of Love: Queer Ecology & Reimagining Belonging and We Dream Worlds: Wandering in the afrocene, afrofuturism, and womanism at the end of the world.
This process involves re/claiming connections and acknowledging their legacies while un/learning and untethering from colonial systems. We draw on the work of those who have long resisted and healed the deep divisions between humans and the more-than-human world. We are inspired by wisdom keepers and freedom fighters, Black feminist thinkers like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Jacqui Alexander, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Saidiya Hartman, and Chicana feminists such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Maria Lugones, and Chela Sandoval.
These voices challenge us to embrace the complexity of our intersecting, ever-evolving identities and to consider the ethical dimensions of traversing borderlands. We build relationships through mycelial connections, forming a rhizomatic network of decolonial healing with those who “tie our roots together” (Sophie Strand). We remain grateful for the elders, guides, friends, and family who co-dream and co-create with us in Rooted.
On the Shoulders of Giants
We honor the intellectual, spiritual, and ancestral lineages—both human and non-human—that guide our creative and imaginative work.
meet the rooted team
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Rooted's mama, Clown Philosopher & Alchemist of Care
Karine Bell is a mother of two, life partner to Daniel, and founder of and co-dreamer in the Rooted Global Village.
A bi-cultural Black woman, she is also a somatics educator, practitioner, somatic abolitionist, scholar-activist, and clown-in-training. She is currently alive with curiosity around how we can learn to weave ourselves and each other into ecologies of care, countering cultures that create fragmentation, alienation, and hyper-independence; to embrace difference, cultivate embodied capacity for transformation, and engage in radical acts of friendship across division. She is guided by curiosity and wonder as compass points, and research as an act of reverence for life. She is a PhD candidate at Pacifica Graduate Institute where she combines continued practice and study in somatics with studies in decolonial depth psychology with a focus on community, liberation, indigenous and eco-psychologies.
Karine Frieda Bell
Rooted's mistress of movement and bodily wisdom
Weena created SE+AM and is the primary facilitator for this program. She is a Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner, a facilitator in the Rooted Global Village, a dance theater maker, movement trainer and mother to four. She has been working and playing in the worlds of dance and somatic therapies in New York City for over 26 years. Now, she works with individuals and groups all over the world via the magic of Zoom and in-person locally. Her guiding light is to value the interconnected reality of embodied aliveness (and its absence in the tangible sense). She is interested in what shifts human-made systems toward that which protects, cares for, and supports interdependence, rather than the mythology of separateness. SE+AM is a body of work she has developed that focuses on making direct contact with internal, bodily-felt aliveness that connects us through the practice of seeing and being seen. Through that contact, the aliveness within oneself and others becomes a compass for choices in life, in relationships, and for world building.
Weena Pauly-Tarr
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Rooted edler & co-dreamer
As an End of Life (EOL) Doula, Oceana Sawyer specializes in the liminal spaces of active dying and grief. She is currently researching the intersection of embodied grief and somatic abolitionism as well as developing and holding space for healing through a sensual (all the senses) lens.
A certified home funeral celebrant, living funeral ceremony facilitator, and Conscious Dying Educator, Oceana also holds graduate degrees in counseling psychology and organizational development.
Oceana draws upon her meditation practice, experience as a sensuality educator, earth-based spirituality, and intensive study in the expressive arts and integral counseling psychology to bring a grounded, compassionate presence and holistic approach to her work. Through Death Cafes, EOL vision mapping, EOL doula training, and virtual grief events and workshops, Oceana has enjoyed working with a variety of groups and individuals, and primarily focuses on People of the Globl Majority.
You can follow her on Instagram and participate in her online community on Patreon.
https://www.oceanaendoflifedoula.com.
Oceana Sawyer
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Resident dj,ELDER & facilitator
Cliff has 35-years experience as a percussion student and teacher of several music traditions, including drumming styles from Brazil, the Caribbean, Africa and India. He has combined his music studies, degree in psychology and years of experience as a professional DJ to develop practices that promote collective joy, cultural dexterity and global healing. Cliff has had the honor of using these practices for the past 5 years co-facilitating workshops with his mentor, Dr. Barbara Holmes, author of Race and the Cosmos and Joy Unspeakable.