Kai Cheng Thom, MSW, MSc, Qualified Mediator, and Certified Professional Coach is an author, performer, and noted expert in the fields of trauma healing, professional coaching, somatics, dialogue facilitation, and conflict transformation. As a theorist and practitioner, she has made significant contributions in the area of trauma-informed, social change-oriented approaches to pursuing individual and collective healing and transformation, particularly in her work on Transformative Justice and conflict resolution in activist communities. A widely published author in multiple genres, Kai Cheng's non-fiction essay collection I HOPE WE CHOOSE LOVE: A Trans Girl's Notes From the End of the World was a Stonewall Honor Award book, and her poetry collection Falling Back In Love With Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls was an instant Canadian bestseller. She also wrote 100 editions of the popular advice column Ask Kai: Advice for the Apocalypse for Xtra Magazine. As a Senior Teacher at The Embody Lab and a Faculty Member of the Institute for the Study of Somatic Sex Education, Kai Cheng has trained hundreds of coaches, therapists, counselors, and other health and wellness professionals in body-based, anti-oppressive methods to working with people over the world. Instagram: @kaichengthom Bluesky: @razorfemme Substack: kaichengthom.substack.com

Manish Jain is deeply committed to regenerating our diverse local knowledge systems, cultural imaginations and inter-cultural dialogue. Inspired by the lineage of MK Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, Ivan Illich, his illiterate village grandmother, his unschooled daughter, indigenous communities, tricksters and Jain spiritual philosophy, he is one of the leading planetary voices for unlearning, deschooling our lives and reimagining education. He has served for the past 26 years as Chief Beaver (ecosystems builder) of Shikshantar: The Peoples’ Institute for Rethinking Education and Development based in Udaipur, India and is co-founder of some of the most innovative educational experiments in the world - the Swaraj University, the Jail University, Complexity University, Tribal Farmversity, the Creativity Adda, the Learning Societies Unconference, the Walkouts-Walkon network, Udaipur as a Learning City, the Families Learning Together network, Berkana Exchange. He co-launched the global Ecoversities Alliance with 500+ members in 50 countries. He is a senior advisor to the Economics of Happiness network for localisation. He has worked as a facilitator with Social Labs, Art of Hosting and World Cafe. He has served as guest faculty for Schumacher College (UK), National School of Drama-Theatre in Education (India) and for the Peace Boat (Japan). Manish has been invited to give inspiring public keynote speeches on Reimagining Education in many countries such as USA, England, Portugal, Brazil, Mexico, India. He has edited several books on Vimukt Shiksha (liberating learning) on themes such as radical pedagogies, hacking education, learning societies, unlearning, gift culture, community media, and tools for deep dialogue. Prior to this, Manish worked as one of the principal team members of the UNESCO Learning Without Frontiers global initiative in Paris Headquarters. He has also been a consultant to UNICEF, World Bank, USAID in Africa, South Asia and former Soviet Union. Manish worked as an investment banker with Morgan Stanley. He has been trying to unlearn his Master's degree in Education from Harvard University and a B.A. in Economics, International Development and Political Philosophy from Brown University. He and his wife Vidhi have been unschooling themselves with their 22 year old daughter, Kanku, in Udaipur, Rajasthan. Manish is passionate about masti yoga, urban organic farming, filmmaking, simulation gaming, bicycling, circle dances, ultimate frisbee, trekking, compassionate clowning and slow food cooking.

Leticia Nieto Psy.D., LMFT has been an active poet, dramatist, and performer since 1978. She has been a psychotherapist and trainer in anti-oppression and expressive techniques including psychodrama, playback theatre, and theatre of the oppressed since 1980. For her work in the Master of Arts in Counseling Psychology Program at Saint Martin’s University, Nieto was named Outstanding Faculty of the Year in 2005. She is also a member of the faculty of the European School of Classical Psychodrama in Mexico, and loves to sing.

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.

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 Global Majority.

Malia is here for integration, embodiment, soft skills, digesting intergenerational and collective trauma, hanging in nuance and dissolving "boxes." She is a facilitator of DEIA with an emphasis in healing racialized and structural trauma, accessibility and belonging for all bodies. This passion stemmed from moving through life in a nuance body that felt resistant to believing the world existed in binaries. Always questioning and being curious, she challenges they way our bodies remember, the way we think and the way we collectively care for one another in an approachable and playful way. She invites embodied exploration for individual and collective processing to support the progress for wider cultural change. My multitudinal lineage grew from Chinese, Swedish, British and African roots. My Asian-American mother and white father’s marriage was not approved by grandmother, a mixed chinese, black and white woman, who wanted her to marry another Asian man. My grandmother, as a mixed woman, never felt like she belonged. With this experience, she leaned into deep assimilation, seeked simplicity, sameness. But through this love I was born. My body is not in sameness, it is not in simplicity, it will not check off a box. I have felt marginalizations and received privilege through the color of my skin. I have always felt like a bridge of sorts, conjoining complexities and seeking exploration of how my body is mirror of all things coming together.

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.

Cassie Thornton is changing. In the apocalypse, everything must change, including us and the work we value and how we value things. We call Cassie an artist because we don't have a better title for someone working this hard on invisible stuff, like changing. But in another time, she might have been called a janitor, one in a long line of descendents of Janus –two faced god of transitions, time and passages– in Ancient Roman myth. Cassie has come to clean up the messes of her confused, lonely and dysfunctional family, the beneficiaries of the western empires. A two-faced catalyst, Cassie works in at least two ways to clean up some of the old colonial and capitalist garbage lying around our collective psychic architecture. First, using good-natured practices she has developed including The Hologram, she helps groups and individuals build social infrastructure with trust, integrity and communication that will naturally evict hierarchies and toxic uses of power. This work includes workshops, consulting, and lectures about care, debt and crisis. This work can live independently or can be the groundwork for the second type of work, which includes sharp and incisive political art about the absurdity of our most sacred social structures (power, privilege, financialization and security) on a burning planet. This work has recently included writing extensively about The Flat White Dimension, attending a tech conference as a working class elder from the future, or turning a Swiss Spa into a place that transforms privilege into something useful. Cassie wrote a popular book called The Hologram published by Pluto Press, and helped launch an international social movement where all caregivers are cared for. She is also a steward for a bar that is secretly a social clinic in Berlin.

Aerin Dunford is a network-weaver and connector of people, ideas and organizations. She’s a writer, upcycling artist, urban gardener and yoga instructor. Aerin is the great-granddaughter of Mormon pioneers and the daughter of baby-boomer parents who discovered that Mormonism wasn’t really their thing, leaving her a state of semi-exile given the religio-social-cultural backdrop of her childhood. Over the years, Aerin has been claiming her weirdness (a rare mix of prudishness with explosive experimental impulses) more and more. She believes that the work of unlearning and unpacking Western value-systems and indoctrination, and decolonizing the mind are vitally important in these strange end-times. Aerin is an independent consultant at Coquixa Consultores using El Arte del Liderazgo Participativo and other participative approaches as a basis for her work with organizations and groups of all kinds. Since the death and stillbirth of her son in 2018, Aerin has been called to work with grief in new ways; she has been reflecting, writing and convening others to metabolize loss together.

Aimee Wilson (they/ them) serves as Founder and Executive Director of Únashay, a grief sanctuary in the high desert of New Mexico that offers land-based (and mobile/ online) presence, shelter, creative arts, and community care for the grieving. Aimee presently oversees únashay’s offerings, which is mostly a lot of listening and quiet steps. At heart, they are an artist, with music being their primary language, having written, performed and recorded two albums. They have served under many roles, as singer, writer, Philadelphia social worker, community organizer, fundraiser, ayurvedic health counselor, and group facilitator for houseless women, LGBTQ2SI+ community, and various grieving circles. After much intimate experience with loss, and decades of work within a system that doesn’t take care of the grieving, Aimee was moved to summon únashay. They currently study extensively with Megan Devine of Refuge in Grief, and dwell in New Mexico with wolf kin, and chosen family, tending the sanctuary and writing music.

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.