Racial Identity Development - Ife Lenard
Ife Lenard, MSW, EdM, is an innovative educational leader creating learning communities that thrive. She has a profound commitment to intentional spaces, service-leadership, and building relationships in a different, more human way. Her ability to serve as a catalyst, share stories, unpack thought patterns that sustain harm and deepen practices move people forward in their journey.
For more information, please contact ilenard@themeetinghouseafterschool.org
Identity Development - through an incremental, scaffolded developmental process, teh purpose is the encourage self-awareness and critical reflective practices for all participants while simultaneously examining the cycles of socialization that foster, known and unknown beliefs and values. This therapeutic intervention is designed through the lens of PROP, an acronym for Power, Race, Oppression and Privilege, and affords an opportunity to unpack culture and thinking
Emotional Intelligence - This eight or twelve part workshop/professional development series helps to 1. enrich capacity to be aware of, understand, label, express and manage emotions, 2. broaden ability to relate empathetically with others, 3. use EI to inform decisions and behavior, and lastly 4. adjust and self-regulate in order to adapt to environments or achieve one's goal(s).
Restorative Practices - As a Professional/Personal Learning Community (PLC), participants gather together to connect and embrace the deeper work of learning and creating together –in an experiential way– that’s just the right kind of PLC for today’s leaders and change agents. This series is designed to bolster the awareness in order to 1. advance social-emotional learning (SEL) skill-sets, 2. launch restorative practices and interventions to address the impact of harm and conflict, heal the harm, and restore school/work communities, 3. take part in brave conversations about disparities as they widen their awareness from experiential activities to examine how subtle implicit and explicit biases and barriers either thwart or create equitable and liberated learning spaces, and lastly, 4. support leaders and their teams in rethinking policies and practices, and realign and revise with SEL and restorative approaches that benefit all.
Contemplative Practices cultivate a critical, first-person focus on incorporating daily touch-points - as a reminder to connect to what we find most meaningful. From deep silence, bearing witness and spiritual resourcing to music, body movement, and motivational journaling, contemplative practices are radical in itself. Each practice is transformative in its developing capacity to deepen concentration and quiet the mind in the midst of confusion, chaos, and distraction from daily living.
Positive Parenting - An eight part approach that adopts a developmental life perspective that situates parenting within a socio-historical and motivational context. Parents learn how children and adolescents develop and age within a series of relationships that evolve across time both shaping and being shaped by a host known and unknown, intersecting and overlapping factors. This network of relationships is itself situated at a historical time and cultural location that have a reciprocal influence on children. Positive Parenting provides the foundation knowledge for self-reflective practice with parents in their interactions with environmental factors and social systems - as a way to engage them in ‘motivational and sociological imagination’ about human behavior, resiliency and child development. Deepening parents’ understanding of the impact of the home environment, how to bravely recognize, capture and take advantage of teachable moments with their child/ren generally and at various stages throughout the span of their childhood and/or adolescence.