nurturing the relationship between spirituality and social justice
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Contact us
by e-mail at
leavencenter@leaven.org
by mail at Leaven
P.O. Box 97
Lyons, MI 48851
or by phone at
989/855-2606.
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Upcoming Events
We encourage you to participate in the following events sponsored or led by Leaven. For more information about an event, you may call us at the Leaven Center office, (989) 855-2606, write us at Leaven, P.O. Box 97, Lyons, MI 48851 or e-mail us at leavencenter@leaven.org. The Leaven Center is near Lyons, Michigan, midway between Lansing and Grand Rapids.
There are two ways for you to register. You can register on-line by VISA, Discover, or MasterCard, paying the full amount of the registration fee by credit card. Or you can print out a registration form and send it by mail to our post office box. If you register by mail, you have a choice of making the specified deposit to hold your space, or you may send a check for the entire registration fee. Partial scholarships are available for all events.
Leaven Center Calendar
June 13 -15. Work Camp at The Leaven Center
June 20-22. A Healing History: Drawing Strength from Ancestral Wells ~ A Workshop and Retreat for African American Women, with Rachel E. Harding
June 22-26. Four Day Writers' Retreat for Women of Color, self-directed
July 10-12. Honoring Our Stories: The Personal Work of Social Change, with Jill Bedard, Melanie Morrison and Dionardo Pizaña
July 24-27. Getting Real! For Boys 12-15 Years Old, with Neil Byrne, William Copeland, Joe Reilly, and Alex Wilson
July 28 - 31. GrrrlFest ~ An Annual Event Just for Girls, with Sarah Cleaver, Jessi De La Cruz, Chris Pereira, and Naadirah Nicole Shapely
August 13-17. Telling the Truth About Our Lives ~ The Art of Autobiographical Writing, with Anya Achtenberg and Demetria Martinez
October 25-27. Doing Our Own Work: A Seminar for Anti-Racist White People, with Melanie Morrison and Aaron Wilson-Ahlstrom. (continues December 5-7 and January 16-18, 2009)
June 13 -15, 2008
Work Camp at The Leaven Center
Have you been yearning to get out of your routine and try out some new skills? The Leaven Center Work Camp may be just the opportunity you need. We have lots to do on these 25 acres. We will be doing repairs on the accessible trail. Some of us may work on carpentry projects; those who love plants can help tend Leaven’s garden; tree and general ground maintenance are always needed; and there may be repair and touch-up jobs in the Lodge and Farm House.
You are invited to stay in the Lodge or pitch a tent. Come for a day, part of the day, or the whole time. In addition to working, there will be time for cookouts, singing by the campfire, and kicking back together. The work camp is open to all ages and will get underway after lunch on Friday and end with lunch on Sunday.
Please contact us (989) 855-2606; leavencenter@leaven.org; or Leaven. P.O. Box 97, Lyons, MI 48851, to let us know when you will be arriving and how long you wish to stay.
Event is gender inclusive
Time: Friday, 1 pm – Sunday, 1 pm
Cost: Free
To print and send registration form
June 20-22, 2008
A Healing History: Drawing Strength from Ancestral Wells
~ A Workshop and Retreat for African American Women
For women in all parts of the Afro-Atlantic diaspora, religion and culture have been keys to our sustenance, our creativity and our continuation in the face of great traumas and odds. Whether we draw from the spirituals and gospel hymns we learned as children in towns and cities of the USA, the jazz and soul that girds and thrills us, or from the enchanting stories and danced rituals of the Caribbean and Afro-Latin America, we are beneficiaries of the spiritual power that our ancestors embedded deep in the culture. We can access that power and use it for guidance and strength in our own lives.
This workshop emphasizes the history of African American women as a sacred history, a resource for compassionate social and personal transformation. By examining our own personal and collective stories (in both joy and trouble), we will seek the resources of spirit, creativity and grace that sustained generations before us and that are available to us as well.
The retreat also includes reflections on the orishas, the ancient West African cosmic energies who have fed ritual traditions such as Brazilian Candomblé, Cuban Santeria/Lucumí and Haitian Vodou.
Our ancestors entrusted us with a great legacy of healing, strength, and deep mystic and creative power. Through our own stories, those of our “veteran” elder sisters, as well as through poetry, movement, meditation/prayer and healing therapies, we will find ways to tap more deeply into the resources our foreparents gave us. The ancestral wells.
Event for African American women
Leader: Rachel E. Harding
Time: Friday, 7 pm - Sunday, 1 pm
Cost: $185 ($50 deposit; $135 balance due)Rachel E. Harding, PhD, is a historian, writer, and consultant specializing in religious traditions of the Afro-Atlantic diaspora and the intersections of faith, culture, and activism in contemporary U.S. social justice movements. She is author of A Refuge in Thunder: Candomblé and Alternative Spaces of Blackness, a history of the Afro-Brazilian religion, Candomblé; as well as many other essays on Afro-Atlantic religion. She is also a poet and has published work in Callaloo, Chelsea, Feminist Studies, The International Review of African American Art, Hambone, and in several anthologies. Rachel teaches part-time at the Iliff School of Theology and writes from her home in Denver.
To register on-line and pay by credit card
June 22-26, 2008
Four Day Writers’ Retreat for Women of Color
There are writers who write for fame. And there are writers who write because we need to make sense of the world we live in; writing is a way to clarify, to interpret, to reinvent. ~ bell hooks
This four day writers’ retreat is for women of color who desire a safe place of peace and beauty to write in order “to make sense of the world” – whether through journaling, poetry, nonfiction, or fiction. For many women of color writing has been a means of survival and revolution in a world rife with sexism, racism, classism, homophobia, and ableism. And the power of the word has not fallen through our fingers; women of color have used their pens to expose injustice and their unique life experiences. It is true: we write because we have to.
This retreat will be a time for us to support each other in the bringing forth of our truths through the written word. If you often find that you do not write as much as you would like because of lack of free time – this is the retreat for you.
Each woman will have a private room, if solitude is what you need. If you prefer to write outside, there are picnic tables near the Lodge and benches by the river, stream, and the pond. You will be free to explore the 25 acres of land with walking trails, woods, a spring-fed stream, and 1,000 feet of river frontage. This retreat is self-led so you will be able to spend your time as you see fit. Food for breakfast and lunch will be available for you to make your own meals. There is a sit-down dinner, prepared by the “house mother.” After dinner, we will gather for a time to read any piece of writing that you would like to share with the group. Due to space limitations, enrollment is limited to nine women.
Leader: self-directed
Time: Sunday, 7 pm – Thursday, 2 pm
Cost: $200 ($50 deposit; $150 balance due)
July 10-12, 2008
Honoring Our Stories: The Personal Work of Social Change
Imagine... if you had abundant time and space to...
- Be with others who share a deep and abiding commitment to social change
- Gapple with issues of privilege and oppression, exploring how they affect our lives personally and professionally
- Reflect --- with compassion and clarity --- on where we have been and where we are going in our work for social justice
- Engage in individual and group reflection about what is life-giving; what is depleting
- Mourn the losses and defeats with people who can hold the anger, grief, and vulnerability
- Celebrate the breakthroughs and victories with a community that can share the laughter and joy
- Wander the meadows, woods, and orchards on 20 beautiful acres of land
- Be productive in a different way that allows yourself to relish silence, sanctuary, companionship and community.
Too often, we are so absorbed in the never-ending work of social change, we grow forgetful of our need for each other as we strain to sustain hope in isolation. This retreat offers a different way. If your spirit longs for rejuvenation, deeper connection with other activists, and the nurture of a beautiful natural setting, we invite you to be part of this unique three-day retreat.
Leaders: Jill Bedard, Melanie Morrison and Dionardo Pizaña
Time: Thursday, 9:30 am - Saturday, 4:30 pm
Cost: $250 ($75 deposit + $175 balance due)
Jill Bedard is Executive Director of The Leaven Center and an educator and activist with years of experience promoting social change in her community and beyond. She is a Sault St. Marie Ojibwa tribal member long committed to Native American issues and multi-cultural education. As a Native American Traditionalist, Jill believes in the healing and restorative powers of nature and Mother Earth. She carries an awareness of the connectedness of all creation and the necessity of maintaining spiritual balance in the Sacred Hoop of life that embraces all things.
Melanie Morrison is Executive Director of Allies for Change (www.alliesforchange.org) and a seasoned anti-oppression educator and activist. She is passionate about working with individuals and organizations to better understand the connections between systemic oppressions and to nurture authentic relationship across differences such as race, gender, abilities, and sexual orientation. She believes it is possible to grow ever more aware of the depth and complexity of injustice without surrendering our capacity for compassion, joy, and hope.
Dionardo Pizaña is the diversity and personnel specialist for Michigan State University Extension (MSUE). He has 16 years experience developing, teaching, and facilitating diversity education programs through MSUE, Adrian College, and Siena Heights University. Dionardo is a nationally-recognized, highly sought-after multicultural consultant, speaker and trainer and has received numerous awards that recognize his outstanding accomplishments.
July 24-27, 2008
Getting Real! For Boys 12-15 Years Old
Getting Real! is an opportunity for young men between the ages of 12 and 15 to enjoy a fun and enriching weekend experience in a supportive and positive environment. Over the past five years this program has encouraged young men to build healthy relationships with themselves, each other, their families and communities, and the earth. In this climate of brotherhood, participants learn from each other, enjoy the outdoors, discover ways to handle the challenges that young men face in the world today, and have fun together!
Activities include drumming, shelter building, group games, creative writing, fire-building, personal reflection time, hiking, and free time. As we play, learn, and have fun together, we will share our own experiences and celebrate our diversity, enriching our journeys towards adulthood and celebrating our life paths.
Getting Real! provides a unique opportunity for young men to grow and learn together, and to enjoy being themselves in a space just for boys. This time together will be guided by Joe Reilly, William Copeland, Neil Byrne, and Alex Wilson, each of whom has extensive experience in youth leadership and strong enthusiasm for nurturing meaningful learning experiences with young people. At the request of boys from previous years, we have extended this year’s Getting Real! to make it a four-day event.
Event for boys 12-15
Leaders: William Copeland, Joe Reilly, Neil Byrne, and Alex Wilson
Time: Thursday, 3 pm – Sunday, 3 pm
Cost: $215 ($50 deposit; $165 balance due)
Neil Byrne is currently serving as the Coordinator of Service Learning Opportunities at The Leaven Center. His work here includes the coordination of a program designed to offer volunteers and participants opportunities for leadership development and to provide them a supportive environment in which to build authentic relationships across differences through service. Neil brings to this work first hand experience with, and a passion to interrupt, the cycle of inherited damage that occurs when men follow and impose a narrow definition of manhood. He is committed to supporting and advancing social justice, and has completed anti-oppression trainings at The Leaven Center addressing sexism, racism and disability rights.
William Copeland is a poet and cultural organizer. He has presented workshops at schools and programs including Detroit, Ypsilanti, Ann Arbor, Adrian, Romulus, Highland Park, middle and high schools in Minnesota, and Michigan’s Prison Creative Arts Program. He is a board member of the Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership, one of the founders of the Detroit Artist-Activist Community Dialogues, and a consultant for nonprofits on using art to amplify their messages. He works as a Program Director for University of Michigan’s SERVE, advising college students in community service, learning, and social justice projects.
Joe Reilly is a singer, songwriter, and environmental educator at the Leslie Science Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In addition to teaching and performing his music to audiences throughout the Midwest, Joe leads talking circles for boys at American Indian Health and Family Services in Detroit and writes music with the Scholars Together Learning Community in Royal Oak. Joe has offered instructional and inspirational workshops on songwriting, guitar, and environmental justice for a variety of communities. His way of working with people is empowering and educational.
Alex Wilson served as an AmeriCorps*VISTA member at The Leaven Center, where he coordinated the Accessible Trails Project and helped design the first Getting Real event for teenage boys. Most of his work with Men’s issues has focused on youth and young adults. Alex’s interest and work in Men’s related issues, however, spreads into a variety of areas. As a graduate student in music at the University of Chicago, Alex is particularly interested in understanding music as a lived cultural experience. This includes considering the ways in which music and musical performance reveal and enforce social power relations. Alex values opportunities for Men to come together to grow and learn from each other, taking time to address personal healing and well-being as well as problems surrounding imbalances of social power.
July 28-July 31, 2008
GrrrlFest ~ An Annual Event Just for Girls Age 10-14
A time for girls, ages 10-14, to be together engaging in activities like: creating music, art, and poetry, having fun outdoors, making pizzas, playing games, and lots more. At previous GrrrlFests, there have also been valuable conversations about friendships, developing a girl’s own opinions about beauty, making healthy choices, and affirming unique gifts and talents. This event will be girls’ space – a place to share dreams and talk about what’s great and what’s hard about being a girl.
The retreat will bring together young women from different parts of the United States and Canada and will be led by four feminist women who understand how crucial it is for girls to develop positive and healthy self-images and form relationships with women who can serve as mentors. At the request of girls from previous years, we have extended this year’s GrrrlFest to make it a four-day event.
Event for girls 10-14
Leaders: Sarah Cleaver, Jessi De La Cruz, Chris Pereira, and Naadirah-Nicole Shapeley
Time: Monday, 3 pm – Thursday, 1 pm
Cost: $215 ($50 deposit + $165 balance due)
Sarah Cleaver is a former Leaven Center staff member who lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She helped to lead the first GrrrlFest at The Leaven Center in August 2004. She co-facilitated and participated in various workshops during the two and a half years she spent at Leaven, but she shares that GrrrlFest was definitely a huge highlight. Sarah has spent the past three years writing music and touring the country as half of the duo Nervous But Excited. She is greatly looking forward to coming back to The Leaven Center this summer to help lead this event.
Jessi De La Cruz is a Leaven Center staff member. She has worked with youth in a number of non-profit groups since graduating from Michigan State University with a degree in journalism in 1998. Most recently, she co-facilitated an Alateen group, which is a support group for youth who have been affected by the disease of alcoholism. She enjoys writing poetry, hanging out with her cat, Parker, and listening to music. She is currently working on her certification as a massage therapist and applying for graduate studies in the area of social work. This will be her second year leading GrrrlFest.
Chris Pereira helped to lead GrrrlFest in the summer of 2007. She graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a BA in Women’s Studies and Political Science and moved to Michigan to pursue graduate school. She is about to start work on her dissertation in the Curriculum, Teaching, and Educational Policy program at Michigan State University. Chris is passionate about social justice and peace education, dancing, poetry and living life to the fullest, and is excited to be a part of the GrrrlFest team again this year.
Naadirah-Nicole Shapeley lives in the Chicago area, where she works as a pre-school teacher and Diversity Advocate. She holds a BS in Family Community Services from Michigan State University. Naadirah-Nicole grew up in a multi-racial household as a transracially adopted child. She is passionate about all forms of social justice, especially the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, and is a poet and writer of reflective prose. Among her favorite activities are times spent outdoors and with her family that is scattered from North Carolina to British Columbia.
August 13-17, 2008
Telling the Truth about Our Lives
~ The Art of AutobiographyOur lives are works-in-progress. How we write about our lives allows us to feel our way forward into the future and to locate where we are as individuals set in a particular historical moment. Putting our stories into writing helps to make more vivid a story “map” that spiderwebs through time and space, clarifying and deepening our own stories by revealing their relationship to the stories of others.
This workshop will give you the tools you need to tell your story in the context of a supportive community. We will do many writing explorations to bring forth this rich storytelling capacity within each of us. We will examine issues of memory, how we reframe a story with each telling, working to discover its meaning and power to heal on both the personal and communal level. We will also explore ways to honor/write about that which we can’t remember – due to factors such as trauma or unknown family history – so that the struggle with memory, where useful, can become part of our narrative.
There will be room for many kinds of writing and many kinds of writers. We will read, write, and share our writing with one another (by choice, never by obligation). Through the process of our own writing, as well as listening to the words of other writers, we will give birth to the stories we have always wanted to write.
Leaders: Anya Achtenberg and Demetria Martinez
Time: Wednesday, 7 pm – Sunday, 1 pm
Cost: $325 ($100 deposit and $225 balance due)
Anya Achtenberg lives in Minnesota, teaches creative writing and is creator of the Writing for Social Change: Re-Dream a Just World workshops. Her numerous literary prizes in fiction and poetry, include Coppola’s Zoetrope: All-Story, New Letters, Southern Poetry Review and Another Chicago Magazine. Her works include: The Stone of Language (West End Press, 2004); The Stories of Devil-girl, (novella on CD, 2003); and a completed novel, Floor Plan of Paradise, excerpted in Harvard Review. She is writing a novel centered on a Cambodian woman born as the bombing of Cambodia begins.
Demetria Martinez of Albuquerque, New Mexico, is the author of a novel, Mother Tongue, winner of a Western States Book Award for fiction; and three collections of poetry, including Breathing Between the Lines. Her autobiographical essays, Confessions of a Berlitz-Tape Chicana, was the winner of the 2006 International Latino Book Award in the category of Best Biography. She is summer writing faculty at the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at UMass Boston. She lectures widely and writes a column about social justice issues for the National Catholic Reporter.
October 25-27, 2008, December 5-7, 2008, and January 16-18, 2009
Doing Our Own Work: A Seminar for Anti-Racist White People
Doing Our Own Work is an intensive seminar for white people who seek to deepen their commitment to confronting and challenging white racism where they live and work. It is our experience and conviction that those of us who are white need to "do our own work" -- educating ourselves, confronting white supremacy, holding each other accountable, and demonstrating good faith as we seek to build genuine and lasting coalitions with people of color. Doing Our Own Work seminar is designed as a supplement to, not a substitute for, contexts where people of diverse races and ethnicities discuss and strategize together how racism can be challenged.
Utilizing input from the leaders, reading assignments, videos, group discussion, and structured exercises, we will explore the following topics and issues:
- Individual racism, institutional racism, and cultural racism
- White privilege and unearned advantage
- Claiming and shaping an anti-racist identity
- How to be an effective anti-racist ally
- Discerning our spiritual resources for change
- Practicing the skills of interrupting racism
- Strategies for institutional change
Providing more than 45 hours of "class time," the seminar utilizes an action/reflection method of learning: our study and reflection will be grounded in anti-racist action and our action will be strengthened and refined by reflection, study, and conversation. The action/reflection components of this seminar will include:
- Identification by each participant of a "sphere of influence" or constituency that will serve as her/his focus during the seminar;
- Assessment of where and how racism is present in this constituency;
- Development of an action plan and time table that identifies ways that the participant can work, in collaboration with others, to challenge white racism and strengthen anti-racist commitment in her/his constituency;
- Checking in with the group to receive feedback and encouragement and to amend the action plan where appropriate;
- Keeping a journal of daily experiences, insights, concerns, and questions regarding racism and anti-racism.
The facilitators are committed to working with the participants to create a respectful, loving, and truth-telling environment where we may bring our whole selves to this vitally important work.
Leaders: Melanie Morrison and Aaron Wilson-Ahlstrom
Time: Friday, 7 pm – Sunday, 1 pm
Cost: $600 ($100 deposit + $500 balance due) The balance may be paid in installments over the course of the seminar. The cost includes program, resource materials, lodging, and meals for three weekends.
Aaron Wilson-Ahlstrom is a teacher who is passionate about the role of schools in working for social justice. He works for the Henry Ford Learning Institute, a small non-profit that is developing a network of small, innovative charter schools based on the Henry Ford Academy in Dearborn, Michigan. Aaron believes that racism is present everywhere and, while it does not oppress white people, it does damages them by making white people complicit in the oppression of people of color. He sees anti-racism work as critically important if white people are regain their collective humanity. In addition to being a facilitator of Doing Our Own Work, Aaron is a community training partner with the Michigan State University Extension multicultural awareness program.