7AM Saturday and Sunday, Conf Rm 1

Our Hatha Yoga and Mindfulness Meditation class is rooted in teaching the practitioner how to use slow, gentle, and mindful movement alongside breath awareness and control to release tension while fostering alignment and inward stillness. The 60-minute session is guided by Demetrius Napolitano, a leading yoga and meditation teacher whose class is challenging enough for daily practitioners but also gentle enough for beginners. 

Demetrius T. Napolitano | 
Fostering Meditation, CEO 
929-736-8640
(Pronouns: He, His, Him)

fosteringmeditation.org

"Be where your feet are." 
― Unknown 

10:15AM on Saturday, Conf Rm 1-3

Description: 
1. Understanding Worth Ethic: The workshop will begin by exploring the concept of "worth ethic" and its significance. Participants would discuss how worth ethic encompasses self-worth, self-value, and personal empowerment.

2. Recognizing Unique Experiences: The workshop will acknowledge and validate the unique experiences of those who have experienced the foster care system. It will create a safe space for participants to share their stories and discuss how these experiences have shaped their sense of self-worth and personal values.

3. Challenging Societal Narratives: The workshop will address the societal narratives and stereotypes that can impact the self-worth of the participants based on their lived experiences in the foster care system. Participants will engage in discussions and activities to challenge these narratives and build a positive and empowering self-perception.

Other areas of focus include:

Cultivating Self-Compassion and Self-Acceptance
Defining Personal Values and Priorities
Building Supportive Networks
Continued Support and Resources

Key Take Aways: By participating in this workshop, those with lived experiences will have the opportunity to define and strengthen their worth ethic. They will gain tools, insights, and a supportive community to foster self-worth, embrace unique experiences, and navigate personal and professional lives with confidence and purpose while doing the necessary, impactful work for the populations that they serve.

Trainer: Dr. Leah Angel Daniel is a changemaker, community developer, business strategist, author, speaker, and advocate. She is the founder and CEO of Fostering Greatness Inc, a Buffalo-based nonprofit that works to support transitioning foster care youth, young adults, and alumni of color in western New York. Leah is an alumna of the foster system and is passionate about ensuring that youth with foster system experience have the skills and support they need to succeed.

Leah has partnered with organizations in the Buffalo area to address the housing, employment and mental health struggles of youth and young adults. She is also working with organizations to bring education, college, and vocational support to ensure the inclusion of students who are forgotten, underserved, underemployed, unemployed, and overlooked.

Leah just wrote her second book, a memoir, I Shall Not Be Moved, My Extraordinary Journey From Trauma To Triumph where she addresses issues such as abuse, unaddressed mental health within Black and Brown families, concrete support in times of need and community engagement.

Dr. Leah Angel Daniel
Founder and CEO
Leah@fosteringgreatnessinc.org
www.fosteringgreatnessinc.org
716-228-3824

(Pick 1) 2PM on Saturday, Conf Rm 5

Description: This workshop is for parents and guardians who want to use their lived experience with the child welfare system to advocate for the end to family surveillance and separation. In this workshop participants will learn ways to craft effective narrative strategically, using their own experiences to contextualize systemic abuses and advocate for meaningful and effective solutions that center families and children. In addition, participants will learn ways to care for themselves as they engage in advocacy storytelling. Through reflective prompts, discussion, and mindfulness exercises participants will define their own boundaries around when and how to share their experiences and create their own personal self-care toolkit.

Key Take Aways:

• Understand and apply practical approaches to advocacy-based storytelling

• Learn to vet each speaking opportunity and establish your own criteria for when
  and why you are the right person to give testimony.

• Learn to advocate for yourself when asked to speak and define your boundaries.
  By the end of the workshop participants will have crafted a new narrative or refine an existing one that they can share in their next advocacy opportunity along with plan for personal self-care when sharing stories of impact.
  Facilitated by Piper Anderson
  

Trainer: Piper Anderson, Storyteller and Facilitator, is a writer, cultural organizer, coach, and Founder of the social impact consultancy, Create Forward. Through a TED Residency she developed an innovative storytelling project called Mass Story Lab that traveled to thirteen U.S cities bringing together communities to reckon with the impact of incarceration. In 2018, she co-founded the Rikers Public Memory Project, a community truth and healing initiative making the case for reparative justice in NYC through an oral history collection, and multimedia exhibit. Her work have been featured in FastCompany, Audible for Business, Stanford Social Innovation, Huffington Post, and more. She is a New School Writing Democracy Fellow, a Culture Push Fellow for Utopian Practice, a TED Resident, Aspen Ideas Fellow, and a 2021 Radical Imaginational Fellow for The Laundromat Project. Piper has dedicated her life to providing leaders with the generative spaces and tools they need to build thriving communities and organizations. She is a former faculty member at NYU’s Prison Education Program and the Gallatin School.

(Pick 1) 2PM on Saturday, Conf Rm 3

Description: Workshop attendees will exchange thoughts and learn from each other and Ayni Institute about social justice movements and our role and relationship to movements.

1. What is a social justice movement? What is movement building? What role have social justice movements played in history for creating social change and building toward more freedom and justice?

2. Why do we need social justice movements? Why can’t just one person or organization or a handful of people or organizations advocate for change? 

3. What’s the harm to ourselves, our activism, our community, our futures when one person or organization or a handful of people or organizations try to do it all?

4. Seasonality of movements, organizations and people and how this is a framework for understanding: we cannot and should not do everything all the time. We must rely on each other, our comrades, our communities. We must build movement so that we can hold each other through our seasons.

5. Different components of a movement: Movement conflict can arise in many different ways and for many different reasons. Not understanding or appreciating each others theories of change is one of them.
   

Key Take Aways: 

1. Obtain frameworks and concepts to help us increase our knowledge of self in relationship to social justice movement work. 

2. Obtain frameworks, concepts and understandings to help us be in better relationships with people who are in movement work with us.

Trainer: Lisa Sangoi is a mother, daughter, family and community member, and agitator for social change. She is committed to working in service of the reproductive justice movement, having spent the past decade plus supporting and/or leading several advocacy and organizing campaigns to roll back laws, policies and practices that punish mamas for exercising their reproductive decision making.  She founded and co-directed Movement for Family Power for five years, an organization that uses movement lawyering to support grassroots organizing around foster system abolition. She has previously worked at Mothers Outreach Network, NYU Law Family Defense Clinic, National Advocates for Pregnant Women, Women Prison Association Incarcerated Mothers Law Project, and Brooklyn Defender Services Family Defense Practice.