WTR Network Webinar: Dreaming and Becoming with Orland Bishop and Mutima Imani

“Let us invoke the Spirit of our ancestor to understand our highest shared purpose.” – Baba Orland Bishop

Orland Bishop is the founder and director of ShadeTree Multicultural Foundation in Los Angeles, where he has pioneered approaches to urban truces and mentoring at-risk youth that combine new ideas with traditional ways of knowledge. ShadeTree serves as an intentional community of mentors, elders, teachers, artists, healers, and advocates for the healthy development of children and youth. Orland’s work in healing and human development is framed by an extensive study of medicine, naturopathy, psychology, and Indigenous cosmologies, primarily those of South and West Africa.

Resmaa Menakem is an American author and psychotherapist specialising in the effects of trauma on the human body and the relationship between trauma, white body supremacy, and racism in America. He is the founder of Justice Leadership Solutions, a leadership consultancy firm, where he dedicates his expertise to coaching leaders through civil unrest, organizational change and community building. Menakem created Cultural Somatics which utilizes the body and resilence as mechanisms for growth. He is the best selling author of “My Grandmother’s Hands: Racializes Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies” and was described by On Being’s Krista Tippet “activates the wisdom of ancestors and a very new science, about how all of us carry the history and traumas behind everything we collapse into the word ”race” in our bodies.”

Bayo Akomolafe is the Chief Curator of The Emergence Network, a speaker, author, fugitive neo-materialist com-post-activist public intellectual and Yoruba poet. But when he takes himself less seriously, he is a father to Alethea and Kyah, and the grateful life-partner to Ej as well as the sworn washer of nightly archives of dishes. The convener of the concepts of ‘postactivism’, ‘transraciality’ and ‘ontofugitivity’, Bayo is a widely celebrated international speaker, teacher, public intellectual, essayist and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak. He is also the Executive Director and Chief Curator for The Emergence Network and host of the online postactivist course, ‘We Will dance with Mountains.’

Mutima Imani is a social justice visionary, reverend, master trainer and facilitator working to heal the heart of humanity by providing 21st century tools for personal/professional development and transformation. As a global diversity specialist, she is highly skilled at bringing diverse groups together to practice heart centeredness, resolve conflicts, transmute old wounds and establish new relationships where all are seen and honored. Mutima is a trainer for the Work that Reconnects International Facilitation Development Program called the Spiral Journey.