CONSULTING & COACHING
Who I’ve Worked With
Past Work
Greetings, salaams and welcome. Thank you for taking the time to read a bit more about my life and work. We are woven with so many layers, lands, identities, relationships, systems, values. I envision myself as a cultural steward, one who explores and uplifts community and personal core values through an equity and justice lens, to collaboratively support the healing and transformation of relationships, structures and practices to reflect those values. Working 1-1, I see myself as a witness, sitting alongside you with compassion to encourage, reflect, guide (when appropriate), and remain curious. I’ve completed 240 hours of trauma healing certifications including Somatic EMDR and Mind/Body Life Coaching, and 3 years of practice integrating these particular methodologies and modalities.
With 20 years of immersion in postcolonial studies, education, social justice, community building, somatic healing, conflict transformation, music and the performing arts, my focus over the last decade has centered on community healing and restorative justice, particularly within learning communities. I've honed my experience through culture building, structural transformation, and partnerships with youth, educators, administrators, individuals and community organizations committed to anti-racism and community healing. My skills encompass various community transformation practices including community building, facilitating addressing harm and conflict processes, support and accountability circles, healing and creativity spaces, and guiding institutional and cultural change. I facilitate trainings and workshops tailored to the needs of communities, and engage people in classrooms, conferences, and other diverse spaces. As a musician and performer, I advocate for social justice and utilize expressive arts as potent tools for healing and transformation.
In the last decade I’ve held transformative music sessions with incarcerated people inside prisons, jails and juvenile halls, taught classes in universities and schools, worked with Oakland Unified School District as a restorative justice coordinator, taught voice as a full-time middle-school teacher in a public classroom, and served as the Restorative Women and Girls Coordinator with Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (RJOY) where I held weekly intergenerational community healing circles, co-facilitated trainings for professionals and partnered with staff to lead various community organizing events to end mass incarceration. I’ve contracted with The Teaching Well as a multi-racial healing affinity group facilitator with educators across lands and borders, and worked with UCSF Children’s Hospital to co-write a nature-based healing curriculum for families. From 2021-2023 I served Saint Joseph Notre Dame high school as an Interim Dean of Students then transitioning to Personal and Academic Counselor. Since 2020 I’ve worked with over 25 schools providing restorative justice training, community building and engagement, professional developments and coaching.
I currently work with RJOY as the Training Manager, Circle Keeper and Life Coach. Since 2020 I’ve partnered with John Muir Health’s Community Violence Prevention program to co-create their first Restorative Justice Initiative in East Contra Costa County, partnered with Peer Advocates Training and Consulting as an educator, as well as others. At the heart of my work is a commitment to social justice and remembrance, infusing radical joy, compassion, healing and doing my best to uplift one another's dignity. I value the art of celebrating our wins, making space for what is emergent, acknowledging and healing wounds to the best of our ability, and actively creating the world we want to pass along to future generations. I hope the transformative power of restorative cultures continues to seed and grow in joyful, healing and nourishing ways across borders, lands and peoples.
Approach
I provides transformative & restorative practices, facilitation, consulting & coaching internationally and locally, based on on unceded Chochenyo, Mwekma, Oholone land also known as Oakland and the East Bay.
I support schools, groups, individuals and organizations who are willing to remember, transform, build and nurture values-centered relationships, community, practices & systems.
For me, remembrance is a foundation of this work and acknowledges:
- we are all a work in progress and remembrance is an intentional, on-going practice of returning to what is love and justice on a regular basis.
- healing is needed and healing invites us to transform. it gives us the capacity to nurture
ourselves and each other more deeply; - collective liberation: we can co-create community ecosystems that are just and loving;
- the on-going effects of colonization—the structural & historical harms such as racism, sexism, classism, carceral systems & state violence—and how these affect us all in different ways, depending on who we are;
Honoring
My parents were born in Kenema and Pangoma, Sierra Leone. They were raised in the same village of northern Lebanon called Rahbe. My mom told me that my grandmother kept their doors open and unlocked with an extra pot of something delicious to eat on the stove in case neighbors came by. My grandfather was known as a man of great wisdom. So much so that people in the village would seek counsel from him with problems they had. He even helped families through disputes they had.
I inherited hospitality and the desire for peace-making from my family. I am grateful for them, the ways they held onto joy at every turn because they knew at the end of it all our memories, relationships and love are what we have from this earth. My parents remind me to be the salt ملح and noor نور) light) in this world, as we are spiritually called. This also means admitting when I’m
wrong and to learning to be accountable. It also means to committing to loving myself through the eyes of the Creator, so that I can love others.
I chose the name “salt and noor” to honor part of this legacy and callin
Acknowledgment
I can do this work because of ancestors, elders, youth, mentors, friends, wisdom-keepers and so many of those living as, dedicated to and organizing for indigenous, Black, trans, disabled, immigrant, refugee, economic, environmental, racial and social justice; for global & collective liberation; because of those working toward ending carceral & colonial systems while building emancipatory ones.
I consider myself a life-long learner and never an expert of this work. To me this is never-ending heart work. Culture-shifting work. Personal transformation. Communal alchemy. I learn from each and every practice & process I have been a part of and believe we are all a part of knowledge production.