co-facilitators

Erin Caitlin Sweeney (they/she) is an energy worker, writer, dancer, student of herbalism, and group facilitator. They grew up in the woods on Susquehannock land and, after 16 years away living and loving in New York City and Oakland, CA, recently returned to the land that raised them, currently known as Lancaster, PA. 

Erin is curious about how community and land shape us, the relationship between personal and collective healing, and how building relationships of connection and reciprocity to place, people, and ancestors can support us on the path to collective liberation. 

Erin has been a practitioner of ancestral connection and energy healing since 2017 after completing their master's degree in Integrative Health Studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies. There, they studied ancestral medicine with Atava Garcia Swiecicki and Kimmy Johnson, guided imagery with Leslie Davenport, and met their reiki teacher and friend, Angela Omulepu. She has facilitated classes and workshops such as Ancestral Grief & Wisdom, Ancestral Healing for White Folks, Ancestral Storytelling, and more. In addition to these, Erin co-facilitated antiracist white accountability groups with Thrive East Bay and co-facilitated Liberation Academy for white healing practitioners with Sage Hayes at Genesis Healing Institute. Recently, they’ve been a practitioner with Decolonizing Wealth Project's Healing Collective, and learning more about herbalism and the folk healing traditions of their Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors with Rooted Home Herbalism. 

Erin spends their time talking with plants, reading European folktales and myths (currently diving deep with the shapeshifters), going on long, meandering walks with her partner and pup, Frankenstein, and spending two nights a week having the most fun ever teaching a strenth-training dance class at Move It Studio. You can learn more about Erin and their work here. 

CREATOR, FACILITATOR, HEALER, WRITER, VISIONARY

Kusum Crimmel’s work is to inspire people to live more deeply and firmly into accountability and integrity, thereby accessing higher levels of joy and embodied love.  She is a facilitator of transformational change and creates space for truth, (re)conciliation, and healing to reclaim our humanity and the humanity of others.   She has spent nearly two decades working with teenagers in non-profits and public schools.  Eleven of those years were spent at Oakland Tech High School where she built up a vibrant and highly acclaimed, peer-based Restorative Justice program. Some of her students made a video to highlight this work here.  She is an LCSW, has 10 years of rape-crisis counseling experience with San Francisco Women Against Rape and more than 8 plus years of training with Generative Somatics, expanding her understanding of trauma and the impact of interpersonal, generational and socially pervasive trauma (racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, etc.).  

Her formal racial justice work began about 20 years ago with her initial participation in the Challenging White Supremacy Workshops, a training program led by Sharon Martinas. While working with racially diverse youth in the non-profit sector, she collaborated with three other white women, which expanded into a powerful crew of white educators, and built Y-Step: Youth Step Toward Addressing Racism, a racial-justice training program for white youth in the Bay Area (2003-2012).  She’s facilitated workshops & presentations in conferences such as the White Privilege Conference, Loving Decision Conference, and the National Association of Community & Restorative Justice National Conference as well as organizations such as Japanese Community Youth Council, California Institute of Integral Studies,  SEEDS, Seneca Center, SOAR for Youth, The People’s Conservatory, the San Quentin Prison Interfaith Restorative Justice Roundtable, Head Royce School, Earthjustice, and Mission Preparatory School.  She has designed and facilitated public programs such as, Dissecting Whiteness in Urban Education, a two day workshop; Restorative Justice Circle Series for White Folks in Urban Education, a 10 week program; “Healing Circles for Europeans Who Have Become White,” a 6 month drop-in space.  She has also been a part of a collaboration of restorative justice practitioners to put together “Using a Culturally Responsive Lens to Build Community.”  Kusum is currently doing restorative justice consulting work with SEEDS Conflict Resolution Center, training facilitation with Fred Finch Youth Center, is a co-lead with the teen program at Heart & Soul Center of Light and is a new board member with The People’s Conservatory, youth arts program.  She has been a long time member, previously a performing member, of the Brazilian arts organization, Fogo Na Roupa.

Kusum is a proud parent to a fourteen-year-old singer, dancer and brilliant thinker.  She is auntie to a bright and courageous five year old, and an ongoing mentor to countless young people who she has connected with over the last twenty years. Dance is her favorite form of therapy and she loves to laugh until her belly hurts.  

Sage Hayes (she/he/they)               is a devoted healing arts practitioner who believes wholeheartedly in individual and collective transformation.  Exploring lineage, embodied presence and emergent relational care are the threads braided together in Sage’s work.  Sage is a somatic experiencing practitioner of 17 years, a bodyworker with a massage and biodynamic craniosacral therapy background and a student of family/systemic constellations.   Most recently Sage has been a lead teaching assistant with the Somatic Experiencing Institute, has been a practitioner with the Decolonizing Wealth Healing Collective and a facilitator with Healing Cycles of Harm program.  Sage is also beginning to co-lead restorative nature retreats for healing practitioners.

Before entering the field of somatics, Sage worked as a consultant and facilitator in schools and organizations towards creating proactive safer spaces of inclusion, equity and kindness for LBGTQQA+ people.  Sage’s personal experiences of being trans and adopted greatly inform their passion towards creating conditions, both one-on-one and in educational spaces, which nurture access and belonging for all participants.   Sage co-created a wellness center in Portland, Maine called Justice in the Body, a collaboration project which explored the dynamic question of how can we be free in our bodies in an unfree world?  From the micro to the macro, from the past to the future, sage believes healing begins and ends in the now, with care and in collaboration with forces of wholeness much bigger than us. 

Sage has published a handful of articles including in Frontiers Journal In Psychiatry & Mental Health:  Somatic Experiencing® Informed Therapeutic Group for the Care and Treatment of Biopsychosocial Effects on Gender Diverse Identity,  in Massage Magazine:  "These 4 Essential Skills Will Help You Practice Trauma Informed Massage" and in Somatic Experiences in Psychotherapeutic and Body Therapy Trauma Treatment: Building Courage and Capacity.  Somatic Practice with Marginalized Populations (avail upon request).  Also a frequent guest at conferences and podcasts, Sage spoke at the Embodied Trauma Conference in 2020, the Sex Gets Real podcast on Embodiment, pleasure, and safety, and at the Pecha Kucha event in Portland Maine with a creative talk called Look for It. 

When not traveling you can find Sage exploring the cusps of introversion and extroversion living on Peaks Island in Casco Bay, Portland, Maine, on the northeast coast of Turtle Island (U.S.). Sage spends a lot of time outside with their mountain cur pup named Thelma Jean connecting to tidal and seasonal rhythms. Sage is also a nature photographer, you can check out their work here.