Consent is how we operationalize liberation; consent is a framework for collaborative decision making across power lines and differences.
Deadline to Register: May 22nd 2024
The course takes place in June + July of 2024 with continued access to the content for a full year.
bluelight academy's Gender Liberation class is an opportunity for folks moving through accountability processes, community educators, advocates, care providers, and people impacted by gender-based violence to explore the roots of violence and frameworks of prevention and response. Through this multimedia course we dive into the history, power dynamics, and systems that perpetuate and uphold gender based violence as well as strategies and tools to practice consent, healing, and harm reduction.
We encourage you to attend this course if you are practicting accountability for harmful behaviors within the umbrella of gender-based violence. Systems of oppression coerce us into behaviors without our consent; this course offers a soft place to land. We create space to unlearn and to relearn strategies for healing our relationship to gender. The course offers content in a cohort model with coaches who are trained fierce supporters and accompany participants in integrating the course material into their day-to-day life. This is a great container to co-learn with your pod, to find an accountability buddy, and supplement an ongoing accountability process.
For education and care providers, this course offers a unique opportunity to move through content that is important to accountability processes centered on gender-based violence. Moving through this course will help providers and creators strengthen their frameworks and processes through queer strategies of addressing harm.
This course is for you if:
- You have experienced gender based violence, homophobia, or transphobia and are looking for supportive community and frameworks to make sense of your experience and identify a path forward
- You have perpetuated gender based violence and are looking for a space to learn the tools and frameworks to support healing and prevent further harm
- You are a parent, caregiver, or teacher who wants to understand how to teach and practice the skills necessary to prevent gender based violence and support queer and trans youth around you
- You are an advocate, peer educator, or support professional working alongside queer and trans people, survivors of violence
- You are a transformative justice, restorative justice, or community accountability practitioner who wants more values aligned tools to address gender based violence
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You are an organizer who believes in ending violence without creating more violence
This course is taught by Spring Up Collective Members
Spring Up is a collective of 11 liberatory educators, care coaches, and Transformative Justice practitioners. After over a decade of practicing consent and intervening in gender based violence in our communities and families we decided to create a platform and connection space for people to learn from one another and the tools that have supported us in our work.
The Gender Liberation course is the first curriculum we ever created and piloted in community. This curriculum began in the form of pop up community workshops in 2013, building into a 6 month fellowship in person with youth leaders in Miami Florida, and ultimately becoming this 6 month course with access for a year. Over the years we have adapted our curriculum based on community questions, feedback, and spaces of collaborative imagination.
Through this 6-week course, you can now get access to the tools and frameworks we have come to rely on in our practice of consent including an in depth analysis of the roots and causes of gender based violence, as well as strategies to practice gender liberation, consent, and healing.
This course is designed as a space to practice choice and freedom.
This means that each week's content includes a variety of modes of engagement, and enough content to return to for the entire year you have access. We encourage you to commit to checking out one resource each week during the initial 6 week course arc.
We provide a variety of supports for folks with different learning styles to engage in the content the way that aligns with their needs and interests, this includes providing 1:1 coaching, reflection and discussion questions to bring to your community, alongside the live discussion spaces, platform of multi-media content and the option to add a print workbook to bring the digital content into your physical space.
Once you sign up for the course, you will get access to the course platform - this will be your hub for information and dialogue. As soon as you log in, you will see an orientation module that includes:
- a detailed overview of what to expect from the whole course
- space to introduce yourself to the rest of the cohort in the written comments (you can even post a photo if you would like!)
- a survey to let us know about your access needs, goals for the course, and if you need to be paired with a buddy
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a worksheet to plan out your term with guidance on how to coordinate with your buddy and block out time to go through the content during the 6 weeks of the course
Beginning on May 31st, you will receive a weekly email every Friday that informs you of upcoming opportunities to learn alongside relevant links to access content and zoom rooms as well as some guidance on what we recommend you review that week based on what you are most interested in learning about and your time availability that week (15 min, 30 min, 1 hour, or 2+ hours).
During Welcome Week (the week before the course begins), you will also receive a safety and care plan that we encourage you to fill out in order to identify your support system and plan for how to care for yourself throughout the course.
Each weekly module includes:
- a core quote that introduces the topic of the week
- an overview detailing the core components that week and any content warnings to keep in mind
- a ~5 minute optional grounding or somatic practice (like a meditation, visualization, or song and journaling prompt)
- 1-2 core resources: this can be a video or two, or a video and an original essay, or an essay and a scenario / case study for analysis
- a set of reflection or discussion questions
- a variety of optional resources to choose from to dig deeper into the content, including essays (with accompanying audio recordings of our team reading them aloud), podcasts, webinars, even comic strips
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multi-media alumni reflections related to that week's content - these could be collages, videos, original songs, zines, or written reflections
Live Discussion Spaces
In addition to the asynchronous discussion space under the content on the platform, we also offer live mixers in the beginning and end of the term. These are spaces to connect with other participants and alumni, discuss the content, practice the tools live, and ask any relevant questions to practitioners and peers.
Registration for this course includes two 1:1 coaching session with one of our coaches. Spring Up coaching is a peer-based, flexible, non-therapy offering to help you clarify your goals and build your self-care and communication skills.
Our collaborative approach to coaching is based in a non-hierarchical relationship that is solution focused — coaches recognize that clients are experts in their own lived experience. Coaching is strengths-based and culturally specific in that coaches help the client enhance their inherent strengths, skills, and resources accessible to them. Spring Up coaching has an expectation that the client is ready to engage in further learning and implementation of that learning outside of the session.
During Welcome Week, you will be introduced to the coaches for this term as well as receive their calendars to sign up.
Buddies
Because we believe in dialogue based learning, self reflection, peer support, and integrating what you are learning into your life, we ask that everyone who participate do so with a buddy or group. Each individual within your group will register individually, however we will ask you to share who your buddy or group is with us during orientation before the course kicks off.
If you do not have a buddy or group to sign up with, there will be space in an intake survey to indicate that you would like to be paired with 2-3 other solo learners to support one another.
Groups of 5+
Groups of five (5) or more signing up together get a facilitated opening and closing live session with Spring Up facilitators; if your group has 5 or more participants please email [email protected] letting us know your group size and which course you want to sign up for so we can coordinate. You can also request an invoice if your organization is paying for you as a group.
How does this course relate to your Community Care + Accountability Course?
Research has shown that in order to address sexual and intimate partner violence through restorative and transformative justice, facilitators must be equally trained in restorative / transformative justice practices AND the intricacies of gender based violence (Center for Court Innovation). This course can pair with our Transformative Justice course to give you the toolkit you need to address this widespread and deeply personal type of violence.
How does this course relate to your Cultivate Consent Mini-Class?
The mini-class is intended as a “taste of Consent”, a window into this framework that we believe has the power to radically transform the ways we care for ourselves and each other. It is NOT a replacement for our more comprehensive 6 week Consent, Gender, Power course, but can be a good way to prepare for that course or identify if you want to go deeper. The Consent mini-class was put together with accessibility in mind and is the equivalent of about a half day training on Consent.
Can my organization or workplace pay for me to register for the course?
- Yes, email us if you need an invoice for your group
- You can also register yourself and you will receive a receipt for reimbursement
- Email [email protected] with any other questions
Am I able to access the content off of the platform or offline?
- You can order a print copy of the workbook from our website or receive it as a patron (all content is included in PDF on the platform)
- PDF Readings can be downloaded to be printed or annotated
- Audio recordings can also be downloaded to listen on the go
- You can access the content on the teachable app, and download to watch even with no wifi
What if I don’t end up having as much time as I thought during these 6 weeks?
- You can continue going through the content for the rest of the year you have access
- You will get monthly reminders to go through content as access gets close to expiring
- You can let us know you’d like to be moved to a future cohort
What if I want more live time or hands on support?
- You can sign up for a bundle with a daylong facilitated retreat
- You can book more coaching on our website or through patreon
- You can bring us to your community to offer a webinar or retreat
What accessibility strategies do you take to make this course work for folks with disabilities and different learning styles?
Our virtual learning experience is designed to align with a diversity of learning styles. We offer readings as well as videos, somatic exercises, podcasts and journal prompts. There are spaces for reflection, for discussion and for connecting, be it through our buddy system, our virtual discussion board, or coaching. A worksheet to support in executive functioning and planning is shared during welcome week that details all of the options for engagement with spaces to map out your plan for what to do and on what timeframe, this worksheet can also be done in partnership with a Spring Up coach to get additional support in executive functioning.
In terms of platform content, videos are all captioned and can be listened to. For videos that we make, we read off any text that shows up in that video. All of the readings and articles on our platform have audio recordings of the text. Most of them are accessible to screen readers but some of them, like embedded pdf workbooks, might be less accessible. If you need a different version of a reading, email [email protected] or leave a comment requesting the information you need and we will do our best to meet that need.
All live spaces are on zoom and include closed captioning. Live spaces tend to be scheduled in US timezone evenings during the week. 1:1 Coaching is more flexible with times available on coaches calendars at various times and days of the week for you to select from
Does this course work for folks outside of the US?
Yes, since each participant chooses what time of day to explore the content, this course is very flexible for people in different time zones. International students may be less able to attend the live mixers, but can still take advantage of 1:1 coaching and set up time to chat with course buddies closer to their time zone.
Is this course only in English?
At this time our content and resources are all in English - we are working on a translation of our workbooks to Spanish this year. You can request translation to other languages by emailing [email protected], with the subject "translation."
If you would prefer to receive coaching in Spanish, email [email protected] requesting coaching for the CGP course in Spanish.
Can you tell me more about the folks who made this course?
The lead designers for this course are Spring Up co-founders and co-directors Stas (they/them) aka the imaginatrix, and Leander "Lea" (they/he) aka the mythematician. Stas is a nonbinary BlaQ Italian storyteller, and Leander is a transmasculine European American facilitator and lifelong learner. The two have given two TEDx talks: "Cultivating a Culture of Consent" and "The Millennial Mindset Can Save the World," are published in the critically acclaimed anthology "We Believe You: Survivors of Campus Sexual Assault Speak Out," appeared in the documentary "The Hunting Ground" and on stage with Lady Gaga at the 2016 Oscars. They have presented on consent, gender, and justice at over 100 universities and schools nationwide including Brown University, Yale Law School, University of Michigan, University of California Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, Vassar College and many more.
A Message from Stas + Leander: We are a couple who have been in relationship, collaborating and healing together for the past 10 years. You will see us in videos, get to read essays we wrote on this topic, and get access to worksheets and tools that we developed in community over the past 10 years. This course particularly is a labor of love with curriculum that we have been working on since 2013 in workshops, trainings, and community accountability processes with folks around the US (and even some around the world!) This course is rooted in our formal and informal study and lived experience of race, gender, and structural/ historical systems of oppression as well as liberatory practices. You will also get access to some fiction we wrote as part of our book Millennial Sex Education, since we think it is critical that work analyzing sexual and gender based harm take a look at the intimate moments where these systems show up without overexposing individuals and exploiting their personal stories.