Southern Leadership Jam 2024
8th Southern Jam
June 7-12, 2024
Marshall, North Carolina
We have extended our application deadline until all open spots are filled. Apply today!
Hey there, fellow southerner!
With great excitement, we warmly invite you to the 2024 Southern Jam. This unique gathering will unite 25-30 dynamic and diverse Southern dreamers and changemakers. Together, we will dive into deep listening, sharing, self-discovery, systemic inquiry, and community-building in the gorgeous mountains of Marshall, North Carolina just 20 minutes outside Asheville.
For more than 30 years, YES! has brought together changemakers from around the world. This June, YES! facilitators from across the southeast are offering our eighth Southern Jam! We honor and appreciate the efforts, organizing, and collaboration of the first seven Southern Jam teams, and are humbled to bring forth this offering to our communities.
We’ll come together to share our challenges and breakthroughs; nurture ourselves; support and inspire each other; explore our identities; find intersections for future collaborations; and build more resilient communities and networks. In the midst of a global pandemic, global uprisings for racial justice and an end to genocide, there is an ever-deeper calling and need for community and connection, and we are rising to the occasion, remembering that we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
“And who will join this standing up
and the ones who stood without sweet company
will sing and sing
back into the mountains and
if necessary
even under the sea
we are the ones we have been waiting for”
-June Jordan
The Southern Jam will take place from Friday, June 7th to Wednesday, June 12th, 2024.
We have extended our application deadline until all open spots are filled. Apply today!
What is a Jam?
In music, a jam is a creative, live gathering of musicians who, together, spontaneously create a new sound. Similar to that, YES! Jams are places where diverse leaders and visionaries bring together their passions, openness, and unique perspectives. In spontaneous connection, we weave layers of experience, wisdom, heart, and spirit to create some real magic. The Jam asks that all the players who are present and ready to listen deeply to each other, and together, we create something greater than we as individuals can create alone.
A lot of movement trainings are about strategy, but leave out how to build healthy relationships. Other retreats focus on personal transformation but leave out systemic change. Some trainings work on leadership and power dynamics, but forget our souls.
YES! brings all three together — we give change-makers tools to build open-hearted, healthy communities where people can be real with each other. The Jam is not a conference, seminar or typical meeting – it is something unique. It’s dedicated time to think and feel deeply about transformation in our world, in our communities, and in ourselves. There are in-depth conversations and there is a lot of fun, art, and creativity. There is dancing and embodiment, group explorations, and co-creations, as well as solo time and internal reflection.
The Jam works on 3 levels:
On the personal level, the Jam is a place to share and reflect on your life journey and work in the world. It is a time to replenish, recharge and renew, and to gain specific and practical tools for self-care and personal sustainability. It is also an opportunity to grow in self-knowledge, to ask meaningful questions, to unlearn our fears and blocks, and to co-create new possibilities together.
On the interpersonal level, we come together to share our backgrounds, our stories and our struggles, to deepen in our understanding of each other and of ourselves. During the Jam, we hope to discover our commonalities and celebrate our differences. The intention is to build trust and friendship, in a meaningful way. This means challenging stereotypes, being present with each other, speaking truth, working through tough places and being open to giving and receiving support. We feel that the more authentic our relationships are, the stronger the foundations we will have for developing new collaborations and synergies within our movements and communities.
On the systemic level, the Jams give us time to become clearer about our vision and work in the world. We get a chance to link issues that aren’t commonly linked, to notice crucial intersection points, and get a clearer picture of the whole. We come together to learn from each other: about what is working, about what mistakes we have made, about where we need help. We have a chance to share tools and ideas to support one another. In turn, we hope this helps us to generate a body of collective wisdom for change. We also hope it will enable each participant to feel deepened in their capacity to affect meaningful positive change and carry their dreams forward.
This organizing team is a configuration of folks who have been jamming together for a bit and has a wide variety of involvement in co-organizing and co-facilitating a number of different Jams.We will be fully participating in the Jam, bringing our questions too. We don’t have all the answers (or maybe any of them!). What we do offer is a variety of ways for each of us to arrive at our own answers — and new questions. We’ll use a number of processes and tools and experiment with different ways of being together, all aimed at strengthening our self-awareness, our ability to communicate and work through conflicts, and our ability to vision and put these pieces together. We see the Jam as a co-learning journey of the collective experiences, questions, powers, and differences of everyone who attends.
Why the South?
The Southeastern United States or the South is a wise and sacred land riddled with pain. This land holds the wisdom of indigenous folks who lived in symbiosis with it. It holds the wisdom brought over by enslaved Africans who built their own culture as a means for survival. This land holds the love of community and steadfast determination towards liberation for all people that Freedom Fighters of the Civil Rights Movement held so deeply. This land holds joyous acceptance towards migrants from all lands to be a part of the beloved community. This land is holding the continuation of this legacy of love that southern changemakers are currently taking on.
This land also remembers the harm. It remembers how the indigenous folks were violently forced out. It remembers the physical, mental, and spiritual violence systemically inflicted on enslaved Africans and their descendants. It remembers and knows that the legacy of this harm is being upheld. This land of the South sees that it is being used as a political playground by those upholding the system and legacy of harm. The land sees migrants being treated less than human; the history of Black Americans being erased; body autonomy being stripped from women and queer and trans folks. The land sees its own resources being uprooted and destroyed. The land weeps.
With this permeation of wisdom, joy, love, symbiotic community, and the grief from harm, the South is fertile ground to birth the New South with those in conscious relationship with this land.
Why a Southern Jam?
The intention of this Southern Jam is to invite these folks in conscious relationship with the South to deepen into themselves and explore what’s there. From this exploration we invite folks to connect and build intentional community with each other and investigate together what a New South looks and feels like.
This is a vital time for the South as this harmful system violently lashes out with awareness of its impending death. The framework of the Southern Jam allows folks to connect with each other and the land through our sacred breath in order to uphold and build on the legacy of the beloved, intentional, and symbiotic community.
“Our breathing is sacred because the energy that connects us is older than any of the structures we are unlearning and will persist beyond the imagination of this species.”
-Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Who is it for?
This jam is place-based and focused on people, organizations, and communities that are based in the Southeastern US. If you feel called to attend, keep reading!
As mentioned above, we seek to bring together as diverse a group of people as possible. This means we are looking for a range in:
- leadership (from ‘person on the ground’ to ‘director and founder’);
- years of experience (from ‘just starting out’ to ‘been at it for a while’);
- methods and venues of social engagement (entrepreneurs, NGOs, communities, families, neighborhoods, healers, philanthropists, government, etc.);
- issue- or work-focus (for example, community media, local economies and globalization, indigenous issues, education, food security, cultural regeneration, cultural exchange, interfaith, health and physical well-being, ecology, spiritual healing and recovering from trauma, arts, sustainable living tools and practices, political participation, socially- and ecologically-conscious building and architecture, upholding and honoring diverse forms of human dignity, etc.);
- place of origin and base of work (in terms of country, sub-region, locale, etc.);
- race and ethnicity;
- religion and spirituality
- Class
- Immigration status
- sexual orientation and gender identity
- Ability
Dates, logistics, and contribution
The Jam will be held from the afternoon of Friday, June 7, 2024 to the morning of Wednesday, June 12, 2024. The location is Prama Institute in the beautiful Smoky Mountains of Appalachia: prama.org
The tuition for the Jam is offered on a sliding scale of $300-$1200. We are working hard to make this event accessible to all people, regardless of ability to pay. If you have less access to money, feel free to pay at the low end of the scale, and if you have more access to money or resources and/or you have the financial backing of an organization or institution, we invite you into class solidarity, to consider paying more so that someone else can pay less.
If you pay more than the at-cost amount for tuition, that extra amount is tax-deductible.
Money should never be a reason not to apply: partial scholarships are available on a limited and first-come, first-serve basis. We also invite work trades and monthly payment plans. We aim to figure out with each applicant the right combination of tuition, work trade, and scholarship that can work for you. The sooner you apply, the sooner we can mutually create a plan that works and the better your chances are of receiving a partial scholarship if you need one.
The facilitant and organizing team is dedicated to ensuring the public health safety of everyone and ensuring that the space is as accessible as we can make it for everyone. Details of COVID protocols and accessibility of the space will be communicated to participants at a later date.
Apply today! We have extended our application deadline until all open spots are filled. Please feel free to contact us at southernjam@yesworld.org if you have any questions.
Organizer
Patricia (Pat) Parker is a communication professor and director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a participatory researcher committed to helping to make the Beloved Community a reality. In 2007, along with her students, and girls and women in a local public housing neighborhood, she established the Ella Baker Women’s Center for Leadership and Community Activism. Her 2020 book, Ella Baker’s Catalytic Leadership grew out that work and translates Ella Baker’s philosophy and praxis into tools such as radical listening (to perceive trauma and, also, resilience), productive structural analyses (to see how oppressive power is currently reinventing itself), and catalyzing leadership (creating participative spaces for people to see their personal routes to collective power). She applies these tools in all her endeavors, including as co-chair of the University Commission on History, Race, and A Way Forward, charged with leading efforts for reckoning, healing, and repair given the legacies of white supremacy and racial violence at the founding of UNC that persist as current inequities and injustices.
Alejandro Guizar Lozano is an Undocumented Immigrant, union member from Culiacan Sinaloa, Mexico with roots in the Appalachian city of Knoxville TN. Alejandro’s community organizing journey started in 2011 when the U.S. Government unsuccessfully sought to deport Alejandro to Mexico. In those early days Alejandro participated in the first Southern Jam, leading to an internship with Elandria Williams at the Highlander Research and Education Center. Ten years of community organizing experience ranges from Senate campaigns in NC, to rural organizing in AL. Now, Alejandro currently resides in Nashville TN and seeks to find the nexus of community organizing, popular education, and providing those communities with the services they need. Alejandro spends their limited free time playing video games, taking formal classes online, working out, paying attention to his family (wife, 3 cats). Cooking and attending AA meetings.
Jacklyn Joy Byrd is a somatic traumatologist and therapist at Grounded Wellbeing, a small group practice in Decatur, Georgia (Muscogee Creek land) that serves queer, trans, and gender-expansive folks throughout the US Southeast. Her community-based research allows them to present regionally, nationally, and internationally on the experiences of trans people in harm reduction substance use treatment. They are a student of Somatic Sex Education and are passionate about the erotic embodiment of trans folks. Her love for movement work is rooted in radical softness and savoring one-on-one connections. Their commitment to somatics and social justice has been recognized by Global Citizen Year, Dalai Lama Fellows, the National Board for Certified Counselors/Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, and the University of Georgia. Jacky is passionate about using her multitudinous self to create space, pleasure, and joy for the multitudes contained by the collective!
Gert Comfrey does facilitation and healing labor at the estuary of psychotherapy, community organizing, and spiritual care. They are a therapist in private practice, as well as a Circle facilitator and continuing education trainer. They were raised in Central Pennsylvania (Susquehannock land) and have lived in the South on unceded Cherokee, Shawnee, and Yuchi land in Nashville, TN for 15 years. During that time, Gert has learned from and been shaped by intersectional liberation movements including feminist, abolitionist, queer, disability justice, transformative justice, healing justice, anarchist, and anti-capitalist frameworks. To rest, Gert spends time in their garden, making art, and cuddling their cats Trouble Jane and Ronnie the Bear.
Frank (Byrd) Phoenix is a retired Environmental Engineer. He now works with the Fenwick Foundation where he supports people and organizations working for a just and more beautiful world.
One of Byrd’s favorite things is to sit in circle following the practice of Way of Council. Way of Council practice is 10,000 old and sets a container for authentic speaking and listening. When done well a space of deep communication, love and healing can emerge. Another Byrd favorite is making prayer circles. Making prayer circles for Byrd is a way of honoring and connecting with Mother Earth and the Ancestors. His circles are a place to meet, connect and pray.
Nour Elkhattaby Strauch is a community organizer and facilitator from Casablanca, Morocco, currently living in Western Massachusetts. Nour has been organizing and facilitating YES! Jams since 2012, including the Middle East Leadership Jam, the North America Leadership Jam, the Men Raised as Men Jam and others. He is currently serving as Executive Director of YES!, and hopes to continue growing the impact of this organization that works with social changemakers at the meeting point of internal, interpersonal and systemic change to co-create thriving, just and balanced ways of life for all.
Nour has also worked with many other notable non-profits in Morocco, the U.S., and beyond including Neighborhoods Association Idmaj, LifePath, Seeds of Peace, CorpsAfrica, Casablanca-Chicago Sister Cities, among others. He is a former member of the National Administrative Council of Amnesty International Morocco.
George Holmes is a Black, queer, neurodivergent Atlantan. As a young adult, their curious exploration of life has allowed them to engage deeply in their personal healing. Through various opportunities, they’ve been able to use their personal healing journey as a catalyst for others to explore their own healing.
Through extremely challenging yet healing moments, they have acknowledged and accepted their role as a caretaker which manifests itself in different forms. As a healer and facilitator, they have the opportunity to embody care through mindfulness. As a project coordinator, they are able to express care through organizational support of organizations dedicated to the care of frontline communities.
As a way to care for themself, they enjoy expressing themself through music production, photography, and software development/generative art design. George’s values are aligned with Black Feminist Wisdom. They are committed to justice for marginalized people and exploring ways to dismantle systematic oppression while establishing intentional community rooted in the ancestral wisdom of accountability, generosity, and love!
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