Your Nervous System, Racial Trauma and the Workplace

Public leaders and employees who’ve continued working tirelessly to advance diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives have been embattled over the past decade. Many are burnt out under the pressure and overwhelm of regressive federal measures; discouraged and hopeless in the face of retaliation, censorship and decimation of budgets for essential social services. The impact is compounded for employees of Color who are experiencing increased rates of racialized trauma from the office to the streets.

This kind of chronic stress, fear, anxiety and fatigue can lead to behaviors that make it even more challenging to navigate this heightened discriminatory reality. Research and experience teaches that without conscious practice of healthy coping skills, many individuals react to this kind of chronic stress by shutting down and isolating, or lashing out against those in closest proximity, including loved-ones and co-workers. These survival responses are generally involuntary, but can damage relationships and distract from the essential public work of the agency when they are viewed as signs of a “difficult personality” or ascribed to someone refusing to “be a team player.” Symptoms of racial trauma are often met with performance plans and rather than collegial support in a culture of care.

In this session, Strategy & Solidarity co-founders Carlos Kareem Windham and Theresa Logan will provide a brief overview of the human nervous system, including how our nervous systems react under stress. They will break down the differences between personal trauma, collective trauma and racial trauma, and will share skills individual can use to support themselves and their teammates in challenging times. 

The content of the session is drawn from lessons the facilitators have learned over the past decade supporting public and non-profit organizations in cultivating strong, cohesive organizational cultures that prioritize staff wellbeing, mitigate racial harm, and deliver quality outcomes for clients/customers, even through the most difficult circumstances.

Participants will learn practical skills for creating cultures of care that center the most impacted, mitigate racial trauma, and support everyone on your team in carrying out essential public services while surviving tumultuous and uncertain times.

Learn more about about Strategy & Solidarity Collective at www.strategyandsolidarity.com

Theresa Logan is the founder of Subduction Consulting and Co-Founder of the Strategy & Solidarity Collective.

Through her firm, Subduction Consulting, Theresa has spent the past decade working in close partnership with Carlos Kareem Windham to successfully guide community groups and workplaces in repair processes after incidents of racial harm, and transform workplace cultures, processes & procedures to create more racially just outcomes.

Theresa began organizing with the Metropolitan Alliance for Common Good as a college student where she learned the power of building intentional relationships & strategic alliances, mapping power and developing actionable campaigns to pressure local government leaders to address pressing public needs. Working as a community organizer through college, she facilitated house meetings and leadership development sessions, worked on voter registration campaigns and local actions for housing justice, tax reform and health care access. 

Theresa continued to pursue a career advancing community wellbeing after college, supporting grassroots community development projects in Latin America and the Caribbean at the Inter-American Foundation, and supporting immigrant families as a parent advocate with Multicultural Community Service in Washington DC.

After completing a master’s degree in Conflict Analysis & Resolution at George Mason University, she returned home to Portland to help set up the Oregon Foreclosure Avoidance Program, and then facilitated public engagement and conflict resolution processes for city agencies & non-profits on staff at Resolutions Northwest.

Theresa co-founded the Strategy & Solidarity Collective with Carlos Kareem Windham in 2024 to bring together their global networks of racial justice practitioners, artists, activists, healers and community leaders to offer personal and professional development services and community building opportunities.  As a global community center, the Strategy & Solidarity community provides opportunities for our members to build community, skills, peer support networks, and effective strategy for manifesting our shared vision of a just and thriving future for all.

Multi-hyphenate, Carlos Kareem Windham, is an artist/organizer who has spent the better part of the last two decades performing for audiences and speaking with students, teachers and organizers on stages and in classrooms across the globe.

Carlos’ works are vulnerable, defiant expressions of the relationships between race, class and gender in the U.S. and abroad. Whether through the medium of storytelling, lyrics, workshop, or stand-up, Carlos takes every opportunity to speak truth to power.

Their path began as a student activist leading a movement that created the Department of Ethnic Studies at University of Colorado, Boulder, continued through touring internationally as a performing artist, evolved into designing arts education programming for youth, managing civic engagement programs and supporting community housing initiatives and private consulting.

Prior to founding El Porvenir Services, Carlos served as the Director of Equity and Community Programs, and then as Director of Strategy and Innovation at Resolutions Northwest where they lead a radical pedagogical transformation and tremendous growth of RNW’s community programs; including rapidly building out an organizational racial equity consulting service in response to client demand. Carlos’ leadership contributed to Resolutions Northwest earning a reputation as a regional leader in racial equity and systems transformation training, facilitation and consultation.

In June 2019, Carlos founded El Porvenir Services, LLC with the mission of bringing communities into the future, and centering the voices of the most impacted in the reclamation of their power at the intersection of race, class, and gender. Through El Porvenir, Carlos works for the creation of just ecosystems where people maintain long-term relationships across difference, in the creation of outcomes that provide equitable opportunities for the most excluded.

Carlos co-founded the Strategy & Solidarity Collective with Theresa Logan in 2024 to bring together their global networks of racial justice practitioners, artists, activists, healers and community leaders to offer personal and professional development services and community building opportunities.  As a global community center, the Strategy & Solidarity community app provides opportunities for our members to build community, skills, peer support networks, and effective strategy for manifesting our shared vision of a just and thriving future for all.