Transformative Growing Spaces

Transformative Growing Spaces

Traditional organizational trainings often focus on making us more "resilient" workers within broken systems. At Root Salve Wellness, our workshops are designed to do the opposite. We facilitate dynamic, trauma-informed spaces where individuals and teams can unlearn supremacy culture, heal from systemic burnout, and actively design pathways to liberation.

Grounded in deep clinical expertise, advanced trauma specialization, and anti-racist pedagogy, our sessions move far beyond surface-level corporate wellness. We blend radical honesty, systemic analysis, and ancestral wisdom to offer actionable tools for deep, collective transformation.

Below is a selection of our core offerings. Because we know that healing and equity work is never one-size-fits-all, these spaces can be uniquely tailored to the specific needs, size, and goals of your ecosystem.

For Institutional & Systems Transformation

Operationalizing Anti-Racism

A strategic space to help leadership and boards move beyond performative DEI to build and sustain genuinely anti-racist policies, environments, and metrics.

Trauma-Informed Pedagogy & Leadership

An exploration of how to integrate trauma-informed principles into structural leadership, program design, and teaching, ensuring environments are safe and supportive for marginalized individuals.

Shifting the Center: Rebuilding Foundational Pedagogy

Foundational courses in higher education are often heavily rooted in Eurocentric, developmental frameworks that fail to capture the lived realities of marginalized communities. Designed for university faculty, curriculum developers, and educational leaders, this collaborative space focuses on critically dismantling traditional syllabi. Together, we explore how to move beyond pathologizing theories and rebuild educational frameworks that truly center global, intersectional, and liberatory perspectives.

From Practice to Policy: Designing Equitable Systems

A space focused on how to evaluate and rewrite organizational or institutional policies through an anti-oppressive, trauma-informed lens.

Decolonizing Data & Program Evaluation

A training for organizational leaders and researchers on how to shift from extractive, top-down data collection to community-based, participatory, and liberatory frameworks.

Intersectionality and Justice in Family Systems

Decisions made within family and protective systems (such as those regarding family separation, custody, and safety) have profound, generational impacts. However, these systems frequently fail to account for intersectionality, often punishing marginalized survivors of intimate partner violence and pathologizing Black and Brown family structures. This session equips decision-makers and advocates with a critical, anti-racist lens to understand the complex dynamics of trauma, bias, and survival, ensuring that institutional interventions and protective measures do not inflict further systemic harm.

Reframing the Narrative: Trauma & Advocacy in the Legal System

In the legal system, the way an individual’s life history is documented and conceptualized can permanently alter the course of their future. This session focuses on transforming case evaluations, advocacy narratives, and pre-decision reporting through a trauma-informed, liberatory lens. We explore how survival behaviors and trauma responses are frequently criminalized due to systemic racism and sexism. Participants will gain the tools to holistically contextualize clients' lived experiences, shifting the approach from one of pathologization and punishment to one of systemic understanding and harm reduction.

For Workplace Ecosystems & Team Culture

Dismantling Supremacy Culture at Work

A guided, deep-dive exploration of how identity, power dynamics, and systemic oppression intersect within organizational structures—and how teams can actively uproot them to build cultures of genuine care.

The Illusion of Burnout: Reimagining Care at Work

Mainstream workplace wellness programs often place the burden of healing back on the exhausted worker, treating burnout as a personal failure rather than a systemic issue. This session helps teams unlearn "grind culture," professional socialization, and the productivity myths that actively block sustainable care. Together, we shift the focus away from individualistic fixes and instead help teams build radical, collective soul care practices into their daily operations.

The Politics of Soul Care & Resilient Leadership

A space designed to help leaders shift away from demanding output and instead build sustainable, radical care practices into the fabric of their organizational culture.

Navigating Systemic Burnout

Designed for those in helping professions and public-facing roles, this workshop provides targeted support for mental health, boundary-setting, and burnout prevention without relying on toxic productivity narratives.

Strategic Planning for Collective Wellness

Moving away from commodified wellness initiatives, this session introduces actionable strategies for integrating true equity, mindfulness, and collaborative change management into your workplace culture.

Surviving and Resisting Microaggressions

A dedicated space for processing the daily, compounding stress of workplace microaggressions. This session honors unique lived experiences and offers collective strategies for grounding, boundary-setting, and resistance.

Fostering Inclusive & Liberatory Dialogue

Facilitated conversations aimed at enhancing communication, strengthening trust, and building authentic cohesion within diverse teams.

Imagination as Resistance

A forward-focused, creative session that encourages risk-taking, radical imagination, and experimentation to empower participants to design systems aligned with their true values.

For Care Workers & Practitioners

Decolonizing Clinical Practice & Writing

Traditional frameworks and documentation often pathologize Black and Brown communities. This space equips practitioners with the tools to decolonize their practice and approach case conceptualization and writing through a liberatory lens.

Trauma and Radical Soul Care

Building upon foundational mental health concepts, this session utilizes trauma-informed perspectives to help practitioners build resilient, radical soul care practices.

Integrative Trauma & Somatic Awareness

Utilizing insights from advanced trauma modalities (such as EMDR, Brainspotting, and IFS), this workshop introduces somatic and internal awareness practices to help care teams better understand and respond to complex trauma.

Deconstructing the DSM: Unpacking Pathologization in Clinical Spaces

Traditional clinical frameworks rely heavily on the DSM, but for Black and Brown communities, this lens often pathologizes valid responses to systemic trauma. This session unpacks the history and impact of the DSM, exploring how survival strategies and active resistance to oppression are frequently mislabeled as disorders. We guide practitioners in shifting away from a rigid, individualized medical model toward a liberatory social model - ensuring that clients' experiences are understood through a lens of systemic context rather than clinical pathology.

Intersectional Approaches to Intimate Partner Violence

A training for clinicians and advocates on how intersecting identities (like race and gender) impact how Black women experience IPV, navigate systems, and seek help, moving beyond one-size-fits-all trauma models.

Liberatory Motivational Interviewing

Traditional Motivational Interviewing can sometimes be misused as a compliance tool. This workshop reframes MI skills to genuinely center client autonomy, empowerment, and cultural responsiveness.

Chronic Illness, Stigma, and Trauma

Exploring the intersection of medical trauma, societal stigma, and chronic health conditions within marginalized communities, and how somatic and systemic awareness can be integrated into care.

Trauma-Informed Youth & Family Engagement

Drawing on extensive experience in program development, this session explores decolonizing youth interventions and building truly trauma-informed, empowering spaces for young people and families.

The Ethics of Reporting: Navigating Mandates and Systemic Harm

While mandated reporting is a legal requirement, the ways these mandates are executed often disproportionately fracture Black and Brown families, operating as an extension of the family policing system. Designed as an advanced, critical-ethics supplement for practitioners who are already mandated reporters, this space moves beyond standard compliance checklists. Together, we explore the ethical tension of these legal mandates, equipping professionals with the tools to differentiate between systemic poverty and neglect, recognize institutional bias, and apply a rigorous harm-reduction lens to their practice.

For Communities & Collectives

Radical Healing

Moving beyond simply coping with systemic trauma, this space is dedicated to community-centered radical healing. We focus on reclaiming joy, integrating ancestral wisdom, and building sustainable practices for collective liberation.

Narratives of Care

We often know how to care for ourselves - a quick internet search can provide endless tips - yet we still struggle to actually do it. Why? This community workshop shifts the focus away from simply listing "what to do" and instead explores the deep socialization, internal beliefs, and systemic narratives that actually get in the way of our healing. Together, we unpack the hidden barriers to rest and reclaim our right to deep, restorative soul care.

Unpacking the Strong Black Woman Archetype

Grounded in rigorous research, this session deconstructs the "Strong Black Woman" archetype, providing community members with critical tools to understand how this narrative impacts vulnerability, help-seeking, and resilience.

Mental Health & Spiritual Spaces

Bridging the gap between faith and mental wellness, this offering focuses on responding to mental health crises, reducing stigma, and integrating trauma-informed care within spiritual and religious communities.

Radical Body Reclamation & Sexual Agency

Supremacy culture thrives by disconnecting us from our bodies. This session guides participants in deconstructing controlling images and reclaiming their physical selves, presence, and assertiveness.

Colorism & Community Healing

A facilitated exploration of the historical roots and present-day impacts of colorism, fostering radical honesty and collective healing around intra-community challenges.

Healing from State and Institutional Violence

A community space dedicated to processing the collective trauma of over-policing, state violence, and the racialized experiences of protesting and advocacy.

Rhythms of Resistance: Diasporic Movement & Collective Healing

While mainstream Western somatic practices often focus on quiet, individualized mindfulness, many marginalized communities have historically processed trauma and cultivated joy through collective rhythm and movement. Grounded in formal training in Afro-diasporic dance and movement studies, this experiential space centers the body as a site of liberation. Participants are guided through rhythmic, ancestral movement practices designed to release systemic stress, honor cultural histories, and experience the profound healing power of collective joy.

Co-Create a Custom Growing Space

Don't see exactly what you are looking for? We know that deep equity and healing work cannot always be boxed into an existing curriculum. Every ecosystem has its own unique challenges, histories, and goals.

If your organization, clinical team, or community needs something specific, we would love to partner with you to design and develop a fully tailored workshop or training. Reach out to us to discuss how we can co-create a specialized experience that meets the exact needs of your group.