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Politicized Healing with Mark-Anthony Clayton-Johnson and Prentis Hemphill

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This is an online event.

Mark-Anthony Clayton-Johnson is a licensed acupuncturist and an experienced organizer. He served as the Director of Health and Wellness at Dignity and Power Now, a Los Angeles based grassroots organization building the leadership of formerly incarcerated people and their families to end sheriff violence. In this capacity he provided strategic leadership for DPN’s two member-led campaigns for a legally empowered and independent civilian oversight commission to the Sheriff's Department and to stop Los Angeles’ proposed $2.3 billion jail construction plan. He also led the Building Resilience project of DPN, a collaboration of formerly incarcerated people, organizers, health care providers and academics whose goal is to decarcerate the county jails via the diversion of incarcerated people into community based treatment and the creation of community based spaces to address the trauma of state violence.

Mark-Anthony is a teacher with both Generative Somatics and Black Organizers for Leadership and Dignity; an organization committed to building Black movement infrastructure and developing Black leaders with an emphasis on transformative organizing, political education, and embodied leadership. As a 2017 Soros Justice Fellow, Mark-Anthony has founded the Frontline Wellness Network, a California statewide network of health care providers working to end the public health crisis of incarceration through political education and bridging relationships between providers and grassroots organizations.

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Prentis Hemphill is a Black,  genderqueer, Texan born healer, movement facilitator, somatics teacher, and writer living and working at the convergence of healing, individual and collective transformation, and political organizing. Prentis spent many years developing, learning and contributing to powerful organizations such as generationFIVE and Communities United Against Violence (CUAV), and as the former Healing Justice Director at Black Lives Matter Global Network - grappling with questions of how we value and transform ourselves the harm we enact and experience, all while transforming conditions and institutions around us.

Prentis currently teaches with Generative Somatics and Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity and serves on the board of the National Queer and Trans Therapists of Color Network. In 2016, Prentis was awarded the Buddhist Peace Fellowship Soma Award for community work inspired by Buddhist thought. Uncovering ancestral wisdom, creating new healing interventions, and shifting the culture of organizing towards creativity, healing, and joy have been central to Prentis' commitment and work. You can find out more about Prentis’ writing and other healing work at www.prentishemphill.com.

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Flash weekend fundraiser with Time Being tattoo artists

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West African Drumming in the garden