Both. In 2017, we launched the course Finding Freedom: White Women Taking On Our Own White Supremacy. Meeting in person for the first 3 years, we felt encouraged by the response of our communities in North Carolina. When COVID 19 conditions required us to move the course online, we expanded our reach and as of May 2024, we have had over 900 people participate in the course. In 2020, because of the momentum of white women and genderqueer people wanting to do more, we formed an LLC, We Are Finding Freedom. Join our mailing list to stay in touch.

Finding Freedom is right for you if you are striving to understand your own relationship to being white and how that impacts your ability to make your way in a multiracial world. We welcome all white women and genderqueer people in the workshop space. The course works for people as a first step, as well as a deeper dive. We explore our individual collusion, practice the skill of calling in, and study some fundamental aspects of being in the world as a white person seeking to lessen our harm, deepen our analysis, and take action for racial justice in our own communities.

This workshop may be useful to you if you were socialized as a white female and/or if you are perceived as one today. Our intersectional approach invites participants to consider how gender and class socialization work to support white supremacy and racism. Finding Freedom urges participants to reconsider our relationship to this socialization. The categories of “white” or “woman” might not be exactly how you define yourself. We warmly welcome lesbian, queer, gender-nonconforming, non-binary and trans workshop participants, as well as mixed-race and white-presenting people who are interested in exploring the intersection of white womanhood and white supremacy.

We do not turn people away due to cost—we offer a sliding scale and also have free tickets available for people who need them. We warmly welcome people of all class backgrounds and income levels. We recognize that money matters. White supremacy would not exist without capitalism. Too many people do not have access to living wages, employers who will cover the cost of training, or enough income to take courses. From the beginning, we have been committed to offering free tickets to people who do not have the resources to pay us. Please check out the registration page of the workshop you’re interested in for more information about the sliding scale and free tickets.

For many decades, leaders of color--including James Baldwin, Malcolm X, and Alicia Garza--have asked white people to step up and to work on dismantling white supremacy within our own communities. Black and Latina feminists—including the Combahee River Collective and Charlene Carruthers—have called on white feminists to take up the mantle of racial justice and to support other white women in unlearning internalized dominance. This workshop heeds those calls. It follows in the footsteps of white anti-racist organizers Anne Braden and Mab Segrest, and it’s grounded in the work of Showing Up for Racial Justice. Throughout course development, we have spoken with our colleagues of color, shared our motivation for delivering Finding Freedom in its current form, checked in about the purpose and methodology of the workshop, and incorporated their input.

We believe there are times when it is beneficial for white women to learn together about the ways we collude with white supremacy so that we can be more effective in spaces that are multiracial. Being alone together in the space allows white women to ask our “stupid questions,” to make mistakes, and get coaching and challenges from other white women about how to do better. The goal of this caucus space is to inspire and encourage white women to show up humbly, effectively and generously in movement spaces that are led by people of color. Historically, it has not gone well for people of color when white people talk alone in a group about race. Yet we believe that white people have put too much expectation on people of color to teach and to share painful experiences in order for us to recognize the harm we’ve done. For this reason, this workshop is essentially an anti-racist white caucus space.

The creators of this course, Kari Points and Evangeline Weiss, have spent more than 40 years combined as white people working with communities, individuals and organizations that are people of color-led and -centered. In our roles as white anti-racist leaders, we have collaborated with colleagues of color on racial justice work, facilitated many race-based caucus spaces and shared the experience of being white anti-racist co-consipirators. We hosted a Training of the Trainer for 2021 and now we have a group of 7 white women and genderqueer people who facilitate the Finding Freedom workshop.

We consistently hear from our participants that Finding Freedom is unlike any other racial justice course they’ve taken. Here’s why: We are committed to a powerful gender and class analysis in our takedown of white supremacy. We are big on welcoming you just as you are. We facilitate our courses with trauma, embodiment and movement building in mind. We offer a curriculum that is part analysis, part skill building, part Southern somatics, and part collective awareness and relationship building. We bring joy, humor, spirit, connection to place, heart and play to this journey. All of our course designs recognize our unique complex identities, explore our history of collusion with white supremacy, share practical skills and mindsets that support deeper moral courage and resistance, and offer opportunities for taking action individually and collectively.

Our workshops primarily focus on United States history, context and contemporary reality. Women based outside the US are welcome to join, as long as you understand we will be using a US-based frame. That said, we’re working to incorporate a more global lens, since the US would not exist if it weren’t for colonialism and globalized white supremacy.

Leaders of color, in particular Black movement leaders in the US, have been asking white people to work with our own people for many decades now—since at least the early 1960s. Finding Freedom is our response to this demand for accountability. As white women, one of our goals is to lessen the burden on women of color to get white people to divest from white supremacy. As white people, this is our job, and we are best positioned to work with our own communities, families and neighborhoods toward racial justice.

If only white people who could afford to facilitate for free were facilitating, there would be no working class or poor people present in the leadership. Working-class and poor peoples’ analysis and struggles would be absent from the design. Getting paid a living wage for this work is what allows working-class and poor white people to lead. This matters because unpacking class is crucial to understanding how white supremacy functions.

Finding Freedom receives no grant money. We are committed to being funded by the movement. Each workshop takes about 40 hours of our labor to manifest. We make enough to cover our costs, pay for part-time staff, and underwrite free tickets for every workshop. It is a labor of love. Donate here.

Many participants stay in touch after the course ends, so we encourage you to connect with your buddies, pods and others from your workshops. We also have an amazing online community to support these relationships: We Are Finding Freedom Mighty Networks is available to people who complete a Finding Freedom workshop, as well as people generally interested in the organizing and facilitating work we are doing. Check us out here.

The way a community gets ready to do racial justice work is by doing racial justice work. We have successfully offered Finding Freedom in conservative as well as progressive communities, with participants who are new to racial justice work as well as those who have been doing it for decades. We offer this workshop online as well as in person (as a 1- or 1.5-day event). This workshop is a perfect opportunity to jump-start both dialogue and action for change in your community.

We welcome requests to bring this workshop to you and your people! Please consider that this course is a caucus space and inevitably raises the question of how you are developing and resources BIPOC folks and white men. Contact us via our intake form for more information.