We are very sorry to announce that this Adaptive Action Lab has been canceled. We just didn't have enough people enrolled to ensure an optimal learning experience. Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience or disappointment this may cause. Our courses for 2024 will be posted soon. Please check back or watch our newsletter for opportunities in the New Year.
Racism and the act of “othering” is an “intentional or subconscious act of separating or distinguishing oneself as superior compared to those we believe to look, live, act, or think differently than ourselves.” It often shows up as judgments, assumptions, disagreements, and defensiveness. It leaves people feeling ignored, irrelevant, and invisible.
The impacts of these wicked patterns affect almost every aspect of our lives and affect everyone. They tear at the fiber of individual, organization, community, and family relationships. You may be aware of the impact of racism and bias but feel overwhelmed by the challenge of transforming these patterns. You may also recognize that change is needed at all scales and across diverse settings, but you don’t know how to make a difference. You may even wonder if what you’re already doing is enough.
In this Adaptive Action Lab, we will blend curiosity with courage and celebration to transcend historic and systemic patterns of racism and “othering.” We will practice new and healthy patterns of Inquiry and Adaptive Action. We will use deep engagement to shift the turbulence of exclusion toward patterns of systemic equity, that welcome historically excluded voices and share power with all.
Use your own most challenging and frustrating experiences with racism and exclusion to:
- See and understand racism as a pattern to be shifted, rather than a problem to be solved
- Experience the power of shared identity as it influences all your interactions
- Engage with others in creative, generative, and productive action
At the close of these sessions, you will be prepared to begin a new journey toward equity in your personal and professional life, your institution, and your community.
Faculty & Coaches
Dr. Antonia Apolinario Wilcoxon is an HSD Associate, and she brings generative engagement to facilitate conversations about differences. It is an approach that removes the sometimes-conflictual discussions around race to elevate the value of relationships, in the context of shared voice, shared power and shared identity to the center. Participants engage in discussions that are productive and effective, as they do their own internal considerations of their responsibilities to change patterns they identify as detrimental to their work environment.
After retirement in 2018, Dr. Apolinario Wilcoxon is a sought-after professional who hosts community engagements, meeting facilitations, strategic planning sessions and coaching executives as an independent consultant. Local government, state government, private and nonprofit organizations entities hire her to help them learn from the communities they serve how to best provide culturally responsive care for optimal health and well-being.
She brings training and expertise on a variety of convening methodologies and adapts them to her clients’ hoped for outcomes. Art of Hosting/Art of Participatory Leadership, the Technology of Participation (ToP), certified trainer of trainees on Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACEs), Respectful Conversations Facilitator, Kaleidoscope Facilitator in Faith Communities.
She served as the Community Relations Director for the Minnesota Department of Human Services (DHS), where she led the health and human services equity initiative in an overall effort to center the voices of those experiencing inequities in accessing publicly funded services and realizing positive outcomes.
Following a period of community wide facilitated meetings throughout the Twin Cities learning from the community members, DHS staff and leaders, and the initiative executive champion, how inequities impacted communities, what narrative they used to describe their experiences. She worked to co-create recommendations for the agency, which later became the blueprint for the agency’s Equity Policy. The results were three specific actions that executive leadership enacted: shifting the affirmative action goals to stretch goals: beyond what the required work force supply and demand in the Twin Cities; establishment of program measures to address community-identified structures: hiring, promoting, embedding community-based participatory research, improving the presence of Doulas to support families of cultural communities, experiencing marginalization, and creating a legislatively mandated council to advise the commissioner of human services on disparities. Enacted in 2013, the Cultural and Ethnic Communities Leadership Council, provided a template for other initiatives endorsed by the Minnesota Department of Health, HEAL, and the equity initiative at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota. Mitchell Hamline Law Review published a case study on developments at DHS: https://open.mitchellhamline.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1144&context=mhlr
Tamela’s passion is centered around helping others to fulfill the highest expression of themselves. She is a Certified Facilitator and HSD Practitioner and uses her skills and experience to improve engagement and transform leadership in municipal government.
Tamela previously served in the Office of former Mayor of Kansas City, Missouri, Sly James, as Senior Advisor for Operations. She’s also served on numerous boards and commissions including the Kansas City Credit Union’s Supervisory Committee, the Kansas City AIDS Foundation, and the Avila University Alumni Board.
Tamela earned a bachelor’s degree in Marketing and an MBA in Management from Avila University, where she’s served as a guest lecturer for several years.
Tamela comes from a family of seasoned educators and orators. She spends her spare time lending her talents as a voiceover artist, podcast host, on-air personality, poet, and inspirational speaker.
Fueled by deep pride in her family surname, Tamela believes that Courage Comes in Handie.
