You want to be more anti-racist in your work.

I’m here to help.

Active and Authentic Racial Justice

8-week group training designed to integrate your professional and racial justice values and skills

Do you want to “do better” with race and racial justice in your work?

You’ve read the books, you know some of the important language, but putting these ideas into action feels disconnected from your day-to-day work life. You feel unsure how to communicate about anti-racism with skill or confidence.

You face racism, sexism, heterosexism, etc. regularly and you want to contribute to a more just world but feel you don’t know enough about your own race or what to do with your privilege in your specific role. You either feel like you don’t do enough or feel unsuccessful at supporting meaningful change in your work.

You feel stuck, helpless and hopeless in your racial justice efforts, especially when you:

  • Leave trainings energized or outraged, but without the tools for implementing next steps

  • Face racist and sexist comments from people around you that you feel you cannot address.

  • Learn you didn’t support or you caused harm to a Black, Indigenous, and person of Color colleague or client the way you wanted to either due to inaction or action

  • Keep being the only one bringing up race or equity without being heard

  • Know there are moments you should be talking about race and it just feels too hard or unsafe

  • Have questions about how to make sense of privilege, power, belongingness while getting your work

  • Feel like your advocacy efforts are clunky, aggressive, or leave the wrong people vulnerable

Being more than a passive ally means doing work to understand yourself.

Racism is one of the most complex systems of oppression in our world.

We have been socialized all our lives to avoid race and racial injustice. 

Addressing racism in your work is not about following a set of rules or checking off boxes.  

Your racial justice values are deeply intertwined with how you think, feel and behave about your race (and race in general).

You can become more confident in addressing racial dynamics at work and grow a deeper understanding of your race through:

  • Orienting yourself to your values & skills (i.e., your purpose)

  • Grieving what you thought you knew about race (so you can learn more)

  • Approaching (not avoiding) your racial anxiety

  • Develop racially responsive skills (i.e., advocate, elicit feedback, talk about & analyze racial dynamics, deepen empathy and perspective taking)

In service-oriented work, the way you understand & address race matters.

I’m Dr. Stephanie Thrower and my pronouns are she/her. I was trained in counseling psychology and social justice.  My research focuses on how to train White therapists to be more racially responsive. Even in a field like mental health (where building trusting and compassionate relationships is key), I learned problematic racial dynamics and racial injustices still occur. 

I am interested in how systemic, intrapersonal, and interpersonal racism work together to maintain the status quo. 

My expertise on race as a White cis-female gives people all kinds of feelings. Humility and/or deference doesn’t seem compatible with expertise.  Yet, building expertise for me has meant deep learning, which inevitably has also taught me how much more is left for me to learn.

I support professionals to manage complex, nuanced power dynamics, internal defense mechanisms, and systemic pressures in order to meaningfully address racial injustice at work. 

This program will help you:

  • Skillfully talk about race when it comes up

  • Understand and address racism or a racial event

  • Build supports who help fill in the gaps of your understanding on race and racism

  • Detect the patterns of behavior you and your organization or business use to avoid race, racism, privilege, and power

  • Gain more clarity on the ethical issues of identity (race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ability, age, etc.) in work

  • Increase insight into the nuance of your racial identity with exploration of other intersecting identites

  • STOP relying on people of Color (who you offer services to, supervise or manage) to teach you about your own privilege

  • Learn what you need to do in your work to make space for important stories/experience of people of Color to be heard and honored

  • And if you happen not to be White, learning more about White racial identity might help you navigate surviving your work and understand how Whiteness operates in your specific field and organization

Authentically integrate your professional & personal values with your racial equity values

Become more racially responsive

  • Module 1: SELF

    Clarify & specify personal racial justice goals to build an accountability and support plan

    Identifying personal and professional values relevant to racial justice

    Deepen your understanding of your unique emotional experience processing racial material in order to identify effective ways to cope

  • Module 2: HISTORY

    Explore origins of your career values and philosophy - knowing where we came from helps us understand where we want to go

    Explore origins of how you learned about race, and how that knowledge and experience of race has changed

    Learn the origins of the theoretical model - Helms’ White Racial Identity Theory

  • Module 3: IDENTITY

    We will learn how Helms’ White Racial Identity Development Theory applies to you, as well as your work and business environment. This theory will: 1) provide you with a framework (which has been researched over the last four decades) to understand how race shows up and is responded to, as well as 2) teach you how to tailor interventions in your work.

  • Module 4: PRIVILEGE

    Dive deeper into working on your relationship with privilege so privilege defensiveness and denial doesn’t get the best of you!

    Examine how privilege dynamics come to life in your business or organization, and identify what needs to be done to highlight exclusion and inequity

  • Module 5: POWER

    Explore different kinds of “psychological power” and how it relates to your interactions with others at work

    Identify and unpack any wounds from unskilled leaders that you might be carry forward in your role today

  • Module 6: ADVOCACY

    Identify advocacy routes that fit your interpersonal style and specific context that can help you address systemic racial justice in your work.

    Develop your own personal support plan for ongoing racial responsiveness in work (and your whole life)

What’s included :

  • Story-based pre-work designed to anchor our approach together in your individual goals, values, skills, and vocational purpose

  • Eight 60-minutes live interactive coaching sessions (via video) in order to get regular exposure talking about race, getting questions answered, and practice to implement skills in your daily life

  • Recorded course materials to bring the theory and practice to life

  • Weekly asynchronous coaching - submit weekly questions outside of our meetings that I will records and respond to in order to maintain your growth and process of reflection outside of sessions

  • Space and time structured into the curriculum to process and practice skills

  • Exercises and homework that will build a foundation of knowledge so you understanding how race comes up in interpersonal experiences

  • Recommendations and resources tailored to your own individual development so you experience accountability as well as direction to dive deeper into areas of race specifically important to you

  • Establishing an ongoing continuing education plan for future growth in your process of developing richer anti-racism skills

Key Information

Format :

Currently, this training will be held in a one-to-on format. This allows me to tailor the process to your individual goals, racial identity, and learning needs.

FAQs

  • Racial Responsive Training is an 12-week 1:1 program teaching on White racial identity theory, establishing meaningful, specific and realistic goals to be an anti-racist professional in people-centered work, integrating personal, professional, and racial justice values, and building on skills to address race and racial justice in your work, your organization & /or your business (and in your whole life).

  • This group is for anyone who works in people-centered work and wants to reflect on their racial experience.

    I have expertise training (and researching how to train) mental health providers, healthcare providers, educators, healers, & coaches.

    This course is specifically about White Racial Identity Development (WRID), however we will also learn about people of Color racial identity development.

    Individuals of all genders, sexual orientations and racial and ethnic backgrounds are welcome.

    Individuals of all social identities are welcome.

    This course may be useful for a person of Color if you are interested in:

    — Learning about WRID and how to cope with Whiteness in your work setting

    — Being racially responsive to White leadees

    — Coping with negative or toxic dynamics with your White supervisors/managers/leaders

    If you are a person of Color or have intersectional identities that contribute to a nuanced experience of race, please email me with your questions or set up a call to learn if/how this program may be useful for you.

    You will get the most out of this course if:

    You are willing to be vulnerable when talking about race and racism. I’m not sure there is another way around growing racial identity without vulnerability. 

    You are okay with being (gently) challenged or being offered different ideas on race.

    You are up for trying on some new ideas, and willing to do things differently than you have done before

    You’re willing to self-advocate and provide feedback or ask questions in order to engage fully in the process

    You want to learn in community with other leaders who are committed to personal & professional growth

  • Honestly, as a psychologist I believe most work is service-oriented so my definition is broad. If you think you work in service-oriented work, I’m likely to agree. I focus on helping people develop strong relationships and understanding interpersonal dynamics relevant to racism and Whiteness.

    Service-oriented work includes but is not limited people working in the following fields: education, medicine, mental health, consulting & coaching, managing & leadership, law, service, human resources, public relations, sales, financial advisors, etc.

  • You want a self-paced home study program. This program requires your participation to get the most out of it.

    You think race and racism isn’t a big deal or you believe in White supremacy

    You feel you already know all there is to know about race and racism.

  • This program is non-refundable.

    Please read through this page and blog to learn more about my point of view, approach to working on racial identity and leadership, as well as my theoretical background. If you still have questions or feel unsure if this program is right for you, feel free to book a call with me using any of the call links on this page.