Nancy Arvold is one of the founders and co-facilitators of East Bay Saturday Dialogues. She delivers presentations and trainings in the field of white studies and anti-racism.
Nancy is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist with a small private international practice. She worked for public and private mental health organizations for over 12 years, and has been active in addressing issues of treatment disparities and cultural competence in the field of social work. She is a teacher emeritus with an organization called The UNtraining: Untraining White Liberal Racism where she was senior teacher for several years.
Nancy completed her Ph.D. in transpersonal psychology at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Palo Alto, CA in June 2010. Her Ph.D. dissertation, entitled Doing Our Own Work, A Journey into Whiteness: White Women’s Struggles to Become Authentic Racial Justice Allies, is based on experiences of participants from the UNtraining. She has taught cross cultural counseling to graduate students from the standpoint of the enormous impact unconscious white privilege and white supremacist social institutions have on the mental health profession.
Working for prison reform has become Nancy’s focus for her anti-racist activism. She volunteers with California Prison Focus, which supports the demands of prisoners in Secure Housing Units (solitary confinement) in California prisons. Nancy is a steering committee member for Psychologists for Social Responsibility, a national professional organization dedicated to social change in issues relevant to psychologists and is a spokesperson for prison transformation.
“Doctor Nancy” lives on her boat on San Francisco Bay with her two cats, Coyote and Kali, and is a member of Rainbow Women’s Chorus. She is Auntie Nancy to her large extended family that lives in Northern California and the Northwest.
April Schlenk is a co-founder and co-facilitator of East Bay Saturday Dialogues. She has long held a liberationist viewpoint, but it wasn’t until her work in an organization called The UNtraining: Untraining White Liberal Racism (starting in 2003), that her inner activist was released. Since then she has been speaking up about race and privilege and stirring up trouble in various environments, particularly the mental health field, where she worked for about 13 years. She is interested in how race, racism and privilege affect children and families, and feels an urgent need to make positive changes in ourselves and our world for the coming generations.
April was born to hippie parents in the Bay Area, grew up atheist in the Central Texas part of “the Bible Belt,” and made her way back to the Bay Area as an adult. She loves to travel, and spent a transformative year in Central America in 1995. She currently lives happily with her sweetie, Doug and her 4 year old daughter, Sonnet, in Oakland.
Meg Yardley is a therapist and social worker, currently working in the area of school-based restorative justice. Through her work in the UNtraining and East Bay Saturday Dialogues, she has come to experience anti-racism work as a powerful journey toward greater wholeness and inclusion of all parts of one’s self. The more she learns about racism, the more it becomes clear to her that staying “neutral” supports oppression. Meg is a singer, an activist, and a parent. She is a transplanted East Coast-er and lives in Oakland with her partner and child.
Past Facilitators
Corinne Allen is a co-founder and co-facilitator of East Bay Saturday Dialogues. She grew up in the Bay Area with little awareness of her unearned white skin privilege. Her interest in social justice work began in her early 20′s when she began her work with Impact Bay Area, where she has taught self-defense and empowerment courses to women and girls since 2001. She currently teaches 6th Grade Science and Technology at the Julia Morgan School for Girls in Oakland, and what she most wants as a teacher is for her students to love themselves. She is passionate about issues of equity and justice in Bay Area Independent Schools.
Her approach to her teaching and her personal journey are strongly influenced by her experiences with the UNtraining and the Saturday Dialogues community. She aims to remain constantly engaged in the process of teasing out how being female and white affect her experience in the world. She lives in Oakland with her partner and their crazy dog.
Lisa Beard is a founding member and co-facilitator of the Saturday Dialogues group. Her work is deeply informed by her family lineage, connected to 19th century Eastern European immigration and slavery in the South. She grew up in the Bay Area and got an early start in anti-oppression work. She began investigating race and whiteness in high school, in the company of some incredible peers and a white anti-racist English teacher. In college, she did extensive social change work with an emphasis on anti-racism, U.S. foreign policy issues, and global environmental politics. She co-wrote and performed two guerrilla theater pieces about white privilege, and studied reparations in a U.S. context with the Kahn Institute.
Lisa has been trained in anti-oppression work through the Challenging White Supremacy Workshop, the UNtraining, and Theater of the Oppressed. She loves using Theater of the Oppressed activities for social change. Lisa is an herbal practicioner, a dancer/storyteller, and gardener. She is pursuing her doctorate in Political Science and intends to be a professor. She is often found with her partner and her cat.
