We are still shining from our annual Spring Training of Trainers — at our beautiful Avila Center for Community Leadership in Durham, North Carolina — where emerging and seasoned leaders from Alabama, North Carolina, and beyond came together to build, dream, heal and grow.

On April 18–21, UFE held a bilingual four-day Training of Trainers (TOT) to learn and reflect on economic inequality and its impacts, cultivate popular education and facilitation skills, experience practices for healing from the traumas of oppression, and connect across language.

Welcome, Friends!

Lodging, good food, interpretation, child care, and a beautiful outdoor setting brought it all together – at no cost to most of the participants.

We had an invitation to learn outside. Do you know that collective storytelling opens the realm of possibilities? With our words we weave the tapestry of a beautiful collective story.

Power! We can do hard things.

Can you spot the interpreter, our channel between two languages? Our commitment to language justice is a pillar of our work.

Workshopping, noshing, and having fun in the lush Avila springtime.

Forever standing on the shoulders of those who came before us. Peace and gratitude for the ancestors who paved the way to do our work.

For the participants — community-builders and change-makers who are organizing workers, immigrants, and others in struggles for fair pay, rights, and self-determination — the event was a nourishing experience of rest, reflection, connection-building, and growth.