"Your voice takes you to your heart." Gabrielle Roth
Our voices are needed! Our courage is calling!
This one-day Circle of Trust Retreat is centered around voice, listening deeply to what calls from within, and speaking what matters at this time of great need in the world. We invite you to a day of pause in community, discovery, and song to spark your courage for your work at hand. Throughout the day, we will engage in reflection and journaling, songs and silence, as well as large and small group conversations.
Co-facilitated by Courage & Renewal facilitators, Paula Pedersen and Holly Wilkinson, with musician Sara Thomsen.
Paula J. Pedersen is Director of Education for Inclusive Excellence at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Paula is also an interculturalist and consultant to educational and leadership groups seeking self-awareness and strategies toward intercultural effectiveness. She sings with the vocal trio Three Altos and as back up with her partner Sara Thomsen. As an educator, singer and citizen, Paula strives to facilitate understanding of the complexity of multiple perspectives, whether singing, teaching, training or tending her garden.
Holly Wilkinson is Executive Director of WholeHeart. Her experience includes international and higher education, women’s entrepreneurial training, youth leadership, and non-profit management. Creative expression and fostering circles of connection are important aspects of her work in the world. Holly lives on a dead-end dirt road in Vermont, savoring earth, imagery and all that arrives.
Sara Thomsen is a weaver of song and community singing. She founded and directs the Echos of Peace Chior in Deluth, MN. At concerts, conferences, classrooms, workshops, retreats, jails, places of prayer, and lines of protest, to be with Sara is to want to sing. Increasing wonder and awareness, deepening spiritual connection, and widening social engagement through song is at the heart of her work. Sara's ability to get people singing magically transforms gatherings into communities empowered with possibility.
Please join us for this introduction to WholeHeart's Courage work as autumn begins to call us back to work, school and community engagement.
Lunch is included as well as admission to the 7pm concert that evening - featuring Sara Thomsen with Paula Pedersen.