Press Release

"In this transformative moment in America, white women especially need tools to understand and navigate this shifting ecosystem and participate in a way that is respectful of Women of Color." — S.L., thought leader and philanthropist.

Seattle, WA, August 23, 2024: Brave Sis Project, LLC, a five-year-old enterprise using BIPOC women’s history, facilitations, and learning to build stronger awareness and individual and group cohesion, is excited to launch its first self-paced online course through the Teachable platform in August, 2024. 

Entitled Allies, Advocates, Co-Conspirators, Friends, Sisters: A Playbook for Leading, Learning, and Liberation, this eleven-module self-paced course explores the complexities and possibilities of building authentic collaborations, relationships, and even friendships across race, culture, ethnicity, and class. Sample first three lessons free at https://bit.ly/ally-free-course.

Through a combination of learning resources and self-reflection, participants will discover 10 "plays" that will help move them along a trajectory of the 3Ls: Learning, Leadership, and Liberation.

“We are at an outstanding inflection point in history,” says Brave Sis Project Founder Rozella Kennedy, “where the spotlight of hope is once again being cast upon Black and Brown women to save the day. So that this does not again devolve into uninvited labor and extraction, we must recognize and unlearn bad habits and legacy mindsets. If we do this, we can build new mixed-racial collaborations and relationships that are authentic, lasting, trust-based, and based in mutuality.”

This course is intended for individual learning and reflection, allowing for safe, honest space for expanding one’s legacy viewpoints and opinions across ten “Playbook Tactics” that too often create discord among white women and those they would most like to align with across racial and other divides. These segments are based on Kennedy’s years of experience facilitating women’s groups and working in the private sector as a thought leader in equity, inclusion, and impact.

• Tactic One: Understand Privilege and Position, But Don’t Freeze
• Tactic Two: Say No to Monoculture – Unlearn Minimizing and Ignoring
• Tactic Three: Banish Tone Policing and Stereotyping
• Tactic Four: Run Away from Exoticism, Fascination, and Fetishization
• Tactic Five: Interrogate Power, to Expand It
• Tactic Six: Retire the White Savior Approach
• Tactic Seven: Reject Tokenism
• Tactic Eight: Check Your Performativism, Nice-Ism, and Virtue-Signaling
• Tactic Nine: Stop Ignoring History, Culture, Geography, and Context
• Tactic Ten: Don’t Fall into the Trap of Over-Intellectualizing

The course incorporates storytelling as well, including profiles of she-roes such as those from Kennedy’s award-winning 2023 book Our Brave Foremothers: Celebrating 100 Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous Women Who Changed the Course of History (Workman/Hachette).

“This course examines vectors of privilege, the unhelpful histories and cultural norms, and even how science and pseudo-science can contribute to bias and discrimination. As we come to understand the distinctions between aspirational allyship all the way up the scale to devoted sisterhood and Beloved Community, we will all be better able to interact more freely and appropriately given the situation, context, or task we are engaged in.

“With content also targeting BIPOC women and the lies and myths we have learned about each other and even within our own communities, the course challenges all of us to transcend bias while forming deeper connections. And we will also have time for a bit of fun and celebration.”

Each lesson is comprised of video overviews, curated resources, and action steps, points for reflection, and a quiz. The course is intended for individual engagement; however, groups may sign up as a collective, with the opportunity for group-guided discussion work and/or facilitations led by Kennedy. 

“After withstanding the exuberance of the post-2020 moment and the ensuing and mightily disappointing backslide against DEI and Black women’s leadership and position across many vectors of society,” says Kennedy, “it is to be hoped that white women, particularly progressives, understand that the floodgates of friendship are not automatically bounding wide simply because people feel excited about Black women all over again. The same is true for Brown, Asian, and Indigenous women as well!

“It’s important that progressive white women understand that “allyship” is not something that can be claimed, it must be earned. Resources like this course, which contain so many points of information, can help all of us de-center the monocultural approach to relationship, agency, power, and progress.”

The course, which takes approximately 20-30 hours to complete, is priced along a sliding scale from $129-$499, with six-months access to the material. Find out more at bit.ly/3Lplaybook.