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Summer Rejuvenation

share stories, share strategies & gather our strength

An Online Series Hosted by Comrades Education

FACILITATED by: Eleanor Hancock / with GUESTS: J.P. Hill, Sharet Garcia, Huwaida Arraf, Katrina Messenger, and more!

cosponsored by Two Rivers Sanctuary

Solo el pueblo salva al pueblo.

We Keep Us Safe.

Summer Rejuvenation is an online series designed to support activists, allies & everyday people taking action across multiple fronts this summer.

As state repression & imperial forces escalate, so must we! But people are not machines. In order to meet the moment, we need to nourish ourselves, build strength through our connections and experience ourselves as part of a collective. Meeting the moment we’re in requires a strong & healthy collective - something we each contribute to in our own way and in different ways at different times.

Read all about the course below, or jump straight to registration here.

  • This online, five session summer program is designed to bring people together across many walks of life in order to:

    • restore ourselves,

    • share stories & strategies,

    • build connections

    • and contribute to the collective power required to overcome fascism and build an equitable world.

    Designed to be immediate & rejuvenating, each live session of this program will focus on one storytelling guest and one nourishing reflection or meditation led by a spiritual movement leadership. Whole group & small group discussion will be interspersed around these two main activities.

    Registration is ongoing while the program is in session. All live sessions are recorded and available to everyone who joins, regardless of when you sign up.

Session Topics:

Sunday, July 27 Agenda

STORYTELLER: J.P. Hill | New Means Substack

Topics: mutual aid, creation of a people’s community center in NYC, report-back from Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor

PRACTITIONER: Katrina Messenger | Founder, Two Rivers Sanctuary

Practice: meditation for strengthening our collective “soul”

Sunday, August 3 Agenda

STORYTELLER: Sharet Garcia | Founder, Undocuprofessionals

Topic: how we can be allies to members of the undocumented community right now

PRACTITIONER: Eleanor Hancock | Director, Comrades Education

Practice: solidarity meditation created during the initial phase of the Covid pandemic, inspired by the heightened awareness of the role “essential workers” played in all of our lives

Sunday, August 10 Agenda

STORYTELLER: Crowd-sourcing best practices for confronting ICE & protecting our communities | facilitation w/ Eleanor Hancock & Orelia Lesh, LICSW, LCSW-C

Topics: building on our work with Sharet Garcia, group discussion and sharing around how we are preparing for and/or confronting ICE in our area, as well as any other ways we are building people-power to protect our communities

PRACTITIONER: Vanessa Crowley | Two Rivers Sanctuary

Practice: meditation for strength & trauma release in the face of confrontations with state violence

Sunday, August 17 Agenda

STORYTELLER: Huwaida Arraf | Co-founder Freedom Flotilla Coalition

Topics: people’s attempts to break the siege on Gaza, including this summer’s Gaza freedom flotilla journeys; inspiration and support for taking action within the Palestine solidarity movement

PRACTITIONER: Angela Raincatcher | Two Rivers Sanctuary

Practice: meditation for nourishing our hearts, such that strength and love is overflowing into our work for our communities and our world

Sunday, August 24 Agenda

STORYTELLER: Nicole Born-Crow | Co-founder Folke Healing

Topic: strengthening ourselves through our connection to ancestors, ancestral folk practices and connection to the land

PRACTITIONER: Katrina Messenger | Founder, Two Rivers Sanctuary

Practice: meditation for drawing strength from the land and connecting with our plant allies

Course Details

Five online sessions:

July 27, Aug 3, Aug 10, Aug 17 and Aug 24

4:00-6:30pm ET • 1-3:30pm PT

Live attendance is not mandatory.

Sessions will be recorded. 

Suggested registration fee: $70-200*

No one will be turned away for lack of funds.

Registration is ongoing while the program is in session. All session recordings are available to everyone who joins, regardless of when you sign up.

To learn more about participant expectations and how this program will be held, please view our program structure and ground rules document.

Guest Contributors

J.P. HILL is a teacher, lecturer, and mutual aid organizer. He also tweets too much, and thinks a lot about how we can use social media as a tool to help build a better world. He's deeply involved in a local community organizing collective, does some mutual aid and abolition work, and of course he writes in whatever time there is between these different commitments and communities. J.P. is the author of New Means Substack.

KATRINA MESSENGER is a radical feminist of African, Cherokee & Celtic descent, and a refugee from the communist, labor, feminist, and black nationalist movements of old. With over fifty years of experience as a grassroots activist and community leader, Katrina is a full time Wiccan mystic, an ordained minister, and the founder of Two Rivers Sanctuary, Reflections Mystery School and Connect DC.

SHARET GARCIA is the founder of UndocuProfessionals, a project inspired by her personal experiences as an undocumented student navigating a career path after graduation without adequate support. UndocuProfessionals’ mission is to create a brave space for undocumented students transitioning to undocumented professionals to share their experiences, network, collaborate, supporting and hosting a variety of workshops and more.

VANESSA CROWLEY is a radical feminist of African, Cherokee & Celtic descent, and a refugee from the communist, labor, feminist, and black nationalist movements of old. With over fifty years of experience as a grassroots activist and community leader, Katrina is a full time Wiccan mystic, an ordained minister, and the founder of Two Rivers Sanctuary, Reflections Mystery School and Connect DC.

HUWAIDA ARRAF is a Palestinian-American human rights attorney, activist and organizer who co-founded the Nobel Peace Prize-nominated International Solidarity Movement (ISM) and the Free Gaza Movement (now the Freedom Flotilla Coalition,) going on multiple voyages including earlier trips that successfully broke the siege on Gaza. Most recently, Huwaida was a spokesperson for the 2025 Madleen voyage with activist Greta Thunberg.

ANGELA RAINCATCHER is the convener of the public ritual group Connect DC. With over 20 years of experience as a priestess and community organizer, and a pagan spiritual practice going back to the 1980’s, Angela leads with a strong and open heart, and strives to treat all living beings with the respect they inherently deserve. Learn more about her work here.

NICOLE BORN-CROW is the co-founder of Folke Healing, an educational project based out of Cleveland, Ohio with in-person and online offerings. Drawing on her German, Italian, Lebanese, and Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry, Nicole is a politicized healer and activist, intuitive astrologer, Ancestral Lineage Repair practitioner, strega, Hexe and Jewitch.

ORELIA LESH is the convener of the public ritual group Connect DC. With over 20 years of experience as a priestess and community organizer, and a pagan spiritual practice going back to the 1980’s, Angela leads with a strong and open heart, and strives to treat all living beings with the respect they inherently deserve. Learn more about her work here.

Host & program facilitator

ELEANOR HANCOCK is the founder & director of Comrades Education, with formative experiences in The Work that Reconnects and informal animist, pagan practice. Drawing on over 25 years of experience in activism & social justice organizing, Eleanor built Comrades Education (formerly White Awake) from a small website in 2013 to an organization of national significance today. Eleanor holds a strong vision for Comrades Education’s work, and has built a supportive team of leadership and contributors to guide it. For more on how Eleanor frames her antiracism work, you can listen to this 2023 interview on Upstream Podcast.

What participants have said about our courses

  • “I am so grateful for the language, the love, the empowerment, and the honest respect shown by the facilitators for everyone's experience. This is the kind of work I've been looking for. You have helped me feel so much less alone.”

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  • “This course helped me to feel more motivated to work in community and at a community level - that there could actually be meaningful change that comes from that kind of action."

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  • "Many of the activist spaces I have been in used shame tactics to bring people into the movement, and it was really meaningful (and healing!) for me to be in a space that instead focused on what we can do starting now and what our individual and collective capabilities are."

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This course is actively supported by our Advisory Council Members:

Katrina Messenger

Betty Burkes

Bonnie Duran

"Why do you charge for your work?"

We believe the work that we do is significant, and we want to do it well. To this end, we charge a modest fee for our online programs, and solicit donations from participants and supporters, in order to meet our financial needs. This allows Comrades Education staff and instructors to focus their time and energy on the educational work this project promotes, for the benefit of all.

Comrades Education and our instructors support a transition away from capitalism, imperialism and white supremacy; we support reparations to historically targeted groups, communities and Peoples; and we make our work available to all regardless of financial means.

If you have further questions, please contact: info@comrades.education