Get ready to fast-track your racial justice knowledge.

Awareness Accelerator is designed for individuals who are early on in their anti-racism journey, those who could use a firmer foundation for their ongoing learning, and people looking to more fully understand, internalize, and manifest racial justice as a Jewish value.

Awareness Accelerator is a good fit if you are dedicated to taking concrete next steps to increase your awareness around race, privilege, bias, and systems of oppression. The only prerequisite is acceptance of the idea that racism is baked into our culture, and a commitment to embarking on necessary internal and external work toward our collective liberation.

Awareness Accelerator is a six-week course designed to be largely completed on your own time. For each of the six weeks, you’ll receive access to an introductory video from April and Tracie and three or four other resources for you to work through at your own pace. We make a new module of resources available every seven days for six weeks, but it’s up to you to figure out when you want to engage. With one exception, no single resource requires more than 30 to 40 minutes of time, though you could dedicate more. We estimate the time commitment at between 3 and 4 hours a week. We encourage you to dive in during the first 6 weeks, but if that time commitment or pacing is difficult for you, you are welcome to slow down. You will have access to the materials for 6 months.

As soon as you register, you’ll receive access to the course portal and some pre-work/reference material, including the three-video offering, (Joyously!) Moving Toward Racial Justice. The six modules will be made available weekly, starting seven days after you register.

This question is best answered by another question: What are you hoping to get out of it? Are you looking for all brand new concepts? You might be disappointed. Are you looking for opportunities to deepen your existing understanding and hone your analysis? Let’s talk. Through both focused attention and an explicitly Jewish lens, Awareness Accelerator could be a great way to further cultivate and sharpen your skills.

We think it will. Of course your team has specific attributes that are wholly and completely yours, but after decades in this work, we’ve found that the vast majority of organizations really need the same intervention in the beginning of their journey. Awareness Accelerator is designed to provide that intervention. If your team has been doing the work of self-reflection and learning--both as individuals and as a team--for some time, Awareness Accelerator may not be the best fit. If, on the other hand, you’re just starting off or still fairly early in the journey, you could spend a lot of money on a consultant to do an audit, but that audit will likely tell you you need to work on a shared understanding of how and why oppression, privilege, bias, etc show up in and outside of the workplace. Awareness Accelerator lets you skip a step, and go straight to work on achieving the shared understanding.

For groups of 19 or larger, we price by tiers. There is a savings if your group reaches at least the middle of the tier range. If you only have one or two more than the cut-off, it might be more economical to buy the lower tier and add one or two individual seats. However, if you buy the higher tier, you have up to 2 years to use all of the seats, so if you intent to onboard folks in the next 24 months and want to make Awareness Accelerator a part of the orientation process, it makes sense to lock in the lower, bulk rate for those future team members.

Yes! We encourage you to connect with a learning partner or havruta, and the more the merrier! Awareness Accelerator is designed to quickly give students a baseline understanding (or deepen their understanding) of core concepts, terms, and lived experiences. Having a shared vocabulary and experience is a great step for a group looking to change their culture and transform their organization. We even recommend occasional group processing meetings--as frequent as works for you--to review the discussion questions together.

Sure! We have heard from many students that processing with a partner helps them to deepen the learning, but it’s by no means required. Folks who work better alone can use our “discussion” questions as prompts to journal, engage in hitbodedut (literally “self-seclusion” the practice of speaking, out loud, directly to G-d/Spirit/the Universe), or simply reflect on your own. We also have an online community forum where you can share your thoughts with other Awareniks, and read theirs as well.

The Community Forum is native to our third-party host for the course. You don’t have to be on Facebook, Twitter, Slack, or any other social media platform to participate. The only folks who will be able to see what you post are April, Tracie, and other Awareniks. Participation is strongly encouraged. Learning with others is as important as learning from our teachers.

We never use the postings of our students without either asking explicit permission or anonymizing what we share, or both. Though technically we do own what our students post inside our portals, relationships are extremely important to Joyous Justice, and we would never assert intellectual property rights at the expense of a relationship.

Not at all. Awareness Accelerator is designed for Jewish and Jewish-adjacent folks of all races and ethnicities. We work to be accessible to folks from all Jewish backgrounds in terms of translating acronyms, Hebrew, or anything else that could feel like insider jargon. When specific concepts are more or less relevant to a specific identity, we do our best to name that.

Joyous Justice is continuously striving to be an organization which models the liberatory and joyful world we want to create. We are building out our capacity in a number of ways, including our accessibility options. Awareness Accelerator features burned-in-captions on all of the videos created by Joyous Justice, LLC, and we do our best to use alternate image descriptions and use other web-based accessibility measures. 

We recognize that this is an area of growth for us. If you have more specific questions about the accessibility of Awareness Accelerator or recommendations for us, please let us know here, and a dedicated member of our team will respond.

You will have access to the resources for a full six months (make that now a year when you register for Grounded & Growing!), so you can choose to proceed very slowly, or whenever you do have the time. 

Please be in touch with us with your questions by contacting us here or by scheduling a no-obligation chat with April or Tracie.

Thank you so much for your interest in Grounding & Growing with access to Awareness Accelerator as a bonus!