Smart growth practitioners seeking to advance equity in and through our work experience tremendous, often overwhelming, stressors and challenges on a daily basis that can lead to exhaustion and burnout. This workshop aims to help people engaged in equity and justice work become more attuned with how such stress may be showing up in our bodies and how to respond as a team or collective. Attendees will be guided through a process of reflection, embodiment, and individual and group movement as we seek to build fellowship and solidarity for endurance in this effort.
Check out the full Equity Summit agenda
Meet the moderator
Nedra Deadwyler
Nedra Deadwyler guides equitable processes to bring community voices into defining and shaping places and the story of place. She is a social worker, cultural preservationist, and creative. She centers humanity, lived experiences, community care, and our beautiful world. Through her organization Civil Bikes she leads tours, provides bike education, advocacy for mobility justice, and youth bike camps. Through Save Your Spaces she facilitates skills sharing to involve the everyday person in preservation. She continues to write, think, and challenge the systems governing our quality of life and invites our collective transformation toward just interdependence.
She holds a Master of Heritage Preservation from Georgia State University, a Master of Social Work from New York University, and a Bachelor of Social Work from the University of Georgia. She was Scholar in Residence in 2021 with The Atlanta Beltline. Her publications include the chapter Civil Bikes: embracing Atlanta’s racialized history through bicycle tours. (Routledge, 2016, Bicycle Justice and Urban Transformation: Biking for All? Edited by A. Golub, M.L. Hoffmann, A. E. Lugo, and G. F. Sandoval), the book review Whose Bike Lanes, in “Bike Lanes are White Lanes: Urban Planning and Bicycle Infrastructure and Advocacy, and the article “There is a Tremendous Untold Story of Black. People on Bikes” in Bicycling Magazine, August 2020.
The Equity Summit will uplift strategies to advance racial equity in smart growth amidst growing political uncertainty in 2024 and beyond, as well as a shift away from explicit equity initiatives by elected officials, state agencies, and the private sector.