WEBINARS & RETREATS

Our theme at bluelight academy for 2026 is “generative conflict” - as a worker cooperative team of transformative justice practitioners, mediators, and organizational consultants we have first hand experience moving from fear or destructive conflict tendencies into creative, grounded, accessible, and safe practice to address conflict.

In this FREE webinar we will:

• unpack why conflict can feel scary,

• share our most used best practices to move toward generative conflict,

• illuminate what we have noticed as patterns in our mediation work with clients, and

• go through an overview of what to expect from our 2026 programming including our 60 hour conflict mediation training program

If you attend live, you will also get a special discount for our conflict programming this year!

Do you feel confident in your ability to name and interrupt when an agreement is violated? We find that community agreements should be paired with a right sized safety and care plan that can be drawn on as needed in moments of dysregulation and to get support beyond the people present in the space. As an abolitionist collective, we are committed to responding to safety concerns without mandatory reporting - safety + care plans are critical to following through on these commitments. In this webinar we will walk through the agreements we use in conflict mediation, and how we respond when they are violated without punishment. We will also walk through some of our favorite safety planning resources - specifically from the Creative Interventions Toolkit - as well as Spring Up’s mediation safety + care plan worksheet, with examples of how we have used it to response to safety concerns and challenging moments.

In a society that prioritizes logic and the mind over the body and embodiment, we are intentionally disconnected from our bodies’ ability to discern between what is unsafe and what is positive stress, or the discomfort of learning and growing. One of the ways we can learn the skills to discern for ourselves is by reconnecting with this body knowledge through somatics. Somatics offers us tools to be able to build the skills and practices that support us in regulating our bodies and nervous systems, such as co-regulation, grounding, meditation, and stimming. This allows us to connect with our needs, helping us to build strategies to meet them and notice when they are being violated. Part of this involves working through our internalized and embodied ableism and the ways we have been socialized to suppress our pain and discomfort in order to be productive.

People often quote that conflict avoidance is a tenet of white supremacy culture, but what does that look like in practice? And how do we interrupt these patterns without overcorrecting? In this webinar we will go through a map of 4 different flavors of conflict avoidance, from ignoring and enabling harm to jumping to conclusions and scapegoating rather than holding the complexity of a situation. Together we will discuss harm reduction as a framework for responding to conflict and harm in a way that center’s people’s agency while moving away from perfectionism and unnecessary urgency.