Singer Amikaeyla has spent her career sharing musical healing with people facing challenges around the world. Out of her own deep experiences with music as a force for healing, her work is fueled by a belief in its magic powers. So what has this last year during a pandemic, when her work was altered and sometimes unrecognizable, been like? What has kept her optimism and personal healing going? What lessons she learned over many years have come to the fore this year? Join us as we talk together about the practices, perspectives and power that have supported us each in this most unprecedented time.

Amikaeyla Gaston is a force for change. She creates environments that support people in exploring themselves and uses creativity and strategic questioning to support people in addressing their fears, developing a place where everyone has an equal voice. She has led corporations, universities, government, and nonprofit organizations through cultural competency & racial equity training. She has done extensive work in the health arena for over the past 20 years and travels the world extensively as a cultural arts ambassador for the State Department bringing together artists and healers of all forms and from all specialties to promote healing and wellness through the arts & activism. Her programming and work with refugees and at-risk children, youth, and families has been utilized and implemented by the Department of Health & Human Services, The American Psychological Association, and the US Consulate General’s Cultural Affairs office, taking her around the world to Israel, Beirut, Amman, Damascus, Palestine, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Nigeria & Sierra Leone just to name a few.

Throughout the world, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex people continue to experience oppression, including physical attack, psychological torture and rejection by family, friends and communities. In his travels as a journalist, Robin Hammond began to meet people whose very identities are still illegal in their own countries. He set out to interview and photograph them, telling their stories through beautiful images and quotes, in their own words. His project became a passion, and part of his work as a social activist. Personal stories of losses associated with lack of acceptance and understanding change hearts and minds. Robin will share what he has learned and the work he is doing to change the global landscape for LGBTQI people.

The winner of numerous awards including a World Press Photo prize, the RF Kennedy Journalism Award, the W.Eugene Smith Award for Humanistic Photography, and four Amnesty International awards for Human Rights journalism, Robin Hammond has dedicated his career to documenting human rights and development issues around the world through long term photographic projects. His latest work on homophobia and trans-phobia, Where Love Is Illegal, has become a popular social media campaign that shares stories of discrimination and supports advocacy groups in Africa.

Robin is the founder of Witness Change, a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing human rights through highly visual story telling.

The war between so-called pro-choice and pro-life forces in America seem divided beyond repair. But where does that leave women who have made the often painful and important decision to have an abortion? As Kassi Underwood says, they are left with a choice between regret and relief, with few opportunities to talk about the experience and feel supported in their personal struggles. Kassi knows from personal experience that needing to hide all the sometimes complex feelings left after an abortion has a greater chance of fracturing women than the abortion itself. For even necessary losses are still losses, deserving our ear and calling for our attention. With great humor and fierce honesty, Kassi Underwood takes us along on her own search for answers and, in the process, helps us to think more deeply about this important subject.

Kassi Underwood’s work has been published in The New York Times, The Atlantic online, The Rumpus, and Refinery29. She holds an MFA in literary nonfiction from Columbia University, where she taught on the faculty of the Undergraduate Writing Program. In 2012, she won Exhale's Pro-Voice Storyteller Award in recognition of her personal essays on abortion; in 2013, she traveled across the United States, sharing her journey after abortion in an effort to bring peace to the abortion war. Described by audiences as “part-storyteller, part-public speaker, and part performance artist,” Kassi gives talks on the spirituality of abortion, addiction recovery, personal transformation, and social justice nationwide. She has addressed Christian churches and liberal arts colleges, shared a stage with standup comedians Amy Schumer and Sarah Silverman, and appeared as a guest on MSNBC and HuffPost Live. She lives with her husband in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is a student at Harvard Divinity School and cohost of the podcast, Spiritually Blonde.