- This event has passed.
Unpacking Power in Community
August 21 @ 12:00 PM – 3:00 PM CDT
Unpacking Power in Community: Move from Default to Deliberate Dynamics with Yana Ludwig
Thursday August 21, 2025
- Pacific time: 10am-1pm
- Mountain time: 11am-2pm
- Central time: 12pm-3pm
- Eastern time: 1pm-4pm
View your local time here.
This event is a part of the Liberation Learning Series which runs bi-weekly on Tuesdays from June 10 to September 30, 2025.
Join us for a 3-hour interactive workshop where we will learn how to identify, talk about, and deliberately respond to power dynamics in community. We will learn how to start addressing privilege and unconscious power dynamics while looking through a personal and collective lens.
About the event
Power is always present. How it’s acquired and used in community shapes how we relate, connect, and evolve together. As in any collective, intentional communities are not immune to the impacts of harmful power dynamics.
In this webinar, we will look at where power tends to collect in residential communities, and explore how we can best work with power so that it strengthens our communities rather than breaks them down. We will focus on three aspects of power: privilege dynamics, equitable distribution of power, and–trickiest of all–ways to talk about it so it does not turn toxic.
Your host Yana Ludwig has been on all sides of the power dynamics, and brings compassionate and practical lens to the stickiest of all community topics.
Using a social justice framework, and an awareness of how our current political moment can help us understand our own internal community dynamics, we will unpack our own relationships to power in community and the common structural pitfalls that groups can find themselves in.
In this session, you’ll learn about:
- Understanding privilege and how it shows up in intentional communities and other cooperative spaces
- Ways to distribute power, both structural and socially
- Several tools to get into productive – and even connecting – conversations about power
About your Presenter
Yana Ludwig
Yana served on the Board of Directors of the Foundation for Intentional Community for over a decade. She lived in community for 26 years and was a founder 4 times – all of her work is grounded in deep community experience. Her writing includes The Cooperative Culture Handbook (co-authored with Karen Gimnig) focuses on articulating a vision and practical pathway for intentional culture building; and many articles in Communities magazine. Her new book, Building Belonging: Your Guide to Starting a Residential Intentional Community, was released in May 2023.
Yana is the former Executive Director of the Center for Sustainable and Cooperative Culture at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage and Commonomics USA (an economic justice organization). She currently serves in that role for the North Coast Food Web in Oregon, where she lives with her partner and a couple of very fluffy four-leggeds. She is a dynamic, compassionate and thoughtful speaker and teacher, committed to creating a more just and resilient world.
Location
You’ll get the Zoom link after you register in your confirmation email. Please check the spam folder of the inbox you use to register for an email from orders@ic.org.
The Online Event Experience
Live Zoom Sessions
Nothing pre-recorded here! When you sign-up for an event with FIC, you’ll have the opportunity to join a live session on Zoom with the event presenter/facilitator and other participants.
Affordable and Accessible
All our events are run on a sliding scale basis. Generous donations cover the costs for low-income attendees. FIC is committed to making our programs accessible to people of all walks of life.
Watch the Recording
You’ll receive the recording of your event to view for 60 days. So don’t worry if you can’t attend a live session. Watch or listen whenever it is convenient for you. Transcripts available upon request.
Registration
