Nora (she/her) is a physician board-certified in Psychiatry and Addiction Medicine. She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University School of Medicine. She is the founder of Jubilee Healing Farm INC and Jubilee Integrated Wellness, PLLC.

Nora is passionate about community mental health, and believes that we cannot separate human health and thriving from our culture’s increasingly estranged and tenuous relationship with the natural world. Nora has served in a variety of leadership roles at organizations such as Monarch Behavioral Health, the Durham VA Medical Center and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina. She has been published in a variety of academic journals with a focus on racial equity and access to mental health care.

Nora is mother of three curious and energetic children, and has the good fortune to be married to her best friend.

Michal is a Teaching Professor in the Curriculum in Global Studies (CGS) at UNC Chapel Hill, where she also earned a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology, with a certificate in Cultural Studies. Michal's teaching and research seeks to equip students with ways of understanding and denaturalizing many of the core institutions and histories that are presumed to be inevitable and natural-- including the centrality of white supremacy, patriarchy and colonialism to our current visions and practices of “the global.” She serves as Diversity Liaison and chair of DEI for CGS, and co-leads a campus wide initiative on Transformative Pedagogy in Times of Crisis that seeks to create communities of practice for bringing anti-racist, anti-oppression practices into our pedagogy in ways that address and honor the full selves of faculty and students alike. These are based on her recent training and research in mindfulness, trauma-informed leadership and other somatic modalities. She has also curated and led the Carolina Seminar on the Theory and Politics of relationality with Arturo Escobar, since 2011, and the Social Movement Working Group, beginning in 2003. She continues to publish on her research on and with various social movements and social change projects. She has a forthcoming book co-authored with Arturo Escobar and Kriti Sharma, Relationality: Towards an Emergent Politics of life Beyond the Human, expected out in 2024 with Bloomsbury Press, which features her more recent research on Transformative and Healing Justice, Prison Abolition, Sacred Activism as well as other relational approaches to social change.

Kyle Lumsden is an undergraduate student at UNC Chapel Hill studying Medical Anthropology and Chemistry from Charlotte, North Carolina. She is on the pre-health track with an interest in psychiatry, public health, and expansion of substance use treatment in North Carolina contexts.

Dorel Clayton (he/him) is a Community Health professional with practical, life-changing experience, who works to assist individuals with chemical dependency, mental health disorders, and other stressors. Dorel has expertise that professional training cannot replicate. He has the mentality and ability to reach his peers, aiding with articulating recovery goals, learning and practicing new skills, helping with monitoring progress, assisting in treatment, modeling effective coping techniques, and implementing self-help strategies based on his own RE-Entry and Recovery experience. He also assists individuals with increasing self-advocacy to obtain necessary and effective services. Dorel spent 5 years working on a crisis unit and has been trained in health care counseling and peer support. He received certification as a facilitator and has trained certified and accredited curriculums for the past 8 years, as well as being well-versed in WRAP® intervention. Dorel’s experience, compassion, and commitment to Re-Entry and Recovery ensure his dedication to preparing quality professionals who desire to work in the field of Community Health Work.

Jamal Epperson (they/them) joined the Loyola Marymount University (LMU) community in 2019 and joined the DEI team in 2022. As the Assistant Director of DEI Initiatives, Jamal serves as the Advisory and lead for the Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation Alliance at LMU and works with various initiatives throughout DEI, such as Implicit Bias and the LMU Antiracism Workshop Series. In addition, Mx. Epperson serves as a liaison between HR and DEI by assisting with equitable recruitment and hiring practices for faculty and staff. Before this role, Jamal worked in various capacities in the Student Housing Office and Student Affairs, where they learned to center their work from a feminist abolitionist framework by promoting radical love. Jamal is currently a doctoral student at the University of San Francisco studying International Multicultural Education with a concentration in Human Rights Education and a minor in Organization & Leadership. Prior to their studies at USF, they received their M.Ed. in Student Affairs in Higher Education from Marquette University and a B.A. from Western Michigan University in Music and Psychology. Jamal also serves as a part-time trainer for Centinela Youth Services where they teach others about restorative practices and how to ingrain these values within the greater Los Angeles community. Outside of work, Jamal volunteers at Centinela Youth Services as a Restorative Justice facilitator, is a Capricorn sun, rising Scorpio, and Aries moon, and enjoys writing music, playing video games, traveling, thrift shopping, and annoying their dog Nico.

Lama Rod Owens is a Black Buddhist Southern Queen. An international influencer with a Master of Divinity degree in Buddhist Studies from Harvard Divinity School. Author of The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors and Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger, and co-author of Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love and Liberation, his teachings center on freedom, self-expression, and radical self-care.

A leading voice in a new generation of Buddhist teachers with over 11 years of experience, Lama Rod activates the intersections of his identity to create a platform that’s very natural, engaging, and inclusive. Applauded for his mastery in balancing weighty topics with a sense of lightness, the Queen has been featured by various national and international news outlets.

Highly sought after for talks, retreats, and workshops, his mission is showing you how to heal and free yourself. Wanna keep tabs on what Lama Rod is doing next? Be sure to sign up for his email list here. Stay tuned to his website here for upcoming offerings and click here for bookings and other requests.

Tamira is an ancestral medium, song carrier, and ritual facilitator. She specializes in co-creating ritual containers that facilitate connections with our ancestral ecosystems. Her spiritual foundation and ancestral connection practices are rooted in ecologies of Love and Black liberation theologies and informed by her initiations into Afro-Brazilian earth-honoring traditions and West African Ifa Òrìṣà tradition. In her professional life, she is a research chemist with over 16 years of environmental research experience. She is also a STEM mentor for elementary, middle, and high school youth. She loves spending time with her children, kinfolk, feathered friends, and reading books.