LGBTQ Community of Practice Retreat
The ACPE LGBTQI Community of Practice is hosting a retreat for CoP members in Atlanta November 10-12, just before the leadership meetings. ACPE members who identify as LGBTQI are welcome to join, even if you have not attended a CoP meeting before. The meeting will begin Friday night with dinner and continue with sessions Saturday morning (playful learning together) and Saturday afternoon with our speaker, Dr. Pamela Ayo Yetunde (more on that below). We’ll wrap up Sunday morning with breakfast and a closing time of remembrance and celebration.
Register for the retreat (the $25 registration gets hotel and meals covered).
Hotel reservations can be booked at the ACPE group rate at The Westin Atlanta Perimeter North, 770-395-3900, no later than October 15, 2023.
Speaker: Saturday afternoon we will be led by Dr. Pamela Ayo Yetunde. Pamela Ayo Yetunde. J.D, Th.D. is a pastoral counselor who also studied law and spirituality in culture. As an African-American queer woman Buddhist leader, she brings a complex subjectivity and an intersectional lens to her concerns about what spiritual care is and how contemplative practices are used to avoid the real-life struggles of targeted people. During the past several years, Ayo has invested her energies towards shifting consciousness towards true compassion in the struggle for liberation. Visit www.buddhistjustice.com for more information about that work.
In her workshop "Think Like a Lawyer, Act Like a Chaplain, Advocate Like an Activist, Be Like an Ethicist," Dr. Yetunde will present information about the legal and policy implications of being in the LGBTQI community while also addressing how to attend to self and other care in an increasingly perilous society. This presentation will equip chaplaincy educators and practitioners on serving in the complex contexts we find ourselves today, even as we ourselves experience the pressures of those contexts.
This will be a great time of fellowship and resourcing – hope to see you there! Any questions, please contact Tammerie Day.
Pamela Ayo Yetunde, J.D., Th.D., is a board certified pastoral counselor and professor of pastoral care and counseling. She holds degrees in journalism, law, culture-spirituality, and pastoral counseling. She also holds certificates in chaplaincy and spiritual direction. Ayo is educated and practiced in Western & Eastern contemplative spiritualities.
Ayo earned a M.A. in Culture and (Catholic) Spirituality at Holy Names University, and a Th.D. in Pastoral Counseling at Columbia Theological Seminary (Presbyterian). She taught at University of the West, United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities, and Upaya Zen Center’s Buddhist Chaplaincy Program. Ayo was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard Divinity School. She is the author of “Audre Lorde’s Hopelessness and Hopefulness: Cultivating a Womanist Nondualism for Psycho-Spiritual Wholeness” in Feminist Theology and has presented on Audre Lorde’s spirituality at the Parliament of the World’s Religions and the American Psychosocial Oncology Society (APOS) conference. She is the co-editor of Black and Buddhist: What Buddhism Can Teach Us About Race, Resilience, Transformation & Freedom, and wrote Buddhist-Christian Dialogue, U.S. Law, and Womanist Theology for Transgender Spiritual Care, and Object Relations, Buddhism, and Relationality in Womanist Practical Theology. She was the lead researcher on the Women, Spirituality, and Cancer pilot study co-sponsored by CaringBridge.
For more information, contact Ayo@centeroftheheart.org.