our team
From the onset, we deliberately chose to hold intimacy as a guiding principle of our work. We believe firmly that this work cannot be done in the absence of true intimacy, vulnerability, and authenticity, and the beauty and conflict and transformation this engenders. So often, whiteness encourages us to shy away from these very things, further insisting on disconnection from self, other, nature, spirit.
Over the past two years, our work together has grown, alongside our vision of what is possible. We have cultivated our trio-ship online across oceans and continents, and deepened together in person as often as we can. When we get together, we love to befriend plants, to eat (especially cheese), to be silly together, to hold each other through our individual and collective growth, and to dream into what might be possible if whiteness no longer existed.
We are three dear friends born and raised white in the U.S., and currently living very far away from each other. Each of us has been doing our own work in the field for years, both individually and together, including through the Decolonize Race Project and Decolonizing Whiteness workshop series (Jen and Roan) and Reckoning with White Femininity and Anti-Blackness (El and Jen). In 2023, Jen had the brilliant idea to bring these two bodies of work together, and see what emerged through the questions all three of us had been holding. There was immediate resonance, and we had our first in-person retreat at Roan’s family home in January of 2024.
Ellen Tuzzolo (they/she) is a white, queer human of Sicilian, Southern Italian and Irish ancestry. They are a mama, an herbalist, and an emerging death doula. Ellen is most fired up by undermining systems of oppression and breaking down barriers that prevent people from caring for themselves, each other, and the earth.
After growing up as queer and gender expansive in a tiny mostly white town in Massachusetts, Ellen was politicized while supporting organizing and advocacy efforts to end mass incarceration and the school-to-prison pipeline in Louisiana and Alabama. During their decade in the south, they realized it was time to expand capacity to work towards racial justice within their communities of white people in the northeast. Their passion for working alongside other white people to uproot white supremacy grew through their involvement with the White Noise Collective and Showing Up for Racial Justice, two organizations they were part of founding in Providence, RI.
As a facilitator of multi-racial spaces committed to both popular education and outdoor education, Ellen has held space for thousands of youth and adults to understand and challenge systemic racism and other forms of oppression. They are a trained lead facilitator for VISIONS Inc. and have worked with a wide range of organizations, institutions and individuals through VISIONS Inc., Partners for Collaborative Change and Liberation Consulting.
Ellen is currently a staff person for a fierce environmental justice organization in their neighborhood called the People’s Port Authority (PPA). Through PPA, Ellen supports the fight against toxic and polluting industries in the Port of Providence that are causing wildly high asthma rates and other serious negative health impacts. When they are not fighting Goliath, Ellen loves spending time outside with their family, coaching all gender youth basketball, cooking ancestral foods, and learning how to tend to beautiful and edible plant friends.
El Tuzzolo
Roan (they/them) is a writer, facilitator, plant-lover, and healing artist. With a background in somatics, linguistics, and community organizing, their work weaves together ancestral healing, embodied practice, and the liberatory power of desire. As a queer and nonbinary sex educator, they center the importance of pleasure, desire, and reclamation of the body as essential practices toward healing and liberation. For years they’ve worked with white folks in North America around ancestral healing, unraveling allegiance to whiteness, and co-creating white anti-racist culture and practices, including through the Decolonize Race Project and through tending to their own Scottish, Irish, and English ancestry. They’ve worked from grassroots organizing to UN-level policy consulting, and are a facilitant of global YES! Jams around the world. As a spirit in a meat suit, they are endlessly fascinated by what becomes possible when we stretch to embrace more nuance and complexity, and cultivate strength through softness. As a forever nerd, they can typically be found off on a side quest, studying something new.
Roan is a fiction writer, ocean lover, Gaelic speaker, student of herbalism, language nerd and aspiring polyglot, lover of soft things, and protector and steward to Carmichael the cat.
Roan
Wren (Jen) Willsea is a queer mama of young children, a sewist of garments and quilts, and a baker. As a white antiracist practitioner for more than 20 years, she has led thousands of individuals and groups through experiences focused on naming and facing the unnameable, connecting to what is real and vulnerable, and healing the wounds of white supremacy. Wren is known for the deep well of wisdom and groundedness she brings to her antiracist facilitation, consulting, coaching and writing as a white cisgender woman.
Wren has spent more than two decades studying with healer facilitator elders across the U.S. - Black, Brown, Indigenous, and white - and their liberatory models for internal, relational, institutional and systemic change. Over the last decade in Atlanta, Wren has birthed creative projects with friend-collaborators - Black, Brown, Indigenous, and white - rooted in the stance that we can and must practice freedom from colonial legacies now.
A daughter of spiritual seekers, lovers of oceans and boats, studious researchers, creators of beauty and of delights to the tastebuds, Wren is a lineage transformer and a death doula for whiteness. Her blood lineage traces 11-generations to English and Dutch Protestant settler colonizers of northeastern Turtle Island, and 4-generations back to Ukrainian Jewish and Scottish refugees to the U.S. Breaking allegiance to whiteness is a devotional path for Wren. She is focused now on the spiritual, somatic, and relational practices that make the death of whiteness real, and provide glimpses of a future beyond whiteness.
Wren currently serves on the Governance Team at Change Elemental, is a member of the VISIONS Inc. network of consultants, and is a Hearth-Tender at Cavesong. She has a Masters in Theological Studies from Harvard University.
