Coming Soon
Voices You'll Encounter
Dr. Laura Calderon de la Barca
Collective Change Lab, Senior Associate, Healing Systems Co-Lead.
Dr. Laura Calderon de la Barca
Collective Change Lab, Senior Associate, Healing Systems Co-Lead.
Laura Calderón de la Barca, PhD is a psychotherapist and systems change practitioner specializing in collective, intergenerational, and systemic trauma. As Senior Associate at the Collective Change Lab, she advances healing as the key to transforming social systems. She is the lead author of Healing Systems, published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review (2024), which was the most-read SSIR article of the year. Rooted in her lived experience as a Mexican Mestiza reconnecting with her Indigenous spirituality, Laura bridges trauma healing, decolonial practice, and spiritual reconnection as pathways for changemakers. She teaches internationally, with particular focus on Latin America, and collaborates with global spiritual and social impact communities in events such as the Skoll World Forum (Oxford University) and the Wellbeing Summits (Bilbao, Bogotá and Saltillo). She has also facilitated collective trauma healing labs, support spaces for people of color and Spanish-speaking communities with Thomas Hübl through the Academy of Inner Science and the Pocket Project, and served as a panelist and host for the Collective Trauma Online Summits (2019–2023). She is currently working on a documentary about Healing Systems with the Collective Change Lab and Pirata Films, scheduled for release in mid-2026.
Bayo Akomolafe
Public Intellectual | Author | Hubert H. Humphrey Distinguished Professor of American Studies | Visionary Founder
Bayo Akomolafe
Public Intellectual | Author | Hubert H. Humphrey Distinguished Professor of American Studies | Visionary FounderDr. Bayo Akomolafe is a Nigerian-born philosopher, author, speaker, and self-described “trans-public intellectual” whose work invites us beyond rigid ideas of right and wrong into more entangled, relational ways of being. Of Yoruba descent and shaped by early experiences of migration, loss, and encounters with traditional healers, his life’s inquiry centers on trauma, decolonization, ecology, and the sacred “in-between” spaces of uncertainty. A former lecturer and Special Envoy for the International Alliance for Localization, he has taught at institutions including Middlebury College and Pacifica Graduate Institute, and is the author of These Wilds Beyond Our Fences and We Will Tell Our Own Story. As Visionary Founder of The Emergence Network and host of We Will Dance with Mountains, Bayo explores postactivism, ontofugitivity, and transraciality—offering poetic, provocative invitations to rethink justice, power, and hope. Living between India and the United States with his wife and children, he considers his most sacred work the daily practice of learning how to be with the world—confused, enchanted, and alive in the “meantime.”
Somava Saha, MD, MS
President and CEO of Well-being and Equity(WE) in the World,
Somava Saha, MD, MS
President and CEO of Well-being and Equity(WE) in the World,Somava Saha, MD, MS works to advance intergenerational well-being and equity on a foundation of racial and economic justice. A practical visionary, as President and CEO of Well-being and Equity(WE) in the World, Dr. Saha knows and shows that real system change is possible through relationships and system change. Through collectives like the Well Being In the Nation(WIN) Network, Communities RISE Together, and others, in the last five years, this work has led to the creation of over 11,000 jobs in 1009 communities experiencing inequities, entrusted these communities to lead change, and resulted in 195,000 more birthdays celebrated and millions more bedtime stories told—at a 30:1 return on investment. She leads the JUSTICE SQUARED initiative, with WE in the World as the national program office for this work. Previously, as vice president at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Dr. Saha led 100 Million Healthier Lives, which brought together 1850+ partners in 30+ countries reaching >500 million people to improve health, wellbeing and equity. She served as vice president at Cambridge Health Alliance, where she led a health system transformation that won national awards for improved health, experience and cost for safety net communities. In 2012, Dr. Saha was recognized as one of ten Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Young Leaders for contributions to improving the health of the nation. She was elected a Leading Causes of Life Global Fellow in 2016. She has appeared on panels with the Dalai Lama, Angela Davis, and been a featured speaker at a White House Summit on the economy hosted by Kamala Harris. Dr. Saha and her team at WE in the World aim to grow and be connected with a global movement of better ancestors that can advance intergenerational well-being and justice together.
Stephen Lewis
President at Forum for Theological Exploration
Stephen Lewis
President at Forum for Theological Exploration
Stephen Lewis is the president of the Forum for Theological Exploration (FTE) and creator and co-founder of DO GOOD X, a start-up accelerator for diverse Christian social entrepreneurs. He is an organizational change strategist and a leadership development specialist, focused on inspiring the next generation of faith-inspired leaders and entrepreneurs to live and work on purpose. Stephen is the co-author of Another Way: Living and Leading Change on Purpose (2020) and A Way Out of No Way: An Approach to Christian Innovation (2021).
Learning Conversation Facilitators
Nilima Bhat
Founder-Director Shakti Leadership Mission; Former Distinguished Professor in Gender & Conscious Leadership, Faculty of Excellence, Tecnologico de Monterrey.
Nilima Bhat
Founder-Director Shakti Leadership Mission; Former Distinguished Professor in Gender & Conscious Leadership, Faculty of Excellence, Tecnologico de Monterrey.
About Nilima
Nilima Bhat is former Distinguished Professor in Gender and Conscious Leadership, Faculty of Excellence, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico. She is a visionary in the fields of Personal Mastery, Leadership, Gender Equality and Wellbeing. As a facilitator of personal transformation, she coaches individuals and organizations in their quest for conscious evolution. She is an international speaker/trainer on organizational culture, conscious business, women in leadership, self-awareness for work-life balance as well as Indian wisdom and wellness traditions. She is an active supporter of the Conscious Capitalism movement, WIN (Women’s International Networking) and board member of Peace through Commerce, MixR and 20-first. Author of three books: Shakti Leadership – Embracing Feminine and Masculine Power in Business; Healing Leaders 7 Steps to Recovery of Self, & My Cancer Is Me The Journey from Illness to Wholeness which outline new and cutting-edge holistic and integrated approaches to Leadership and Resilience.
LEARNING CONVERSATION DAY 1
Becoming the Wise Fool of Tough Love
Core Invite
Psychological Wholeness through integrating the four poles of elder, child, masculine and feminine.
Summary
In a fragmented world, integrating our four-fold self brings us into our full power and gives us the capacity to use it as a force for good and be the change we seek. This LC will center on polarity thinking and reflective exercises, along with a leadership style assessment, and end with an embodied practice.
Michael Kass
Michael Kass is an award-winning storyteller, facilitator, and experience designer who works with leaders, impact organizations, and communities to weave a new story.
Michael Kass
Michael Kass is an award-winning storyteller, facilitator, and experience designer who works with leaders, impact organizations, and communities to weave a new story.
Michael Kass
Michael Kass is an award-winning storyteller, facilitator, and experience designer who works with leaders, impact organizations, and communities to weave a new story. Raised in Washington, DC, he grew up with a vague sense that the world was vastly more complex and magical than his parents and teachers let on. He loved myths, fairy tales, and any story where the world revealed its hidden layers. At the age of 11, he declared to his parents that he wanted to spend his life exploring the ways that story reflects and shapes both culture and identity. They nodded and immediately sent him to science camp. That tension between societal expectations and deeper knowing showed itself in every aspect of his life for the next 25 years from a career that straddled acting on stages throughout Chicago and nonprofit financial management consulting, to relationships and friendships. Ultimately the tension became too heavy to hold, and at the age of 35 he collapsed under the strain. Unable to get off the couch, he looked ahead and saw endless years of deskbound drudgery and pasta dinners eaten alone over the kitchen sink. That wasn't acceptable. So he did the most terrifying thing he'd ever done: he began to believe (slowly, slowly) in magic. It was a quiet rebellion, and it changed everything. He quit his job, and a month later found himself working with Indigenous healers in South America. Following a trail of breadcrumbs, he began to practice and facilitate breathwork, launching the first breathwork community on the Eastside of Los Angeles. From there, things unfolded in unpredictable and beautiful ways. He wrote and performed a solo storytelling show, Ceremony, that won awards and toured the United States for three years, serving as both entertainment and transformational experience. His storytelling workshops made their way into spaces including The Nonprofit Partnership, The Walt Disney Company, Google, and the Pan African Leadership Institute. Since 2017, he has been a leading voice in the Ethical Storytelling movement, working to shift the culture of impact storytelling away from extractive practice and toward models that uplift the voices and dignity of all. He served as an advisor to the Dignified Storytelling Project and has brought ethical storytelling conversations to conferences including SOCAP, Opportunity Collaboration, and the 501(c)onference. Along the way he has journeyed across the world as a Wondermaker with the Nomadic School of Wonder, guided breath and sound journeys for social impact leaders and communities around the world, and continued his study with teachers including Deena Metzger and José Luis Stevens. Most recently, his work has centered on the stewardship of Vibrational Intelligence, an emergent field of practice for leaders cultivating their capacity to attune to, discern between, and act from a wider range of frequencies and signals. It's the latest manifestation of that childhood knowing: that beneath the world we're told is real, there are deeper layers of information available to anyone willing to listen. And that, especially right now, those layers are necessary to navigating the world. Michael comes to Soularize as a fellow traveler, eager to learn alongside this community, to trade breadcrumbs, and to find out together what becomes possible when we lead from that deeper knowing. Learn more at www.storyandspirit.org and www.vibrationalintelligence.org.
LEARNING CONVERSATION — DAY 2
The Deeper Knowing: A Communal Experience of Vibrational Intelligence
Core Invite
As old frameworks and ways of knowing falter, how might we access non-linear forms of intelligence for guidance, strategy, and connection? This experience offers a bridge between the sacred and strategic, opening possibilities for a new way of experiencing and speaking about vibrational intelligence.
Summary
Based on decades of experience leading transformational campaigns, entrepreneur, activist, diplomat, and author Jerry White will lead the group in a facilitated exploration of humane leadership. How can we BE SEE DO simultaneously? It's not about chasing them in sequence: values on retreat, vision at the offsite, or aligned action when there's bandwidth at work.
We open with BE, combining intuition and projection to center our core values, the deepest energies we source when in flow, doing our finest work. Then we will SEE, finding our burn what makes us angry, breaks our heart, what chases us. Our agitation offers clues to our vocation, rather than a distraction from mission. Finally, we DO, declaring aloud with confident humility what we're actually good at our contribution.Pulling it all together, participants will declare who they are, what they stand for, and an action they prioritize as a humane leader. Our outer work and inner work are not separate projects; they converge with transcendent power when we BE SEE DO together.
Dr. Tamice Spencer Helms
Dr. Tamice Spencer-Helms is a theologian, cultural analyst, and mystic minister..
Dr. Tamice Spencer Helms
Dr. Tamice Spencer-Helms is a theologian, cultural analyst, and mystic minister..
Dr. Tamice Spencer Helms
Dr. Tamice Spencer-Helms is a theologian, cultural analyst, and mystic minister whose work lives at the intersection of Black liberation thought, spiritual formation, and social transformation. Author of Faith Unleavened: The Wilderness Between Trayvon Martin & George Floyd and founder of Mixtape Praxis, they bring rigorous scholarship and deep pastoral care into every room they enter leaving audiences with new language for what they've always known to be true. Drawing on original research and frameworks like the R.E.S.T. Mixtape, Soulful Leadership Theory and Hush Harbor Praxis, Tamice equips leaders and communities with practical tools for reconstructing faith, identity, and belonging beyond the containers that once held them. They are the host and Creative Director of Black Modern Mystic Media and adjunct faculty at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities.
LEARNING CONVERSATION — DAY 2
New Wineskins for an Ancient Path
Core Invite
how can the R.E.S.T Mixtape as a rule of life and a container for post christian faith become an interfaith, interethnic, intergenerational container for conversation across difference and perpective. How do the elements point us to a fundamental oneness at the core of everything.
Summary
Drawing from the R.E.S.T. Mixtape methodology developed in my doctoral work, we will imagine the “wineskins” needed to carry ancestral wisdom in ways that are adaptable, sovereign, earth-honoring, and life-giving.Rooted in the sacred refusal of the hush harbor, hip hop, and Black cultural aesthetics, this conversation invites us to learn from artists, ancestors, and communities with their backs against the wall as we discern what can sustain faithful change in tumultuous times.
Rainier Wylde
Author, international creativity coach and former psychotherapist and professor
Rainier Wylde
Author, international creativity coach and former psychotherapist and professor
Rainier Wylde
Rainier Wylde is an author, international creativity coach and former psychotherapist and professor whose work lives at the intersection of art, spirituality, and what it actually costs to stay human. He holds a Masters Degree in Community Counseling and hosts The Creators Podcast as well as leading The Creators Collective, a community for artists and thinkers trying to keep their work honest. His first book, As You Are, was an Amazon bestseller. His forthcoming book from St. Martin's explores creativity and the courage to remain fully alive in a world that rewards numbness. He lives in Charleston, South Carolina.
LEARNING CONVERSATION — DAY 3
What Survives the Ruins: Making Something When the Old Story Breaks
Core Invite
What do you do with your creative life when the story that organized it falls apart?
Summary
Most of us were handed a set of myths before we knew we'd received them. These were more than creativity myths. They were the same architecture as the theology many of us have been deconstructing.
In this session, I'll share what I discovered in that collapse and what became possible in the rubble. We'll spend time with the existentialists, in various spiritual and contemplative traditions, historic creators, and with the part of you that still wants to make something even when you're not sure what you believe anymore or whether you have permission.
This is an honest conversation about what actually survives when the old permissions expire and what it looks like to begin to create something anyway.
Danny Sanchez
Danny Sanchez is an entrepreneur, product strategist, and speaker exploring..
Danny Sanchez
Danny Sanchez is an entrepreneur, product strategist, and speaker exploring..
Danny Sanchez
Danny Sanchez is an entrepreneur, product strategist, and speaker exploring how technology can help people think more clearly, make better decisions, and navigate meaningful change. His work sits at the intersection of AI, learning, and human development, with a focus on designing products that deepen reflection rather than replace it. He is the founder of Talkadelic, where he helps experts transform their ideas into conversational experiences that can reach thousands of people without losing what makes them engaging in the first place.
LEARNING CONVERSATION — DAY 3
Conversations as Craft: Designing Spaces for Trust, Insight, and Action
Core Invite
Most of us assume great conversations are the result of asking great questions. What if the quality of a conversation is determined long before the first question is asked? Together, we’ll explore how purpose, space, people, and structure shape the conversations that transform individuals and communities.
Summary
There's no lack of ideas today. With social media and AI proliferating content at the click of a button, what we need is spaces for real inner work. As the Soularize community explores how to integrate inner transformation with outward action, this Learning Conversation offers a practical framework for designing conversations that cultivate trust, shared wisdom, and meaningful collaboration.
The session begins with a brief introduction to the idea of “conversations as craft,” followed by a facilitated conversation designed to demonstrate the principles in real time. Participants will engage in paired and small-group dialogue, periodically pausing to reflect on how elements like purpose, prompts, group composition, virtual/physical spaces, and structure shaped their experience. We’ll close by collectively identifying design principles participants can apply in their own communities, organizations, and gatherings.
Nikole Lim
Nikole Lim is a speaker, educator, and author of the book, Liberation is Here. She is the Founder and International Director of Freely in Hope.
Nikole Lim
Nikole Lim is a speaker, educator, and author of the book, Liberation is Here. She is the Founder and International Director of Freely in Hope.
Nikole Lim
Nikole Lim is a speaker, educator, and author of the book, Liberation is Here. She is the Founder and International Director of Freely in Hope, a nonprofit dedicated to equipping survivors to lead in ending sexual violence across Kenya, Zambia, and the Bay Area. Nikole has been deeply transformed by the powerful, tenacious, and awe-inspiring leadership of survivors. Their audacious dreams have informed her philosophy for a survivor-led approach to uplifting community well-being, safety, and flourishing. Her worldwide, intersectional work provides a trauma-informed and healing-centered approach to organizational development, leadership growth, and systems transformation. Nikole studied Film Production at Loyola Marymount University, Global Leadership at Fuller Theological Seminary, and Embodiment-Based Psychosocial Change at Nalanda Institute for Contemplative Science. She is a native of the Bay Area and can often be found buying African fabric on the streets of Nairobi.
LEARNING CONVERSATION — DAY 1
Leading through Grief
Core Invite
Holding space for loss, grief, and emergence in the transitions of life, love, and leadership.
Summary
Navigating major vocational transitions requires more than strategic planning; it demands intentional practices to honor what was, process the emotional weight of loss, and create space for newness to emerge. Drawing on themes in collective care, personal reflection, and community practices, this learning conversation will explore cultural practices, sacred rituals, and communal methods to prepare for rebirth.Conversations will center on themes including: Embracing Impermanence: Navigating the untethering to professional titles and role expectations, and sharing the quiet grief of closing major life chapters, processing personal loss with emotional clarity, and finding grounding when relationships transform.
Practicing Rituals: How intentional space-making—from affirmation ceremonies to collective intention-setting helps us honor what was and co-design what will be. We will explore organizational frameworks that support individuals and teams to laugh, cry, honor, and grieve with mutual care. Making Space for Newness: How embracing liminal space and letting go provides spaciousness for creative growth. We will look at practical ways to release control, ground in our values, and allow space for emergence in our lives.Allison Conte
Co-Founder and Priestess at the Sanctuary for Sacred Union, Founder of Sophia Leadership, Instructor of Executive Leadership at Harvard.
Allison Conte
Co-Founder and Priestess at the Sanctuary for Sacred Union, Founder of Sophia Leadership, Instructor of Executive Leadership at Harvard.
Allison Conte
Allison Conte serves as a bridge between the worlds of spirituality and leadership, blending her work as an ordained priestess, shamanic practitioner, spiritual teacher, speaker and author with a long career in executive leadership development.
As co-founder of the inter-spiritual Sanctuary for Sacred Union and School for Sacred Union, she supports the leaders of the Great Turning in their spiritual development, so they can bring needed wisdom, compassion, creativity, vitality and resilience to their leadership.
Since 2013, Allison has been a thought-leader in the field of feminine leadership. Her work at Sophia Leadership supports women change-leaders who are on a spiritual path and desire to source and embody the power of the Sacred Feminine in their leadership.
For over 20 years, Allison served as executive leadership advisor and senior consultant to large global organizations, through her work at Mobius Executive Leadership and Hawthorne Consultants.
At Harvard Business School, Allison’s teachings on executive leadership have drawn upwards of 5,000 participants around the globe. She has also taught on the faculties of The Center for Creative Leadership, the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland, and the Integral Center, and served as a master executive coach in Case Western Reserve University’s Weatherhead School of Management Executive Education Department.
She holds a master’s degree in Positive Organization Development from Case Western Weatherhead School of Management, and is a certified Spiritual Intelligence Coach and Gestalt Practitioner. Early in her career, Allison served on the Integral Institute’s Business and Leadership Center. Her work linking polarities and integral theory was published in the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice in 2014. Allison carries the title, “master teacher,” given by her spiritual mentor, Grandmother La’ne Sa’an Moonwalker, a lineage holder in the Apache tradition. She has co-authored three books and is working on a fourth.
LEARNING CONVERSATION — DAY 1
Tuning to Signal
Core Invite
Summary
Angela Migliaccio
Angela Migliaccio has spent three decades building leaders inside Silicon Valley giants IBM and Cisco,
Angela Migliaccio
Angela Migliaccio has spent three decades building leaders inside Silicon Valley giants IBM and Cisco,
Angela Migliaccio
Angela Migliaccio has spent three decades building leaders inside Silicon Valley giants IBM and Cisco, where she remains today, focused on how leaders adopt AI without losing what makes them human. That work, spanning leadership development, executive coaching, and sales enablement, has taken her from new managers to C-suite executives across North America and worldwide. Alongside that career, she built a parallel practice in her own spiritual and somatic work, training as a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach and Systemic Team Coach Practitioner and coming to understand leadership as inseparable from the inner life of the people doing it. That combination shapes how she works now, as a systemic team coach and co-founder of Distinctive Teams, coaching leadership teams to build the trust, coherence, and collective strength that sustained performance requires, not by adding another framework, but by helping teams reconnect to what's already true and alive between them. She holds a BS in Software Engineering, the foundation of her fluency in technology, and considers her real specialty the bridge between that world and the one enterprise rarely makes room for: the sacred. Please let me know if you need anything else from me. Thank you again for this exciting opportunity.
LEARNING CONVERSATION — DAY 3
The intelligence we exiled
Core Invite
Long before AI, organizations in our workplace were already asking us to behave like machines. Linear, efficient, feelings kept out of the room. Now that machines do machine-work better than we can, what becomes of everything we exiled to get here?
Summary
We tend to ask whether AI will make us less human. Some of us are also wondering how to make AI more human. This conversation starts one step back. Long before any of us had a model or an agent, our organizations were already built as machines, and the plans, the metrics, and the reviews were designed as though feeling were irrelevant. People, of course, never stopped feeling. They learned to keep it out of the room, and we called that professionalism. What AI does is end that arrangement, because a machine now does machine-work better than a human performing as one. What remains is exactly what we set aside to perform: intuition, sensing, embodiment, and the collective intelligence that lives between people and cannot be held by any model. In a business world modeled on masculine principles of competitive, strategic thinking, we labeled those capacities feminine, not business-fit, and we exiled them because of it. They are also the ones rising fastest in value right now, which makes this a stranger and more hopeful moment than it first appears.
We will work with what I am living every day in business meetings as a set of polarities rather than problems to solve, because each pole carries a gift and a cost, and choosing sides is what got us here. Discernment and ambiguity, where the machine will always fill the silence with a confident answer, in an AI world mastering inference. Efficiency and emergence, the tension our organizations were designed to resolve in one direction only. Autonomy and shared accountability: machines make individual autonomy fast, powerful, and invisible. How do we stay in community when working alone has never been this easy? After a short opening frame, the time belongs to the room. We will work in pairs and in circle, and close with an open inquiry we build together, about where reciprocity belongs in this new arrangement and to whom it is owed.
This is for anyone being asked to fold AI into their work who senses something is being quietly traded away, and for anyone who suspects that what is called for is reclaiming what we gave up long before the technology arrived. I come to this from inside both rooms. My working week is spent with people being asked to treat Agents as a teammate. My practice is helping leaders and teams remember what only them can do together.
Mike Morrell
Michael Morrell is an award-winning, best-selling author, collaborator on The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation with Fr. Richard Rohr
Mike Morrell
Michael Morrell is an award-winning, best-selling author, collaborator on The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation with Fr. Richard Rohr
Mike Morrell
Michael Morrell is an award-winning, best-selling author, collaborator on The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation with Fr. Richard Rohr, founder of Wisdom Camp, and a founding organizer of this very justice, arts, and spirituality Wild Goose Festival. He co-parents his two astonishing kiddos in Asheville, NC. Michael curates contemplative and community experiences, receiving joy in holding space for the extraordinary transformation that can take place at the intersection of anticipation, imagination, and radical acceptance. You can read his ongoing exploration of Spirit, Culture, and Permaculture at MikeMorrell.org
LEARNING CONVERSATION — DAY 2
Core Invite
Summary
to find out more details about facilitating a learning conversation download the official PDF here.
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REACH US Get Direction to the Event Hall
Venue
Time
How to get there
Venue
6 to 8 OCTOBER 2026, Chicago, IL 126 E. Chestnut Street (at Michigan Avenue), Chicago, Illinois 60611.2014
Email: shayna@soularize.org
Time
6 to 8 OCTOBER 2026, Chicago, IL 126 E. Chestnut Street (at Michigan Avenue), Chicago, Illinois 60611.2014
Email: shayna@soularize.org
How to get there
6 to 8 OCTOBER 2026, Chicago, IL 126 E. Chestnut Street (at Michigan Avenue), Chicago, Illinois 60611.2014
Email: shayna@soularize.org
Partner With Soularize
Is your organization, foundation, or institute interested in making a positive impact in the world of Spiritual Changemaking? Soularize 2026 is looking to partner with a few key sponsors and organizations to help underwrite the cost of tickets to make this valuable in-person event affordable.
Email: shayna@soularize.org
