Sowing Seeds of Healing Justice

Building on the success of our transformative gathering in 2024, we are excited to announce our Spring 2025 offering.

From May 2-4, 2025, we will gather at Cloughjordan Ecovillage in Tipperary for another powerful weekend of collective healing and resilience-building. The term “healing justice” was first coined by the Atlanta-based Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective. We use it to acknowledge the disproportionate impact of the climate crisis and its complex societal consequences. Through collective practices and shared experiences, we aim to address intergenerational, emotional, spiritual, and psychological harms that act as blockers to connection and constructive action within our activist communities and across our movements.

This retreat continues our exploration of how embodied tools for navigating grief and generating resilience can support activists. This invitation is aimed primarily at migrant activists and members of the Traveller and Roma communities from Ireland and Northern Ireland. The program incorporates nervous system navigation, movement, dance, and artmaking practices, in an empowered space for collective healing that honours diverse traditions and experiences.

The weekend program includes:

• Embodied practices informed by the Grief/Resilience Toolkits
• Active Hope and Compassionate Inquiry-informed sessions
• Movement and dance practices
• Community circles and knowledge sharing
• Artmaking and integration 
• Shared meals from local produce

The retreat offers a unique opportunity to engage with healing justice practices while building connections within our activist communities. This framework centres collaborative, creative, embodied, trauma-informed, and inclusive approaches to community engagement. 

We prioritise creating a supportive environment for activists, broadly defined - including those who are oriented toward community seeding and tending. The retreat particularly welcomes those identifying as migrant, Roma, Traveller or global majority to contribute to a base of support for members of these communities.

Contributory Donation
We offer a sliding scale to ensure accessibility:

• Fair Rate: €100 (for those able to pay full rate or sponsored)
• Partially Supported: €50
• Fully Supported: Free (scholarship for those experiencing financial hardship)

• Accommodation is limited to 15 participants. To express your interest, please provide your name, email, and location on this form and you will be sent an email with more information and an application form for the retreat. 

Apply for a place on the course

*The data shared in this form will be shared and processed by the facilitators of this event in line with Friends of the Earth's GDPR policy and safeguarding policy. This information will be used for the sole purpose of the application process. If you have any questions, please contact sara@foe.ie or irelandretreatmay2024@gmail.com

Important Dates

• 7 March – applications open
• 2 April – deadline for applications 
• 7 April (week of) – video calls with applicants 
• 13 April – participants finalised / contacted
• 22nd April- contributory donation to be received by 5pm to Friends of the Earth.
• 20-30 April – transport arranged 
• 2-4 May - retreat! Friday 2^nd arrival 4-6 pm, departure 2pm on the 4^th

People

• Lelo Mary Thebe (retreat facilitator): is a Zimbabwe-born migrant, mother, and Event Management with Public Relations student at ATU Galway. With a passion for hospitality, public speaking, and writing, she is dedicated to creating supportive spaces for navigating grief with compassion, healing, and promoting rest.
• Oana Sânziana Marian (retreat facilitator): is a writer and researcher, and a Romanian-born migrant woman. She currently works as a postdoctoral researcher in the Pregnancy Loss Research Centre at University College Cork / Cork University Maternity Hospital. Her work, which focuses on holding space for grief, is informed by her training in healthcare chaplaincy, Compassionate Inquiry, Active Hope, and the Quaker tradition in Ireland.
• Sara Hurley (retreat coordinator): is a community educator and facilitator, with a keen interest in developing skills and participation in climate justice issues. She is the Global Citizenship Education and Outreach Officer with Friends of the Earth, working with groups often on the margins of the climate movement such as Roma, older people and youth.

This training course is part-funded by Irish Aid at the Department of Foreign Affairs, Concern and FEASTA. Irish Aid is the Government’s overseas development co-operation programme which supports partners working in some of the world’s poorest countries. Irish Aid also supports Global Citizenship and Education in Ireland to encourage learning and public engagement with global issues. Content and materials in this training may not represent or reflect DFA policy. 

Cloughjordan Ecovillage