Our workshops are both informative and highly interactive (at participants’ level of choice, of course!). As time allows, we facilitate exercises to get in touch with desires and boundaries, practice saying no, explore the vulnerability of expressing desires, try out strategies for verbal and non-verbal communication, and inquire into different attitudes toward relationships. Through mini-lectures, discussion, and experientials, we aim to invoke multiple learning styles to facilitate deeper learning and increase likelihood of implementing new skills in real-life situations. Workshops include conversation about sex, but exercises are non-sexual.
Workshops can also be adapted to specific settings. We have, for example, taught several completely non-sexual Consent Beyond Yes workshops in contact improvisation dance.
Online Workshops
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, we have adapted our in-person workshops to an online format, and we’ve added discussions and exercises focusing on consent across distance. While we can’t touch each other over the Internet, we can practice asking for consent for many other activities for which consent is often assumed—such as asking personal questions, commenting on someone’s appearance, or sharing information about them to others. Through the use of breakout rooms, we still provide ample opportunity to practice communication, negotiation, and creativity in pairs and small groups, as well as whole-group discussions and mini-lectures.
All services offered on sliding scale. Contact us for information on booking.
Sampling of Workshops and Activities
Beyond Yes and No: Collaborative Consent for Sexier Sex (basic intro workshop)
Communication Workshops/Activities
- Foundations of Healthy Communication: authentic, compassionate, emotionally responsible communication skills based on Nonviolent Communication
- Flirtshop: how to flirt, how to recognize when it’s invited, how to ask for what you want without being creepy
- Making Communication Sexy: learn and practice language to use to have consensual interactions without “killing the mood”
- Nonverbal Consent: learn and practice how to recognize nonverbal signals, how verbal/nonverbal differs from direct/indirect communication styles, when to use words
- Informed Consent Elevator Speech: present various models, practice constructing and sharing own
Handling Boundary Crossings Workshops/Activities
- Handling Boundary Crossings: calling people into community as much as possible—including workshopping participants’ past or present incidents and developing community responses
- Consent violation perpetrator/victim fishbowls: participants self-identify with role that feels most alive or that they want to explore, have sequential fishbowls about experiences in that role; possibly introduce/draw on drama triangle
- Round table: “I’ve been accused of a consent violation and I don’t understand why”
- Round table: “My boundaries may have been crossed and I’m not sure what to do”
- Recognizing, addressing, and preventing trauma responses (good in combination with boundary crossing activities/discussions above)
Embodied Desire Workshops/Activities
- Embodying Desire: discovering somatic cues around desires, boundaries, and other emotions and body states to create the juiciest, most mutually pleasurable experiences possible—including an embodied exploration of Dr. Betty Martin’s Wheel of Consent
- Color mapping: using “green,” “yellow,” and “red” as feedback for touch, to explore the edges of desire and comfort (edgier activity that can be really fun and sexy for groups comfortable touching each other)
Consent Cultures Workshops/Activities
- Consent and Social Justice: consideration of how our sociocultural identities and experiences impact our ability to consent, how this lives in our bodies, and how we navigate power differentials in relationships
- Cultures of Consent: exploring consent culture, call-out culture, other models (e.g. contact improv culture, nurturance culture); benefits and drawbacks of each. What do we want to create?