Fierce Vulnerability
Kinship Lab
A 3-month journey to inspire collective action rooted in healing, emergence and deep care
Begins March 24
Tuesdays (and some Fridays) from 11am-1pm PT / 2-4 pm ET
With Kazu Haga, author of ‘Fierce Vulnerability’, and Fierce Vulnerability Network (FVN) Facilitators & Friends
This three-month program offers a deeply immersive journey into the practices of Fierce Vulnerability.
Together, we’ll deepen into the book’s principles through embodiment practices, guest speaker interviews and small-group conversations to support learning and transformation.
Participants will be guided in forming kinship pods of 3-8 (in your geographical region, when possible) to co-create community-inspired action projects. These experiments could range from a grief ritual, a community conversation, a song circle or other possibilities that invite a lived experience of Fierce Vulnerability.
Those who want to find a new home for your engagement with the world are encouraged to join us, and to do so with friends, family and community from your local region and global network. If you are interested in continuing, participants will be invited to take part in an additional two-month onboarding training to join the Fierce Vulnerability Network.
Join us in nurturing community connections while cultivating a greater ecosystem of shared inquiry and mutual care.
Why Join?
- Strengthen your kinship ties both locally and globally
- Embody the principles and practices of Fierce Vulnerability
- Offer a transformative act of collective care to your community
- Participate in a collective field of healing and emergence
An invitation + overview of the Kinship Lab
This is a 4-min clip from an informational community call. To watch the full 45-minute recording, which explores different aspects and questions about the program, visit this page.
The Core Elements
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Book Club
A deep read of the book, along with shared inquiries and practices within community.
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Translocal Kinship Pods
Journey with a kinship pod while staying in relationship with the wider field of collective practice.
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Collective Action Projects
Co-create transformative acts of care with real-world projects that embody Fierce Vulnerability.
In times of profound complexity, our response to the collective challenges we face must evolve—toward healing, not division.
Yet too often, activism and social movements reinforce an “us vs. them” mentality, driving us further apart when what we most need is connection.
Fierce Vulnerability offers a path forward that merges the time-honored lineage of nonviolent action with the insights of trauma healing and the grounding of spiritual practice.
With nuance and compassion, Fierce Vulnerability invites us to see these critical times as a catalyst for healing–of both personal wounds and systemic fractures. Together, we can shape movements that center relationships, where care, courage, and kinship become the foundation for meaningful change.
Participants receive a 30% discount code for the book!
**An audio version of Fierce Vulnerability is now available.
The Journey
Introduction
We’ll open our container by sharing introductions, building agreements, and grounding in the history and context of this work. Together, we’ll review the Foreword, Prelude, and Chapters 1–3 to orient to the journey ahead. We’ll also be joined by special musical guests, MaMuse - and, will review elements of the Gift Economy
Vulnerability Rally
We’ll review Chapters 4–6 and engage in the Vulnerability Rally: an interactive practice where we experience fierce vulnerability with each other in real time.
Embodied Presence
In this session, we’ll review chapters 7-10 and hear from guest speaker, Kaira Jewel Lingo, author of Healing Our Way Home, who will speak to the importance of spiritual grounding and guide us in some practice.
The Power of Grief
In relation to chapters 11-13 and the Coda we’ll hear from guest speaker Francis Weller, author of the Wild Edge of Sorrow, about the importance of grief in the work of healing and social change.
We’ll also use this session to transition from discussing the book to putting its principles into practice through our group experiments.
From Deep Listening to Reciprocity
Vickie Chang will guide us in listening to and learning from the natural world as we begin shaping our collaborative experiments in fierce vulnerability. This session offers grounding and inspiration for the next phase of our work together as we remember to accept the unknown and listen to the voice of emergence.
The Infinity Spiral of Life and Death
LiZhen Wang will lead a somatic practice to help us lean into death as a sacred part of life’s cycle. This embodied work will deepen our projects and expand how we honor life and community.
Grounding & Resilience
Oren Jay Sofer will share mindfulness and emotional regulation practices that cultivate grounding and resilience. We’ll also pause to hear from kinship pods, reflecting on what’s emerging and what support is needed for the experiments ahead.
Closing
We’ll celebrate our shared journey, harvest insights from the pod experiments, and engage in a closing ritual to mark this chapter together and honor what’s to come. We will also be joined by poet and song-leader Lu Aya from the Peace Poets to help close us out.
***In addition to the eight live sessions, we invite each Pod to meet 4-5 times during the course of our three-months together.
***All Sessions will be recorded and recordings will be available to registered participants within 48-hours.
Registration Now Closed
This program is offered in the Gift Economy
Registration closed
April 2
To hear about future Kinship Lab, Fierce Vulnerability and Kinvene programs:
Once you register we’ll collect info to place you into your kinship pod.
Read Gift Economy & Other FAQs
Watch Kazu’s Video below about the Gift Economy
Notes on the Gift Economy
In this 5-min video, Kazu shares a welcome message and some insight about the Gift Economy:
In this 2-min clip, Kazu answers a question about the Gift Economy structure, and when to donate. Watch the full recording from this Community Call here.
Meet Your Guides
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Kazu Haga is a trainer and practitioner of nonviolence and restorative justice, a core member of the Fierce Vulnerability Network, a founding core member of the Ahimsa Collective, a Jam facilitator and author of Healing Resistance: A Radically Different Response to Harm and Fierce Vulnerability: Healing from Trauma, Emerging through Collapse. He has over 25 years of experience in nonviolence and social change work. He is a resident of the Canticle Farm community on Lisjan Ohlone land, Oakland, CA, where he lives with his family.
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Kaira Jewel Lingo is a Dharma teacher with a lifelong commitment to spirituality and social justice. Her work continues the Engaged Buddhism developed by Thich Nhat Hanh, and she draws inspiration from her parents’ lives of service and her dad’s work with Martin Luther King, Jr. After living as an ordained nun for 15 years in Thich Nhat Hanh’s monastic community, Kaira Jewel now teaches internationally in the Zen lineage and the Vipassana tradition, as well as in secular mindfulness, at the intersection of racial, climate and social justice with a focus on Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, and activists, as well as artists, educators, families, and youth. Based in New York, she offers spiritual mentoring to groups and is author of We Were Made for These Times: Ten Lessons in Moving through Change, Loss and Disruption and co-author of Healing Our Way Home: Black Buddhist Teachings on Ancestors, Joy and Liberation. Her upcoming events and teachings can be found at www.kairajewel.com.
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Francis Weller is a writer and soul activist who has worked as a psychotherapist for more than 40 years. He's the author of many books and projects including the beloved grief text, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief.
Francis is currently on staff at Commonweal Cancer Help Program. He also founded and directs WisdomBridge, an organization that offers educational programs that seek to integrate the wisdom from indigenous cultures with the insights and knowledge gathered from western poetic, psychological, and spiritual traditions.
His most recent collection is In the Absence of the Ordinary: Soul Work for Times of Uncertainty.
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The second daughter of Chinese immigrants, Vickie Chang was born and raised in the SF Bay Area. Her work as a psychologist, facilitator, and writer is guided by Chinese ancestral wisdom including Buddhism and Taoism; Indigenous teachings; and 大地母親 (the Great Earth Mother), including the mountains Tuuyshtak, 武當山 (Wǔdāng Shān), Arunachala, and the Sangre de Cristos. Some of her teachers include West African (Dagara) elder Dr. Malidoma Somé, Jicarilla Apache elder Dr. Eduardo Duran, and Anuttara Lakshmin Nath. See more on her background and work at www.vickiechangphd.com
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LiZhen Wang drinks from a mighty confluence of ancestral traditions: Daoist-Buddhist practice, ancient astrology, and the most primal ritual of all, mothering. She is an astrologer as well as Co-Director at the School of Unusual Life Learning (SoULL), where they offer nature-based, life-cycle teachings that ease existential suffering in a time of systems collapse. Experiencing her mother’s death was one of the greatest spiritual revelations of LiZhen’s life. It has opened them to the incredible richness of a life that includes, not avoids, death.
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Oren Jay Sofer teaches meditation and communication internationally, integrating classical Buddhist training with Nonviolent Communication and Somatics. He holds a degree in Comparative Religion from Columbia University and is a Certified Trainer of Nonviolent Communication and a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner. Oren is the author of several books, including the best-seller Say What You Mean and Your Heart Was Made for This. A husband and father, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and teaches worldwide through courses and guided meditations. www.orenjaysofer.com
Special Musical & Poetry Guests
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Wholeheartedly fed by the folk and gospel traditions, MaMuse (Sarah Nutting and Karisha Longaker) create uplifting music to inspire the world into thriving. Interweaving brilliant and haunting harmony with lyrics born of honed emotional intelligence, MaMuse invokes a musical presence that inspires the opening of the heart. Playing a family of varied acoustic instruments including upright bass, guitar, mandolins, and flutes, these two powerful women embody a love for all life. The synergy that is created through this musical connection is palpable and truly moving to witness.
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Lu Aya is a co-founder of the Peace Poets and a father, son, brother, cousin, nephew, poet, student, educator, emcee, musician, facilitator, freedom singer, friend and cultural worker. He sees all of these roles as sacred spaces to listen, love and learn more and more, day by day, how to embody healing. He believes that the foundation of working for liberation is always here and now with all our relations.
Kinship Pods & Projects
Fierce Vulnerability & Kinvene Small Group Intentions
The Fierce Vulnerability Network was always envisioned as a decentralized network of small teams of 3-7 individuals, tied together by a common movement “DNA”, similar to the principles share in the book. The emphasis on small teams was key: it would allow for many decentralized experiments to happen in small groups of trusted individuals who can engage in the kind of deep relationship building that is hard to do in larger groups.
This is also the vision of Kinvene: to help build small groups - Kinship Pods - that will allow for a deepening of relationships, often regionally based, while journeying through a longer, virtual program.
Fierce Vulnerability Kinship Lab Pods
FVKL Pods will be your home during our time together. Our invitation is for each team to meet - in person where possible - to debrief from the large group sessions, to deepen in relationship, to share stories and break bread, and ultimately to plan, carry out and debrief an embodied experiment in fierce vulnerability together.
Fierce Vulnerability Kinship Lab Projects
Each pod will design and carry out one fierce vulnerability experiment - an expression of love and courage in response to this time - together by the end of our program.
This may look like a grief ritual, a creative nonviolent action, a silent vigil, a courageous conversation with family, or a mutual aid project supporting those on the margins or the front lines of justice work.
Collective Action Project:
San Francisco
This is an example of a Fierce Vulnerability collective action project. A grief altar was co-created in Union Square, San Francisco in 2023 by The Fierce Vulnerability Network - East Bay cohort, to invite community members to express their fear and grief over our dying capitalist systems.
What will you and your local kinship pod co-create?
Frequently asked questions
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Examples might include:
Connecting over a meal with prompts for sharing and then doing this together in a public space that might invite others to join/witness/inquire/participate
Fiercely vulnerable public offerings, which might look like public rituals or grief ceremonies, nonviolent actions that invite healing or a public art installation
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Tuesdays (+ 2 Fridays - April 3 and 17)
11am–1pm PT / 2–4pm ET
8 sessions across 3 months (weekly at first, then bi-monthly):
Start Date: March 24, 2026
End Date: June 9, 2026All sessions will be recorded and recordings will be available to registered participants within 48-hours of each live session.
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We’ll help all participants join a kinship pod: small groups of 3-8 people. In localities with 3+ participants, local kin groups will be encouraged.
If no local pod exists, we will support participants in joining online kin groups based on geography/time zone or affinity.
if there is anyone in your local community that you want to go through this course with, having pre-existing relationships can really support your journey through this work. Feel free to join with someone you know or with your own group.
Each group will be supported in carrying out a collaborative project aligned with the book’s themes.
Kinship pods will meet during session breakouts and are invited to meet in-person as much as they’d like - we recommend meeting for project planning in the off-weeks when we are not hosting group sessions.
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Yes, all sessions will be hosted on Zoom and will be recorded. All registered participants will have access to a portal that will house audio and video recordings, transcripts and other program information.
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We recommend having your own copy of Fierce Vulnerability. Once you register you will receive a discount code to purchase the book.
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The Gift Economy is a method of managing resources that is modeled after natural ecosystems, and which aims to create sustainability for all people. Gifts, like this program, that are offered in the Gift Economy are not “free.” They are an invitation into a reciprocal relationship with the giver. During the program, we will share more about what this means and offer invitations for you to help make this program sustainable. No amount will be too small or too large.
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This program is a soft re-launch of the Fierce Vulnerability Network. After this program culminates, pods and individuals who would like to continue will have the opportunity to join an additional two-month program to onboard into the Network.
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Email support@kinvene.co for program support. We’ll direct your questions to the best person.
For a list of more FAQs about pods, gift economy and more go here.