Coming Soon!

Noah Cochran: Retreat Designer & Lead Facilitator
                               Program Director, CGN

Noah is a white, Southern-raised queer currently residing in Western Massachusetts on Pocomtuk and Nipmuc land. They believe in ritual, play, and being with big questions about how to be in right relationship with each other and our world. Noah was clinically trained at the Smith College School for Social Work and is a licensed clinical social worker (LCSW). In addition to their clinical work, they are a co-founder and Program Director of the COVID Grief Network. Noah has also facilitated immersive grief retreat experiences, is a host with The Dinner Party (an organization that builds community amongst young adults who know loss), and holds a particular passion for cultivating spaces that honor grief since unexpectedly losing both of their parents as a teenager.

Kiki Lipsett: Ritual Leader
                         Young Adult Programs Director, Urban Adamah

Kiki grew up in the Bay Area at the intersection of music and Judaism, and continues to find herself deeply involved in Jewish and musical worlds today. Kiki moved to British Columbia for university where she received her degree in Psychology and Italian. Throughout her 20’s she also lived in Italy performing Italian theater and working on farms, and in Israel/Palestine for the Dorot Fellowship where she biked up and down the country and created a one-woman show about land and identity.

Kiki’s work over the past decade has revolved around music, performance, social justice, and community building. Prior to working at Urban Adamah, she directed an arts and music program for youth experiencing homelessness to elevate their songs and stories. She has co-led numerous retreats and workshops centered on grief and healing, Jewish spirituality and ritual, and the voice as personal power. Kiki also leads Shabbat and High Holiday services throughout the Bay Area. For the past few years, she has written and directed a politically satirical, feminist, musical Purim show. She is excited to weave in sustainable agriculture, food justice, and hands in soil into her work. She believes the world will be a happier, healthier, more peaceful place when we become more connected to the land we walk on and to the food we eat.

Tracy Einstein: Somatic Resources for Grief Workshop 
                              Facilitator

Tracy Einstein (she / her / hers), M.AmSAT is an internationally certified Alexander Technique Teacher and a Somatic Experiencing® trainee with over a decade of experience in somatic modalities. She lost her father very suddenly when she was 17 years old, and her embodiment practices have been instrumental in helping her to move through grief and reclaim a sense of self inside the fractured lens and disorientation of loss. www.tracyeinstein.com.

Chelsea Taxman: Herbalism Workshop Facilitator

Chelsea Taxman (she / her / hers) is a queer, ashkenazi clinical herbalist and educator. Chelsea enjoys meeting people and introducing them to plants and practices that may support their mental, emotional, spiritual, and physical liberation, with a special affinity for grief tending. Chelsea is also a trained plant medicine maker crafting mostly liquid extracts, including oxymels and ritual essences. You can follow her on instagram: @moon.beam.dreams or send Chelsea a note through her website: www.chelseataxman.com.

The fee for this virtual retreat is sliding scale. $50 – $200 per participant.

Retreat fees cover compensation for our facilitators, retreat programming, and a care package of supplies that we will mail to you before the start of the retreat.

When determining what to pay on this sliding scale, we ask that you consider this information as a guide. Class is complicated and many people will see their class experience reflected in several different categories. In addition, please consider your own life circumstances such as…

• How the pandemic has affected your financial reality.
• How many people your income is supporting, regional cost of living, your age, chronic health needs and costs, and other factors we weren’t able to capture. 

We ask that you use your best judgment. Please pay as high on the scale as you are able in order to support poor and working class folks to take part in this program. To learn more about class backgrounds and distinctions, we recommend reading through this website. If you would like to discuss this further to help figure out how much to pay, please contact the Young Adult Programs Director, Kiki Lipsett, at kiki@urbanadamah.org.

Thanks to Catalyst Project for permission to use this scale they created for their Anne Braden Anti-Racist Organizer Training Program.

* No one will be turned away for lack of funds. Urban Adamah strives to offer programming that is accessible to our community. Thanks to our program supporters, we are able to offer this retreat on a sliding scale. If you are able to register at the higher end, your contribution will directly support the financial accessibility of another participant.

Why folks in their 20’s and 30’s? Or: I’m 40, can I come?
Losing someone you love can leave a profound impact at any age. And in this death-denying culture of ours, all of us struggle to find spaces where we can talk openly about that experience. We have found, though, that there is a unique kind of isolation that comes when you are among the first in your peer group to lose a parent, sibling, partner, or close friend. This is also an age group that is typically underserved by the traditional grief community — too old for youth grief support and too young for traditional grief support groups where attendees are often older. Especially as we continue to navigate a pandemic that limits folks from gathering and grieving in the ways we have in the past, we want to connect young adults to other peers who can say, “I get this”.

Why COVID loss, and what about other types of loss?
Losing anyone in your life can be unspeakably hard, and the specificity of this retreat does not mean to take away from that truth. Due to a desire to respond to a certain kind of loss at this particular and unique moment in time, we are focusing on serving folks who have experienced the death of a loved one to COVID-19. We know there is a lot of grief in the world that is not COVID-related. And we know that loss takes many forms beyond physical loss – life-altering illnesses and accidents, incarceration, family separation, deportation, break ups, divorces, and more. For now we are focused on a specific type of loss for a specific crowd, so that we can do that really well.

Is this a therapeutic or formal grief group?
Nope. This retreat is created for and by peers who have experienced loss, and is not, in the traditional sense at least, therapeutic. We have found that real life experience can be the best form of expertise. And when everyone has only their own story to go on, it means we are all equally ‘expert’ so we are less prone to giving advice or attempting to “fix” something. Most of us are really looking for a chance to hear and be heard, and to identify with others who have been there. This retreat should be a complement too, and not a replacement for, the other places you seek professional support.

Can I attend if I have already been part of a CGN group?
Yes. This retreat is designed to be accessible both to folks who have done grief processing in CGN groups before and folks who have not.

Can I attend if I haven’t been part of CGN and/or Urban Adamah before?
Yes! We enthusiastically welcome newcomers, and if you are interested in signing up for a CGN support group, you can apply to join CGN here.

What other resources do you recommend for navigating life after loss?
We are big fans of

• The Dinner Party. We highly recommend getting connected to them and joining a table, if it is right for you!
• The Grief & Growing Retreat is an annual Jewish grief retreat in the Bay Area for folks of all ages and backgrounds who have experienced all sorts of loss. It is run by the Bay Area Jewish Healing Center, which is a great organization in San Francisco to know about.

If you need help registering, or have any questions about the event, please reach out to Urban Adamah Young Adult Programs Associate Gen Slosberg, at gen@urbanadamah.org.