Photo by Matthew Waring on Unsplash
In 2020, Kati ‘Jazz’ Gray-Sadler learned how to sit still.
With the recent pandemic, our lives have come to a screeching halt. We have lost so much: resources, incomes, education, loved ones; as Jazz puts it in a conversation with Dr. Tanya Gilbert, “We lost an entire year.”
We have also lost touch with other human beings. We spend every day with half of our faces covered by masks, and putting up emotional shields with them.
As Jazz tells us, when we are surrounded by strangers in masks, our “fight or flight responses are activated.” Hospitals are arguably the most stressful places in the world, even without COVID. With the extreme amount of stress and fear that people have experienced in 2020, we have begun to “fight with educators and health practitioners.”
Jazz founded the nonprofit Fifty Shades of Purple Against Bullying in 2015 after years of struggling to find help for her own son. She decided she wanted to do something.
“I bet there are other parents out there that are affected by this,” she said she thought. She started to reach out to her network to build a community around empathy and compassion to combat bullying.
FSP not only addresses bullying in schools, but also in the workplace. For Girls Nite Live’s 400th Workshop, Jazz looks back on the year 2020 from the perspective of essential workers with two women on the frontlines: Katrina Kelley and Domonique Revere.
Katrina Kelley is a registered nurse out of Ohio. She was affected profoundly by workplace bullying, and in this workshop, will talk about how to exist in the space of the workplace after being bullied. Today, Katrina is responsible for hundreds of lives on the frontline.
Domonique Revere experienced a pivot in her life in 2020. As Jazz explains with Dr. Gilbert, we as a society received a blunt realization about racism issues in the United States. We recognized a problem in educating young people and providing basic resources to all families. Having noticed this, Domonique left Human Resources and launched herself into the educational and consulting realm, focusing on diversity, inclusion and equity. In the 400th workshop, she is going to talk about the impact of bullying on high school students.
As we learn how to become more compassionate, empathetic and do better in 2021, FSP aims to guide us on our journeys using advice from Katrina, Domonique, and Jazz’s personal experiences.
Sign up for the January 13th workshop here!
