Practice Progress is a relational commitment between Kai Hazelwood and Sarah Ashkin to practice, embody, risk, and learn with you; to commit to lifelong anti-racisting together.

Kai and Sarah are a Black lady and white lady, and they are in a caring personal relationship, a professional collaboration, and they also make public facing creative work. Anti-racisting at its core is a living practice of trust-building. Kai and Sarah met each other at a social dance space in Los Angeles in 2017. Sarah had just taken a fall that left a black eye blooming on her face, and Kai scooched over to check on this stranger. Tenderness.

Their own racial experience–the racial dynamics, both racist and toward anti-racisting, present in their partnership–is what they feel into, make art about together and apart, go to therapy together for, and invite others to join in unruly learning alongside them. 

We use anti-racisting, the progressive tense of anti-racist, because we know the practice of liberation is unfolding. Our anti-racisting are the ongoing embodied practices of moving against racism.

For Practice Progress, anti-racisting destabilizes white supremacy through the cultivation and awareness of sensation, where racism and anti-racist possibilities can be felt in our bodies, relationships, and social systems. More feeling enables more choice; more choice enables more care; more care gives us a way to be with ourselves and each other that we have always deserved.  

Interracial collaboration does not mean symmetry. We are not the same, and becoming the same is not the goal. Kai and Sarah share anti-racisting values (troubling inheritance, slowing down, listening, and honoring grief), but operationalize those values in different ways. Practice Progress shares this way of working with others in the form of BIPOC Rest Circles and White Working Groups as well as our concurrent research partnerships with more-than-human kin, called Shedding and MUD MOVES. 

Anti-racisting is somatic and material. Practice Progress works to redistribute the discomfort of racism and responsibility for destabilizing white supremacy to white people, and seeks to move the material benefits of racism, such as money and rest, to people of the Global Majority. Kai and Sarah see their LLC as an opportunity for an anti-racisting business model, with a reparative split in pay, a focus on hosting as a luscious accessibility practice, and a commitment to moving money, leadership, and rest to queer and disabled BBIA through curation projects, institutional interventions, and participant fees.

What Kai and Sarah share with others is made possible by the trust they have built together in their interracial, interclass, and interabled relationship. Practice Progress is care work as change work. 

Practice Progress is currently accepting partnership in dual-pedagogy fellowships and research appointments, semester long programs, performance residencies, guest artist offerings, writing opportunities, and more.