Community Call

Rockwood Community Calls are a FREE online event series created to support leaders from everywhere within the social justice ecosystem so that you can feel connected, supported, and replenished.

Every other month, we host a 60-minute Zoom call with a teacher, healer, leader, activist, artist, or speaker who will hold space for whatever our collective spirit is seeking in that moment.

Everyone is welcome, whether you’ve been through a Rockwood program or this is the first you’ve heard of us. Register for the next call and give yourself the gift of space, ease, and joy in your workday.

May 22, 2025 | Evolve Benton

Join us in resilience and personal ecology for an interactive workshop that will equip leaders with strategies to recognize early warning signs of burnout before they escalate. Participants will learn practical stress management techniques and energy renewal practices for busy professionals. The session includes hands-on exercises and immediately implementable tools that help maintain peak performance without sacrificing personal well-being.

Evolve Benton (they/them) is a pioneering DEI practitioner with over a decade of experience transforming organizations through strategic equity initiatives. As CEO of Evolve Benton Consulting, they collaborate with organizations across North America to implement sustainable DEI strategies and enhance employee well-being through stress management approaches. Previously, Evolve established the first comprehensive Equity and Inclusion Program at UCSF School of Medicine, where they co-created an anti-racist curriculum that became a model for addressing systemic inequities in medical education.

With dual master's degrees in Clinical Psychology and Creative Writing from Antioch University, Evolve combines analytical expertise with compelling communication skills. Their professional background includes leadership roles at UCSF and UCLA, where they developed programming that reached thousands of participants. Evolve is also a published author and frequent speaker at national conferences on race, gender, and LGBTQ+ advocacy. Their unique approach focuses on translating aspirational equity goals into concrete, measurable actions while creating safe spaces for difficult but necessary conversations.

Learn more at evolvebenton.com.

July 31, 2025 | Norma Wong

Join us for a virtual gathering for reflection, connection, and conversation as we welcome Norma Wong sharing her new and very timely book, When No Thing Works: A Zen and Indigenous Perspective on Resilience, Shared Purpose, and Leadership in the Timeplace of Collapse. This powerful work distills years of Norma’s teachings and arrives at a moment when so many of us are holding both deep loss and profound possibility in our hearts.

Norma Wong (Norma Ryuko Kawelokū Wong Roshi) is a Native Hawaiian and Hakka life-long resident of Hawaiʻi. She is the abbot of Anko-in, an independent branch temple of Daihonzan Chozen-ji and serves practice communities in Hawai‘i, across the continental U.S., and in Toronto, Canada. She is an 86th generation Zen Master, having trained at Chozen-ji for over 40 years.

In earlier years, Wong served as a Hawai‘i state legislator, on the policy and strategy team for Governor John Waihee with federal and Native Hawaiian portfolios. She led teams to negotiate agreements on the munitions cleanup of Kahoʻolawe Island, ceded land revenue for Native Hawaiians, and the return of lands and settlement of land issues for Hawaiian Home Lands. She was active in electoral politics for over thirty years.

In recent years, Wong has been called back into service to facilitate breaking the impasse and transforming policy and governance on issues of seeming contradiction. In the conflict between native culture/science and western discovery science posing as a dispute over the construction of a telescope on Mauna Kea, Wong was a team member narrating and facilitating a path forward through mutual stewardship. She is currently an advisor to Speaker of the Hawai‘i House of Representatives Scott Saiki, serving in policy development and facilitation roles on issues such as the protection of the aquifer from fuel contamination at Red Hill, and the long-term response to the Lahaina wildfires.

Norma has spent many years in the applied space – the direct application of indigenous and Zen ways, values and practices to living and transformational change critical to our times. Norma is part of the Collective Acceleration community of practice.