to be in a lineage is to have roots,
to have a way of being passed to you.
I stand downstream in the wake of my teachers:
The Catalyst Project, Gamaliel Network, Anita Davis, Chris Wetzel, Mante and Luster, Catherine Girves, Freedom Schools & the Children’s Defense Fund, Simon Wolff, generative somatics, Dara Silverman, Ream, Staci Haines, Wendy Haines, Richard Strozzi-Heckler, Namiko Uno, Stephanie Meux, Tesfaye Tekelu, Susan Raffo, Marika Heinrichs, Nichola Torbett, Stan Saunders, Marcia Riggs, Anna Carter Florence, my midwives: Tanya, Nina, Amy and Brooke, and my parents: Sue and John Waechter.
Some I’ve never met but have deeply shaped me:
adrienne maree brown, Prentis Hemphill, Claudio Carvalhaes, Francis Weller, Resmaa Menakem, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Octavia Butler, Anne Braden, Ched Myers, Mariame Kaba, Angela Davis, Valarie Kaur, the legacies of SNCC, and the Black southern liberation movement, especially the tendrils of resistance that are still fed by the legacy of sanitation workers strike in Memphis.
My ancestors:
I have immense grief at the loss of ritual, culture and ways of being that have been sacrificed for access to safety, wealth and power in my family’s lineage. Even as I stand in the legacy of harm, I am learning to reconnect to the resilience and the blessings of my European born ancestors.
I come from a people who danced in the sunlight of the field and from those with crooked smiles. I come from dear ones who brought beauty into the world by singing and painting, whose eyes attuned to the brilliance of color and taught mine to do the same. I come from farmers, from those who have survived losing children, and from a young child who fled his home after losing his parents to vigilante religious violence. I come from those who insist on joy. I am still learning from whom I come.
Training & Practice
Liberation at the Level of the Tissues: a bodywork intensive with Ream, Nov 2023
Embodied Racial Justice Intensive, with Dara Silverman, Oct 2023
Somatic Coaching Certification (to be certified this fall) with the Strozzi Institute, 2022-2023
Healing Haunting Histories: A Settler Discipleship of Decolonization, with Elaine Enns, Fall 2022
Train-The-Trainer for Understanding Racial Justice with Title Track Michigan, 2021-2022
Recovering Sacred Relationality with Simon Wolff, April - December 2021
White Racial Justice Somatics level I, II, III - Dara Silverman and Amanda Ream, 2020-2022
Doing our own Work: An Anti-Racism Seminar for White People led by Allies for Change, to be completed in March 2020.
Digital Campaigning Certificate, Social Movement Technologies, 2020-2021
Anne Braden Anti-Racist Organizer Training with the Catalyst Project, Jan - April 2019.
National Leadership Training for Community Organizing in the Public Arena, Gamaliel Foundation, March 2018.
Community Organizing experience with a focus on faith-based organizing for racial justice, housing, climate, voting rights, gun violence, anti-war, and abolition (including death penalty work).
Chaplaincy on Rhodes College campus and inside state prisons in Georgia.
Pastoral experience in Methodist and Presbyterian contexts in the midwest and the south.
Publications
Johnson Watkins, Ayanna & Lucy Waechter Webb. “Power Analysis for Powerful Congregations” in Anne Dunlap & Vahisha Hasan, eds. Building Up A New World: Congregational Organizing for Transformational Impact. Pilgrim Press, 2023.
Waechter Webb, Lucy. “A Short Case for the Spiritual Work of White People in Reparations”, web-based, 2022, https://www.justiceleagueglm.org/faithbased.
Waechter Webb, Lucy. “What Whiteness Requires” in Vahisha Hasan & Nichola Torbett, ed. Resipiscence: a Lenten Devotional for Dismantling White Supremacy. 2020.
Webb, Lucy. “Hope for the Prisoner: And all the rest of us.” Vantage, Vol. 4, No. 1, (Columbia Theological Seminary: Decatur, GA), Winter 2009.
Wetzel, Waechter Webb, Davis and Miller. “The Effects of Service Learning on White College Students’ Racial Attitudes: Implications for Achieving Better Outcomes.” Exploring Cultural Dynamics and Tensions within Service-Learning. Information Age Publishing, 2011.
