Friday, April 26  |  1:00 – 6:00 pm
Saturday, April 27  |  9:00 am – 5:00 pm
Instructors: Sally MacNichol & Keisha Kogan
RSVP: Click Here

Communities of faith and their leaders have the potential to play a significant role in helping to prevent and eliminate intimate violence. This course is designed to help seminarians (lay leaders and religious leaders):

• Gain a basic understanding of the complex dynamics of intimate violence and effects on individuals, families and communities.
• Examine our own experiences of violence and abuse, our theological and ethical assumptions and how they interact with and shape one another.
• Learn about intervention strategies: practices and resources needed to help keep victims/survivors safe, and abusers accountable.
• Explore approaches to the challenging pastoral, theological and spiritual issues raised by intimate violence for survivors, perpetrators, and witnesses as well as pastors and congregations.
• Develop strategies for how pastors and communities of faith can play a critical role in breaking the silence and preventing domestic violence/ intimate partner violence.

Rev. Sally N. MacNichol Ph.D, is Co-Executive Director of CONNECT, a New York City nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing interpersonal violence and promoting gender justice. She has been an anti-violence activist, advocate and educator for over three decades, counseling victims of domestic violence, designing and facilitating empowerment groups for survivors, working with men who batter and abuse, and training hundreds of staff from child welfare programs and community-based organizations across New York City’s five boroughs.

Sally created and leads CONNECT Faith, a decade-long interfaith movement in New York City to build the capacity of religious leaders and communities of faith to work to end intimate partner abuse and co-occurring forms of family violence. CONNECT Faith currently partners with over 50 faith communities. Sally’s interfaith theological roundtable has met for 10 years, providing safe space for people of faith to deconstruct and transform the belief systems, theological norms, and faith community practices that support abuse. In 2012, Sally spearheaded the formation of the Ending Child Sexual Abuse Faith Collaborative, which developed and piloted the Safe Faith Community Project, an in-depth training program for churches that addresses child sexual abuse.

Sally currently serves on the board of Freedom House, one of the few existing domestic violence shelters for people with disabilities, on the advisory board of House of Peace, a nonprofit that addresses intimate violence in NYC’s Muslim Communities and on the steering committee of the New York City Elder Abuse Center of New York. She was recently named a New York New Abolitionist. Sally earned her Masters of Divinity and Ph.D. in Systematic Theology from Union Theological Seminary in New York City.

Rev. Keisha Kogan, M.F.A., M.Div. is a trained theatre director and an interfaith minister who works as the Coordinator of CONNECT Faith, an organization dedicated to education and the prevention of Domestic Violence in the NYC area. In her position at CONNECT Faith, Rev. Kogan was the first chaplain at the Manhattan Family Justice Center – a part of the Mayor’s Office to Combat Domestic Violence, which provides comprehensive civil legal, counseling and supportive services for survivors of domestic violence, elder abuse and sex trafficking. Rev. Kogan was a teaching fellow for the Field Education program at Union Theological Seminary for the last two years. Rev. Kogan is honored and overjoyed to still be working the Field Education office.