Rooted Roundtable

Rooted Roundtable is a discussion, lecture, and learning series exploring the connections between humans, animals, and the natural world. Held in the Rooted in Community Garden, the series creates opportunities to learn from authors, researchers, activists, and other thought leaders whose work deepens our understanding of our relationships with one another and the world around us.

Held twice each year—once in the fall and once in the spring—Rooted Roundtable invites the Northwestern community and beyond to gather, reflect, and learn together. Each gathering features a guest whose research, writing, or work explores the relationships between humans, animals, nature, and related topics, creating space for meaningful conversation and shared learning.

Upcoming Rooted Roundtable:

Wednesday, September 29, 2026 | 4–6 p.m.

Photo of Michelle Johnson in bee keeper suit. Featuring:
Michelle Cassandra Johnson
Author and Activist

For our inaugural gathering, we will look to honeybees as teachers and consider what their remarkable communities can reveal about interdependence, coexistence, and collective wellbeing. Michelle C. Johnson will share from her book, The Wisdom of the Hive: What Honeybees Can Teach Us about Collective Wellbeing, exploring the wisdom of communal interdependence to support us in navigating our individual lives and shared experiences. Her presentation will include storytelling, insights and facts about honeybees and superorganisms, and an attunement practice.

Roundtable discussion is from 4–5 p.m.; reception and book signing is from 5–6 p.m. Books will be available for purchase from local Evanston bookstore Bookends & Beginnings.

Read Michelle's Full Biography

Michelle Cassandra Johnson is an author, activist, spiritual teacher, racial equity consultant and educator, and intuitive and shamanic healer. She approaches her life and work from a place of knowing we are, can, and must heal individually and collectively. Michelle facilitates workshops and immersions, leads retreats and transformative experiences nationwide, and offers an array of healing services for individuals and groups. For over 25 years as a racial equity educator, she has worked with large corporations, non-profits, and community groups. Michelle is a six-time published author, and in May 2025, her sixth book, The Wisdom of the Hive, co-written with her best friend, Amy Burtaine, and published by Sounds True, was released. Her upcoming book, You Are Protected, published by St. Martin’s Essentials, comes out in September 2026.

Michelle was a TEDx speaker at Wake Forest University in 2019 and has been interviewed on several podcasts in which she explores the premise and foundation of Skill in Action, along with embodied approaches to racial equity work, creating ritual in justice spaces, our divine connection with nature and Spirit, and how we as a culture can heal.

Michelle leads courageously from the heart with compassion and a commitment to address the heartbreak dominant culture causes for many because of the harm it creates. She inspires change that allows people to stand in their humanity and wholeness in a world that fragments most of us. She lives in North Carolina with her husband, sweet dog, Jasper, and her honeybees.

Visit Michelle's website.

RSVP for the Fall 2026 roundtable!

Be part of the conversation and learning. Roundtable discussion from 4–5 p.m.; reception and book signing from 5–6 p.m.

RSVP