Date/Time
Date(s) - 07/07/2015
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Location
Main House
Categories
“And who will join this standing up
and the ones who stood without sweet company
will sing and sing
back into the mountains and
if necessary
even under the sea:
we are the ones we have been waiting for.”
― June Jordan
Building community is essential to our survival. Especially when larger communities are often dangerous and hostile, we must intentionally create a togetherness that sustain us. How do we define community? How do we choose our community? How do we hold each other accountable? How do we maintain healthy boundaries for ourself? How do we reassess wealth and resources from a community standpoint? How do we hold our community safe? Manifesting justice in our lives starts within our communities.
1. How do we make sure our interpersonal relationships in our organizing are the most important, most valued “work” that we do? How do we model and “insist” this for others we work with in our community?
2. What does it mean to resolve conflict in a way that names and acknowledges and honors each others’ specific triggers to rage, disagreement, sadness, fear, etc? How do we bring these things to light and then, how do we create safe boundaries around these things in order to move forward without resentment?
3. What does it mean to engage a genre of organizing where there is, quite literally, no prior tradition of organizing in kind? How does one find elders…develop new kinds of mentorships with elders where learning/guidance happens, often, in reverse? How does one do this work when one is not indigenous to a place?
“There must exist a paradigm, a practical model for social change that includes an understanding of ways to transform consciousness that are linked to efforts to transform structures.”
― Bell Hooks, killing rage: Ending Racism
“I owe my survival beyond and despite what I have survived to a loving
community of ancestors, elders, peers, lovers, collaborators, students, sisters, family
members, children and reminders that expect my spirit to survive and manifest by any
means necessary, through and beyond my body and my mind.” – Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Rachel Zellars is a single mama to Ade, Zora, and Sade who has spent the last 10 years living in Montreal, QC. Originally a farm girl from upstate New York, she spent her formative years between Baltimore and Washington, DC. She is a co-founder of Third Eye Collective, the first organization of its kind in Montreal that addresses issues of gendered and sexual violence against Black women within a transformative justice tradition.
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