This is the Year...

“This is the year our babies stop playing with police cars and instead use their hands to plant seeds 🌱.” Participants in the 2020 Advanced Practitioner’s Training closed the week together by composing a “This is the Year” poem. Here it is.

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Change IS the Story — A letter from Felicia Perez

Once upon a time a group of strangers sat together in a dimly lit room to share stories, struggles and heartbeats. After a week of spending more time listening than speaking, all these amazing folks came to the realization that they were not really strangers but just friends who hadn’t met yet...

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Felicia Perez
Let’s Dream Together

Free tools available now to boost your imagination! Step into #the4thBox in a game on your phone, in an online course, and with downloadable PDF tools. We're making these resources free to our movement community to better support our ability to dream big in this critical moment. We can only go where we’ve first imagined.

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Love vs. Pandemic

As a queer women of color led organization, we know that frontline leadership looks different for each issue and in each place. We acknowledge the expertise — and look to the leadership of — those who have already been coming together to survive, that is: organizing in the current economy that invisibilizes and ignores them

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Pleasure Activism & Story-based Strategy: A Conversation with Jess St. Louis & Lawrence Barriner

“I picked up Pleasure Activism because I’ve long been a fan of and been a learner from adrienne’s writing - and was really curious about the book because so many people were talking about it, especially at this past year’s CSS Advanced Practitioners’ Training. I was also drawn to it because I’ve long been interested in how we stay in movement work for the long haul given the enormous and intensifying political conditions we live in.”

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Grappling with Contradiction: Mariana Mendoza moves to Decolonize Climbing

I have had the opportunity to work and share in various spaces and with wonderful people who have helped me grow politically, spiritually, and in movement work. Friends and family introduced me to questions, thoughts, and actions that made me more politically conscious growing up. I was part of anti-corruption/violence, land rights, and gender rights campaigns in Mexico…

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Case StudiesMariana Mendoza
Conjuring Magic with Black Girls in Oakland

I'm a Southern Black queer writer and editor, youth advocate, and communications strategist who believes in the transformative power of storytelling to uproot racist systems and change culture. My journalistic practice is a love of language, a pirouette with Black Queer Feminist (BQF) praxis, and a forever connection to Black womxn and girls who channel generational struggle into generational healing, wisdom, and truth…

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Case StudiesZakiya Scott
A Cage as Container of Meaning

In terms of imagination building power, this was the first and only action I’ve done where the police arrived on scene, saw what was happening, and then left.  The whole scene was incredibly haunting. Everybody, and I mean everybody, stopped what they were doing and fell silent. And I believe it was in part because people were imagining themselves, their kids, their family, in the cage. 

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Case StudiesLJ Amsterdam
Stressed, Unstressed: What the Dothraki language taught me about activism and self care

Learning a new language means rediscovering how your mouth and your voice work together. Earlier that year, I felt cut off from both. I had always considered myself an activist and a writer. But I noticed a shift. I had stopped writing, and focused solely on activism work. I was leading campaigns against corporations and corrupt politicians – and some of them were even working – but I was burning out.

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Reuben "Tihi" Hayslett