We are here with other organizations and the community to continue to lift the names of Stephon Clark and Brandon Smith who were recently killed at the hands of the Sacramento Police Department.
We haven’t forgotten. They cannot forget. We don’t want our elected officials to sit back and just think that we’re going to forget, because we’re not.
This terror continues to become normalized in our communities and we want to say no more.
-Sonia Lewis, Chapter Leader, Black Lives Matter Sacramento
RALLY FOR GAZA
"Our struggle is inextricably linked. We believe that Palestinian liberation is incomplete without black liberation and liberation of all oppressed people.
I think its extremely important for all oppressed people and for those who stand against oppression- to unite, to work with each other, to support liberation movements and to organize for a better future."
-Nerdeen Kiswani, In Our Lifetime
Abolish ICE Rally
People's Climate Movement
"If we don’t have clean air, clean water, we don’t have anything. We don’t have health.
Environmental justice is fighting to have clean air and clean water for everyone.
-Estela Escoto, Committee for a Better Arvin
Community activists in Arvin, CA fought oil companies and implemented a city-wide buffer zone, limiting how close oil rigs can be to homes.
Edited by Anna Clare Spelman
There's no such thing in California when it comes to regulating oil.
In Arvin, we were able to put in a 250 ft buffer zone, plus another 50 feet as an extra buffer zone. We were able to achieve 300 ft in Kern County, in the heart of the oil extraction of California.
That was a major victory.
The oil industry didn't even know how it happened. I'm pretty sure they're still back in their offices freaking out, not knowing what to do and probably thinking how to retaliate.
We're ready.
We're ready and awaiting how to keep defending ourselves.
-Juan Flores, Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment
Folks who are impacted by incarceration are seen as the problem but what we prove is that we are the solution.
-Taina Vargas-Edmond, co-founder of Initiate Justice
"We are the policy experts."
-Charles Barry, Director of Outside Organizing, Initiate Justice
Voting is so important and we are purposefully silenced. I think that my voice needed to be heard at a time when it wasn't, as well as many others.
You’re being silenced
and you’re being told that you don’t matter and your experience is nothing and that’s not true.
That’s a form of abuse.
-Jayda Raspberry, Dignity and Power Now
"What is the true solution? I want to vote for rehabilitation.
Imagine being able to be given a right that was once stripped of you, and then you know it and you’re going to use it for what it’s worth and that just creates something that’s beautiful.
That creates something that’s limitless."
-Hugo Gonzalez, Initiate Justice member
NYC Department of Education
Mastery Collaborative is a community of schools dedicated to shifting the paradigm of grading and learning in NYC schools so that schools becoming places of empowerment and healing instead of instruments of oppressive systems.
RESTORE OAKLAND
"What does it mean to heal harm not just on an interpersonal level, but really on a structural level?
What are the levers that we need to pull at to actually advance truth and reconciliation, to advance real deep repair of injustice in the bay area and across the country?
-Zachary Norris
When I look at rising land prices here in the Bay Area and people getting exploited and pushed out of their homes from the subprime mortgage crisis, sometimes I think about,
what is our relationship to land?
What is our investment in the well-being of our neighbor when we see them pushed out of their house and now living in a tent under the freeway?
These inequalities are designed to continue, to perpetuate and exacerbate.
That's how capitalism is designed. It's designed to be more efficient so that you generate more profit even if it's at the expense of labor exploitation or ecological degradation.
Part of creating a more just sustainable and equitable economy is
reconciling with our past as a country
and restoring and reinvesting those communities that have been most economically depressed in making them whole so that we all get to move forward together.
For me the work of restorative economics is recognizing that we are at a fork in a road.
We have an opportunity to figure out: do we stay on that path that we're currently going down
or do we actually make some hard choices and wrestle with the challenges of what it takes to actually get off that path
and move towards one that lifts up collectivism, interdependence, ecological restoration, caring and investing in the well-being of our neighbors and friends.
Each individual should be able to live a life of dignity
and being able to reclaim space and reclaim processes and reclaim models that allow us to
engage in acts of love and relationship
and to reclaim dignity in spite of all the outside external pressures, that is really, really important to me and for the communities that I work with and the communities that I serve.
What would it take to actually take those specific models and take them from the fringes of our economy and actually bring them to the core of our local economy?
The work that I do is about really finding spaces and ways in which we are able to
come together to create community wealth and to create community governance
so that we can have sovereign spaces, self-determination and shared prosperity for all people.
-Nwamaka Agbo, creator of Restorative Economics
Ella Baker Center for Human Rights
"I want to hold people in power accountable."
I want my community to have the healthcare, jobs and education we need.
We’re in a time that feels scary and isolating and sometimes it's hard to know what to do about it. If you’re angry and you’re frustrated and you want to see change, direct all that energy by becoming a member.
"Your voice absolutely matters."
The focus is on supporting our communities so that we can be everything we’re capable of and taking money away from those who are trying to oppress us.
Define: Black
I always pose the question: What if you couldn’t go home anymore?
Intuitive Dance
Beginning to breathe and beginning to live on the inside of myself, as opposed to evaluating myself from the outside, was transformative.
It was such a deep breath of relief to notice that
when I lived on the inside of myself- in the slowness of my breath, my sensitivity, my sensuality, the depth of my voice that rose out of my own core-
then the whole world would mirror me in the same way.
I moved into myself. I moved on the inside of myself and life came with me, nature moved inside of me.
And there was very little pause now between body and earth, which now I really live in my body as if it's my own earth. And I honor and I learn from it and I excavate my own artifacts of knowing and intelligence and past.
We closed our eyes and moved and touched and gestured and shaped and were breathing in ways that were received through the whole being and the body
Then something opens up and all of the feelers and the eyes of the body open up in all directions, not only internally but in all directions. And
we become connected, deeply connected to the world we inhabit, to which we belong.
The body keeps so much. It's a record keeper of so much.
And when we go there, so much shows its face and sometimes an ugly face and an uncomfortable face.
And so what began emerging us and getting clear was that
there was so much grief and anger and untouched sorrow that was waiting to be heard, to be seen, to be breathed into
and to be brought onto the surface again, to become articulated and shaped and articulated, right?
We go into a place where
there's a communion happening between us and everything that makes us whole.
To see and sense with our bodies,
to sense each other,
to play,
to experience joy and pleasure and eros,
like deeply alive in our bodies
and to be witnessed in that
and to witness what happens for others in that-
it's medicinal, it's shape-shifting, it's life changing.
The invitation here is to truly, really, deeply enter a dialogue, a conversation,
a flirtation with your mysteries and with the mysteries,
with the muses, with that which inspires and sparks your aliveness and creativity, that which reminds you of the greater myth you're meant to live,
the greater story you have come to tell.
-Stefana Serafina, creator of Intuitive Dance
The Girl Who Smiled Beads
Do you hear?
That’s the story!
All the birds are calling,
And the wind is dancing
Everything around me right now is so active, so alive.
I am here.
I am present.
Who are we in our breath?
Who are we in our heart beats?
We are all one heartbeat.
But it’s even better when someone gets close to you to listen to your heartbeat.
And that’s our new story.
We’re going to have to be that close.
We are Water | Visual Poem
You have forgotten your role in the great mystery
We are of the same drop. A multitude of droplets that make the whole.
Like a child in the womb, we are never separate
Following the flow of life we will go
Treating everything on our way with the honor it deserves
Death Dialogues
Well mom, I think about you everyday. And I had some questions that I wanted to ask you, that I didn’t have the chance to ask you...
In a world where there’s so few spaces to talk about death and dying, let’s create that space together.
-Morgan Brown, founder of Death Dialogues
Break Free Together
Break Free Together is committed to helping people release sexual shame and claim their whole selves.
The Garden of Life
Presence
Define: Black
Melanated Medicinals
I remember stories from my mother about my grandmother's using herbal medicine for them when they were young.
Every story meant the world to me; and now I have found myself caring for the people around me using the same plant allies they did.
It is a true joy to care, sing, dance with and harvest the plants.
I recognize that all of my ancestors have been important on this journey through life and that they walk with me every day.
The work that I do with plants is a true work of love
-Sun English Jr., Founder of Melanated Medicinals
Diverse Legacies
Diverse Legacies is a 12-week course to explore the ancestral stories you carry as well as the legacy you want to leave. Beginning January 28, 2019 in the Bay Area.
I wanted to create a world of belonging. How do we embody the future that we want to live in?
-Aryeh Shell, co-facilitator of Diverse Legacies
Calling Me Home | Visual Poem
A scent on the wind swirls, swells and fades.
My mind is suddenly ablaze, beset by a flash of a wordless longing - an ache for a phantom feeling I can't quite remember but know is mine and that it's missing.
I grieve.
I writhe and scream and sob and render my clothes to mourn the ancestors who’s names I'll never know
and grieve the ways of being
I'll never be initiated into.
I hold the horrors done in the name of my people’s freedom
And the inhumanities that continue for the sake of our supremacy.
The land on which I stand today isn't mine.
amidst the turmoil, and the lonesome ache of orphanhood
I hear them calling me.
The ones whose nails got dirty building fires and tending soil.
And whose ears still knew how to listen for rain.
Their wordless call of remembering gives peace that perhaps there's is a home, not to go back to but to bring forward through the toils and joys of my labor.
And as my ears attune to their call, my instructions grow clearer.
I must claim them, forgive them, atone their sins, and grieve their losses.
I must honor them by returning myself back into the order of things to which they knew their part.
I have to claim my life and use it.
Me Fucking Too | Visual Poem
Nico Routhier
Credits:
Life Escobar, Awake Storytelling