2020 Program: Breakout Block 1

Have you ever wondered how mainstream society reduced the full diversity of humanity to "two genders"? In order to answer this question, we'll explore the story of race and gender in building the mainstream. This workshop focuses on how the gender binary operates through white supremacy, and how it is constructed to support a hierarchy of humans run by mostly white men. We'll also build tools and shared language to discuss gender identity and expression through a black feminist lens.

Participants will explore sex and gender through the lens of imperialism in U.S. history, analyzing how racial hierarchies have evolved over time through gender norms. We will then consider how it shows up in current LGBTQ organizing models, and what we can do to reduce the harm that toxic gender norms cause us and our communities.

Hindu fascism did not begin with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. This philosophy has been incubating in India and United States for decades. In this breakout, we will outline the history of Hindu fascism in both countries. This workshop will focus on the link between anti-Blackness and Hindu fascism and its role in advancing a white supremacy agenda in America. We’ll discuss not only the dangers of this ideology, but how we can fight its spread.

Participants will have the opportunity to share their knowledge of Hindu supremacy and evaluate its rise in America. We will explore what we can do to ensure that our organizing work is decoupled from Hindu supremacy, and how to pull Americans of Indian descent into the conversation. We'll build shared language and tools through an anti-caste, anti-supremacy lens.

In this session we'll be hosting a live podcast recording of Momentum: A Race Forward Podcast with Chevon and Hiba.

As we face the multiple collective crises of 2020, we need journalism and information produced by and for oppressed communities. Building on the conversations held at Allied Media Conference and Facing Race 2018, this session will gather journalists and media activists to strategize about producing journalism that supports movements, reflects grassroots communities, and fights white supremacy and racism. We’ll talk covering the uprisings, the effects of COVID and economic crises on communities of color, and safeguarding democracy. Most importantly, we’ll build community among movement journalists and media activists in order to share resources and support one another.

The session will be facilitated by Press On, a southern movement journalism collective which has a strong presence in North Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana. The session will include political education about histories of journalism and resistance in the South. We will draw on the work and wisdom of southern media organizations and movement organizers to collectively build strategies for supporting, sustaining, and expanding the liberatory practice of journalism. Small group breakouts will focus on building community among movement journalists and sharing resources.

In Minneapolis, as in so many other places around the country, the Movement for Black Lives responded to police murders of Black people - like Jamar Clark and Philando Castile - in ways that have transformed the political landscape and resurfaced deep questions about the role of police in our communities. Anchored by Black Visions Collective, MPD150, and Reclaim the Block, our organizing in Minneapolis has shifted from short-term reactions in the streets to changing the narrative around community safety and social control with long-haul abolitionist movement building.

Presenters from these organizations will share lessons we have learned and facilitate the group as we dig into questions like: How do we use art and stories to help our communities and decision makers imagine a world without police? What do we do when those in power who claim to be allies to our movement or represent the communities we come from don’t deliver on their promises? How can a grassroots narrative-based strategy deliver change at the level of budgets and policies?

After this workshop, participants will be able to: explain the historical connection between white supremacy and policing; guide questions and answers in discussions that make tangible the vision of a police-free world; envision campaign designs that change the narrative from one of police reform to one with real community-based alternatives to the police.

This session will highlight and explore:

• A return to Black Rural Culture as a way to discover and ground ourselves
• How we are creating contemporary access points for our community from the viewpoint of our work in North Carolina
• Why these remembrances are important and
• What these practices and ways of being mean for future generations

This session will include a live cooking demo! 

Finding grounding in these tumultuous times can be difficult, especially for our most vulnerable communities. Coming back to the land for healing, connection, and to discover true embodied sovereignty is a beautiful remembering for Black, Indigenous, Queer and Trans, communities in these times. This session will explore the themes of healing and returning to the land and land-based traditions as a way of grounding. We will sit with the stories and insights of three speakers, each walking a path of tending to land and plants, and creating access for their communities to find sanctuary, sovereignty and wholeness.

Is your organization committed to working towards racial equity, but struggling to create a tangible work plan or to identify your next steps? This workshop will introduce a collaboratively-created racial equity assessment tool that helps organizations and coalitions create workable next steps for internal and external practices and policies, wherever they are in their racial equity learning and journey. You’ll get hands-on practice, a chance to work collaboratively with other racial equity leaders, and tools to take home with you that outline a clear path forward for you and your organization.

This racial equity assessment tool was created communally by the Puget Sound Cohort on Equity, Infrastructure, and the Environment to answer the question of how multiracial coalitions hold each other and themselves accountable in a way that advances racial equity, and what that can that look like in practice. The toolkit is designed to assist white-led or majority-white organizations in self-identifying their current level of racial equity accountability and provides concrete next steps for organizations to follow, wherever they are in their racial equity practice.

In this workshop we will walk through the assessment tool’s four levels of accountability: individual, organizational, with community, and in building solidarity with other organizations. Participants will reflect on their own organizations and discuss next steps, resources, and continued learning tailored to each aspect and level of racial equity practice.

This workshop will examine racial justice approaches to organizing and will engage participants through presentations and small group work. We will present the main framework of organizing and racial justice and examine the history of fo racial justice organizing.
We will discuss what makes organizing a unique and important approach to social change rooted in a theory of change based on an analysis of power.

This year, climate chaos of hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and heatwaves have rolled throughout the country, compounding with overlapping crises of COVID-19 pandemic, economic collapse, and chronic racial inequality. These crises have cast a light on deep inequality -- low-income communities and communities of color are most impacted by these crises because of historic discrimination and disinvestment. Solutions to the acute crises of our moment, and the long-term climate crisis must center racial and economic justice. The Green New Deal proposes a roadmap to address these intersecting crises. A bold, equitable economic recovery could pave the way by creating millions of good green jobs. But equity in our policy solutions is not guaranteed – we must fight for it.

Communities of color have been organizing for environmental justice against the twin threats of pollution and racism for decades. Today allies across environmental, labor, racial justice, and youth movements are banding together to advance a vision for what is needed for communities to thrive in the face of catastrophe. From local and regional policy victories won by powerful coalitions, to a plan for a national economic recovery, the climate justice movement is embedding racial equity into climate solutions. In this workshop learn how multi-sectoral coalitions at the state and national level are designing equitable climate policy, building power, and winning. Bring your experience and challenges you face in organizing for climate justice policy, to contribute to shared learning and visioning on how a Green New Deal can repair historic inequities and uplift all communities.

Restorative justice represents a complete paradigm shift from viewing harm as a violation of the law to understanding it as a violation of people and relationships that requires individual, interpersonal, community, and system-wide accountability and healing. This approach is a powerful tool for all communities, especially marginalized and silenced ones, because it offers a system that does not require centralized or concentrated power. With this in mind, we are collaborating with community-based organizations and systems partners in counties across the country to establish pre-charge, restorative justice diversion programs for serious harm. These programs rely on consensus-based plans through face-to-face dialogues to meet survivors’ needs and bring all affected parties into accountability processes that repair and rebuild relationships without reliance on criminalization.

Through this workshop, we will first use slides and images to describe our work supporting communities in creating restorative justice diversion processes to replace the criminalization of youth of color. We will then lead participants through a visioning exercise to imagine what it would look like to live in truly “restorative cities” where, for instance, each individual is valued, people do not call the police when harm occurs, people live in relationship with one another, and there is collective decision making and accountability by all community stakeholders. Finally, participants will break into region-based, small groups to discuss concrete ways they can support each other (perhaps through the creation of regional coalitions) and incorporate restorative justice practices as they take steps towards realizing the types of communities they have envisioned.

Learn about how to operationalize racial equity at the city and county level from leaders from three states. Hear the perspectives from the Chief Equity Officers from Asheville, NC; Fairfax, VA; and San Antonio, TX and learn about their successes, challenges, and opportunities for the future. Panelists will discuss their policy approaches, strategy for community development and how to make change in government institutions.

The ways we use and create evidence can help structural racism to reproduce itself. And we are accountable.

"Why Am I Always Being Researched?” began as Chicago Beyond’s letter to ourselves, drawn from our own steps and missteps. Chicago Beyond examined our own practices and behaviors in funding, and in how research is conducted. We noticed more and more how the structures we use to find what works to improve communities may be negatively impacted by the same power dynamics that have propped up systemic injustice. The framework has strengthened our work and the work of many others— from philanthropies to research institutions to nonprofits organizing within their institutional structures to shift practices. The presenters will share learnings from using “Why Am I Always Being Researched?” to challenge orthodoxy in research and evaluation where it does not line up with community needs.

This session will: (1) Introduce the framework of “Why Am I Always Being Researched?”; (2) Share how we and other institutions across philanthropy, research and nonprofits have operationalized it; (3) Lead an active session to equip participants with the tools to recognize faster and more often where the evidence is hiding inequities; and (4) Facilitate participants identifying practical shifts in their work.

The American two-party system is bad for anyone who cares about racial equity. It creates a dynamic whereby one party is hostile and the other gives lip service, but believes it can take the votes of people of color for granted. Moving beyond our current system, “first-past-the-post”, which is a holdover from our British colonial history, may seem impossible. But, in fact, communities across the country have experimented with many reforms. One promising voting system, proportional representation, was implemented in New York City in the 1930’s. It is credited with the election of the first woman and the first people of color elected to city council - including Ben Davis, a black member of the Communist Party.

The workshop provides a crash course for advocates to learn about the ins and outs of electoral systems reform as it relates to racial equity. First, we will cover the range of values implicit in electoral systems, review the mechanics of the major ones in the US, and run an election to provide some hand-on experience. We will then discuss the implication of electoral systems on voting rights and building political power for communities of color and show a short documentary on a recent reform in Michigan. The session will end with some opportunities for making change happen in your communities.