2024 Program:
Multiracial and Intersectional Organizing
Thursday November 21
What is the role of civic trauma in our political reality? And how can this frame offer us a way to build new coalitions that catalyze the power we have to win and govern in unapologetically progressive ways?
This workshop will start with the concept of civic trauma, how we measure and map its impact, and how it offers a frame to unite communities across different histories. Participants will then dive into two projects that build civic healing to activate community power in elections and governance:
-The first, a voter guide co-created by over 1000 residents who debated hundreds of ideas to center the election narrative on what mattered most to them.
- The second, a community-led budgeting process launched in the midst of the uprisings to disrupt the public discourse pitting residents against each other.
In illustrating these case studies, participants will engage with real-life examples that offer countless adaptations to fuel progressive change and build wider frames of belonging in civic systems. Built and implemented in Chicago, these examples offer lessons that apply to electoral and issued-based organizing in both widely progressive and deeply divided communities across the country.
Threats of political violence are eroding U.S. democracy. With upticks in all the major indicators of political violence (PV), communities of color and other marginalized communities are under severe attack. We have to go on the offensive to address these threats and acts of PV, in order to maximize backfire, defections, and extract costs on perpetrators. Defense alone will not cut it.
There is a long history of politically motivated threats and violence being used in the U.S. to restrict the franchise, suppress dissent, and invoke fear and terror in communities of color and other marginalized communities. It was the glue that held together Jim Crow and single-party white rule.
Today, political violence is one of the most viscerally felt aspects of the authoritarian playbook, with real people and communities suffering actual harm. It continues to be one of the greatest obstacles to achieving a multi-racial democracy.
Tens, if not hundreds, of millions of Americans think threats of political violence are unacceptable, and many are concerned about this problem. However, thus far they have not been given much direction or guidance about how they can:
1) Support victims of threats
2) Impose costs on perpetrators and those who incite them
3) Transform fear and threats into resilient and organized multi-racial pro-democracy organizations and communities.
This session will offer training and resources on how to do all three.
From Atlanta to Palestine, organizers are facing unprecedented attacks on the right to protest, including repressive laws designed to silence dissent across issue areas. In this session, you’ll hear from:
- Kamau Franklin, the Founder and Executive Director of Community Movement Builders, which has been leading the fight to StopCopCity since its construction was announced.
-Julia Bacha, the director of the documentary "Boycott" and the Creative Director at Just Vision, an organization that fills s a media gap on Israel-Palestine through independent storytelling.
Presenters will share media clips and other compelling visual materials to illustrate this issue and efforts to push back. For years, lawfare tactics have been used to silence organizers for racial justice and Palestinian advocacy across the U.S. and beyond.
For Palestinian advocacy, the trend is especially sharp in local legislatures, where 36 states have laws on the books that aim to silence those boycotting Israel based on its human rights record. Similarly, StopCopCity organizers are facing legislation that penalizes essential organizing methods, criminalizing everything from the use of burner phones to charitable bail funds, impacting the ecosystem of who can protest, dissent, and organize for their communities.
With these laws spreading quickly across the US, the speakers will share about techniques used to push back and the importance of cross-movement / intersectional organizing in these efforts.
Public school systems across the country have long been a battlefield for competing visions of society. Recent attacks on Critical Race Theory (CRT) and LGBTQ+ people in schools are part of a well-funded, long-term effort to discredit, dismantle and privatize public education and with it, the very notion of public goods. Extremists and their wealthy backers want to destroy public schools because, if they are thriving and equitable, this challenges white supremacy and elite power.
Public School Strong (PSS) is a national campaign that builds power starting locally, so that every student – regardless of zip code, race, gender, or ethnicity – can have equitable access to quality, fully funded public schools. Initially developed by HEAL Together North Carolina in the spring of 2023, PSS has expanded to have participants from all 50 states and statewide organizing committees in more than a dozen states. This interactive session is designed for individuals, grassroots groups and allied organizations to explore this model and how to plug in.
This workshop will move participants through an analysis of the political moment and how we got here and then dig into how to maximize racial justice, power-building, and strategy in whatever post-election scenario we find ourselves in. Participants will think through the best cases for racial justice and power-building in the event of a Trump/Vance victory or a Harris/Walz victory, and the various permutations for Congress and states. Participants will leave this session with a list of prioritized power-building moves for their organizations. We will contrast the long-term agenda of the corporate-conservative and authoritarian movements --- including their strategic use of racism --- with our own movement long-term agenda, and then our respective mid-range plans for the next 10 years. This leads to a conversation about power-building in the post-election scenario in four areas: issue campaigns, battle of big ideas, movement politics, and power-building. We will also share links to free resources on governing power, state alignment tables, strategic campaigns, narrative strategy, building 10-year power plans, and creating/deepening state power analysis.
Government and other public sector agencies can no longer ignore the ways that antisemitism and misappropriated concerns about it harm Jews of all races and non-Jewish people of color, threatening our racial equity efforts and causing job loss and social isolation. Incidents of and concerns about antisemitism have risen dramatically recently, causing harm to Jews and stoking fear. Simultaneously, there is confusion about differences between antisemitism, legitimate criticism of the state of Israel, and support for equal and human rights for Palestinians. Those seeking to eliminate racial equity and DEI initiatives – from education to policies and practices designed to end racial and gender inequities – are successfully using (often unfounded) claims of antisemitism to achieve their goals. This session will explore these and other reasons why – and how – we need to integrate a proactive, solidaristic approach to dismantling antisemitism into our racial justice efforts. Through interactive presentation and small group discussion, we’ll explore the value of a racial equity strategy for fighting antisemitism through case studies of multi-racial, multi-religious groups of organizers working alongside and within local government and universities in Washington State and New York. We’ll review frameworks and practice ways to notice, name, and intervene in actual or potential incidents. Participants will also receive Diaspora Alliance resources that support their ongoing abilities to visualize, normalize, organize, and operationalize this approach in our policy, practice, decision-making, communications, and trainings.
Extremist anti-public education forces that have used attacks on race and gender to erode trust in public schools over the past few years are shifting toward an even more destructive end game: universal voucher legislation that directs billions in public funds to private schools, predominantly for the benefit of affluent families.
Today, in nine states, virtually every school-aged student is eligible to receive public money to spend as they choose—whether on tuition at a private school, tutors or piano lessons, sports programs, religious instruction, or homeschooling. Many more states are in danger of adopting these policies in 2024.
This dramatic expansion of vouchers threatens to undermine state budgets, defund public schools, blur the lines between church and state, and increase segregation. The extremist forces promoting universal vouchers may have unlimited funds, but the pro-public education forces have people power and popular support. Vouchers have appeared on the ballot 15 times over the past two decades, and in each case, the public has voted against them.
In this session, hear from HEAL Together community partners in Florida, Tennessee, and other states about how voucher legislation is impacting their public schools, and the strategies and tools that diverse communities can use to organize majority public support to block, limit, and repeal these policies.
In 2001, Boeing received $60 million in tax breaks to move its headquarters to Chicago. In return, Boeing was required to create 500 jobs in downtown Chicago, a promise it failed to keep. Meanwhile, Chicagoans were struggling to access basic services.
In 2012, Chicago fired 172 librarians and shortened library hours to save $3 million. Chicago closed half of its 12 public mental health clinics to save $2.2 million. That same year, Chicago gave $1.3 million to Boeing to reimburse them for real estate taxes.
Dissenters will provide a training on how communities can replicate the success of their 2022 “Boeing Arms Genocide” campaign, which resulted in Boeing moving its headquarters out of Chicago and denied Boeing $2 million in tax subsidies.
The Congressional Progressive Caucus Center will draw practical connections between the military budget and our everyday lives. For example, under the 1033 program, the Pentagon transfers surplus weapons to police departments across the country. This exacerbates violence against Black, Brown, and marginalized communities.
Military funding siphons funds away from social programs. A $100 billion cut to military spending could provide universal childcare ($70 billion), house every unhoused person ($7.4 billion), and provide universal school meals ($5.2 billion).
Together, we'll explore how U.S. foreign policy feeds racism at home and abroad and how U.S.-based campaigns can intersect with anti-militarism work.
Together, we will expand our knowledge and accountability to the experiences of Black trans people. Between examples from our history, real-time examples and issues, engaging conversations, and self-reflection activities, we will re-establish our role(s) in movements for racial and gender justice.
This session is about the protection, support, and thriving of people who are immeasurably impacted by historic and systemic violence. "Aliveness" is the category for this space, and we will collectively re-imagine what is needed to create holistic care for Black trans people. This session is not a naïve utopian dream nor a space for hollow performativism; it is a praxis of Radical Imagination and an intentional space for us to live into a better, safer world. All participants are welcome—regardless of their identities, scope of work, or prerequisite knowledge—as long as they are invested in fostering a community where Black trans people are liberated.
Session Objectives:
-Participants will learn about eight dimensions of aliveness and relate those dimensions to Black trans communities.
-Participants will engage in activities to set one goal for Black trans aliveness.
-Participants will develop an accountability system to sustain their role(s) in Black trans aliveness.
This session will be a dialogue between Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, Co-Executive Director of Highlander Research & Education Center, and Prachi Patankar, Writer and Organizer with Savera.
Savera's campaign is founded on a simple belief: that building a true multiracial democracy requires multiracial, interfaith coalitions that stand united against supremacist politics of all kinds. Within Indian-American communities, for example, the Hindu supremacist movement has grown in size over the past couple of decades and has since increasingly converged on an alliance with the white nationalist far-right, developing a politics that advances and supports the rise of fascism in India but also harms all of us here in the U.S. Hindu supremacist groups not only oppose the struggle for protections against caste discrimination and Islamophobia, but they have also offered non-white support to campaigns against affirmative action, spread anti-Muslim rhetoric and a pervasive anti-Blackness, and fractured coalitions among communities of color.
This is a moderated conversation between Ash-Lee and Prachi about the steps needed to build a true multiracial democracy in the U.S. Placing these issues within the global rise of authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, and racial and ethnic nationalism, this session offers possibilities for interconnected strategies that place our struggles in transnational and local contexts. They will share their analysis from their work in building intra- and inter-community unity against supremacist movements and how to evolve new strategies to take on the far-right in a multiracial society.
The Race and Democracy work at the Horizons Project seeks to employ futures thinking frameworks to advance racial justice. Futures thinking frameworks and analytical tools have proven valuable in helping leaders, organizations, policymakers, and activists make more strategic decisions about policies, priorities, strategic plans, outcomes, and goals. However, we have not seen these tools equally applied to the challenge of organizing to build collective power for advancing racial justice.
The Horizons Project applies futures thinkings frameworks and analytical tools for the specific purpose of advancing racial justice. In addition, our futures thinking frameworks specifically engage the narrative competencies required to advance racial justice. For example, how should leaders engage in conversations that have deep resonances in demonstrative realities of racial injustice? Conversely, how should organizers and activists push against racial stereotypes embedded within organizational decision-making? What skills are needed to re-shape racial narratives?
What practices should leaders adopt to transform their institutional culture and prioritize racial justice within their organizations? How might these leaders imagine racial justice within their organizations and spheres of influence? How might organizers and activists advance institution’s capacity to reshape public services for better racial equity outcomes?
Too often, philanthropy gets in the way and old habits die hard. The importance of funding narrative power building in support of liberation and racial equity is critical—but how?
In this session, participants are invited to join the Weissberg Foundation for a panel discussion with Black and Indigenous movement organizers using narrative strategy as a tool for liberation. Speakers include:
- Savannah Romero (Eastern Shoshone), the co-founder of BLIS Collective
- Joe Tolbert, Jr., the Executive Director of Waymakers Collective
- hermelinda cortes, the Executive Director of ReFrame
We’ll discuss the importance of narrative strategy in the Reparations and LandBack movements, their vision for a just world, and how the work of organizers reaches both within and across communities to offer a collective vision of a path forward.
Throughout the panel, learn from speakers as they draw from their experiences working on issues at both state and national levels, the power of challenging narratives that support oppressive systems, and the work we still have to do to build solidarity across communities.
Lastly, we’ll discuss how philanthropy has created barriers to this work but how the field can shift and find better ways to support narrative power building for collective liberation.
The National Equity Atlas is a first-of-its-kind data and policy tool for the community leaders and policymakers who are working to build a new economy that is equitable, resilient, and prosperous. It is a comprehensive resource for data to track, measure, and make the case for racial equity and inclusive prosperity in America’s regions, states, and nationwide.
The Atlas contains data on demographic change, racial and economic inclusion, and the potential economic gains from racial equity for the largest 100 cities, 430 large counties, the largest 150 regions, all 50 states, and the United States as a whole.
In this session, participants will learn about the National Equity Atlas’ approach to data equity and research justice in developing analyses and working with community-based organizations to advance equitable policies. Participants will hear about examples of research done in partnership with community organizers that utilize a research justice framework. Presenters will provide a demonstration of the National Equity Atlas and how users can access and leverage disaggregated data.
The session also includes a hands-on activity for participants to engage with the resource and collaborate with each other. By the end of the session, participants will learn how to use the Atlas as a tool for finding disaggregated data and local strategies to support their work.
Friday November 22
Isolation is an unseen and under-discussed tool of control used to perpetuate mass incarceration. For the 1 in 2 Black women with an incarcerated loved one, that isolation has widespread political impact.
Learn how Essie Justice Group is using the power of isolation-breaking as part of a Black Feminist organizing model to drive social change. This workshop will bring attendees in on the disproportionate harms of incarceration to Black women, uncover the radical power of connection, and uplift key insights, tactics, and strategies attendees can leverage in movement-building work.
You will hear from Essie Justice Group organizers about how women with incarcerated loved ones are caregivers and the strategic backbones of their families, rooted in lived experience, ancestral strategies, and the leadership development that results from graduating from Essie Justice Group’s Healing to Advocacy Program: advocating for self, advocating for family, and advocating for community.
This conversation is meant to be an aspirational moment grounded in forecasting, to discuss the nexus of climate migration, and what we will see in cities, towns and legislation unless we begin to thoughtfully think about the future from a climate migration perspective. It is meant to be equal parts visioning and connection to concrete reality through the specific experiences and insights of audience members and the panelist.
Climate migration is often framed in terms that are fear-based, but there is an opportunity to think about the central value of culture—both those we identify with, and that which we want to create—in how we confront the reality of climate migration and its relationship with race and politics at all levels.
Through the panelists sharing a framework for dreaming forward, and audience member participation in small group work, this breakout session is meant to be a time of generative discussion, planning and visioning.
We see this as a starting point for collaboration, networking, information sharing and collective dreaming, to seed a collective approach to climate migration that is based on dignity, not fear.
Do you fund or build organizational capacity for racial justice? If you facilitate or fund learning, strategy development, healing, team building, coaching, organizational change, and more to advance racial justice, this session is for you.
In this generative peer exchange, we’ll build community and share ideas about engaging tough issues, including:
*Embodying racial justice in organizational operations and programming
*Countering the attacks on equity and inclusion, and retrenchment on racial justice commitments
*Power dynamics between BIPOC groups
*Accountable whiteness
*Building and redistributing power to develop a racially just and liberatory culture
This session will include community building, peer exchanges, and space for emerging ideas. We will reflect on power and break into peer-exchange groups to explore specific questions, including: what does accountability look like? How can we be advocates for capacity building work that embodies racial justice? What is our responsibility in this post-election time to contribute to the movement for racial justice?
Facilitators are from the Deep Equity Practitioners Network (DEPn), a network focused on creating spaces for learning and strengthening the racial justice capacity building field. Founded at Facing Race 2018, when Race Forward organized a pre-conference session for capacity builders where participants lifted up shared values, a vision of liberated organizations and communities, DEPn is working to build a space to explore different approaches to building organizational capacity, ways to build power that advances racial justice in and through organizations, and ways to influence the ecosystem that supports capacity building work.
Two community coalitions share how they shift local community power by embedding racial equity values into collective decision-making structures. They will discuss the structures for equitable governance and community engagement that allow their work to be led by and accountable to communities of color.
They will share the tools they use to ensure their community development and health equity policy priorities emerge from and are vetted by communities of color and address the root causes of the injustices baked into our housing and land systems. Some tools shared will include power mapping, root cause analysis, and policy prioritization, as well as models for collective governance that leverage the many resources, experiences, and knowledge from partners.
A conversation will be facilitated about the inside/outside strategies these coalitions use to work with allied institutions. This will explore how they maintain their coalition’s commitment to systems change and community decision-making while collaborating with partners who have varying degrees of commitment to racial equity.
The presenters will investigate the common themes and obstacles that emerge across places and points of deviation, while encouraging participants to consider how similar efforts might look in their own communities. The session will be designed for participants to engage in conversations about deepening racial equity analysis and practices in their own place-based and systems change work and decision-making processes.
Participants will leave with a set of tools and practices around community ownership, coalition building, and collective governance structures to bring back to their own communities.
This session will invite participants to share their current definitions of and orientation to community healing and healing justice. The workshop will analyze the current climate of racial justice and de-carceral movement work and explore the various cultural nuances of healing to explore how healing justice practice can be leveraged across cultures and communities. Using the St. Louis-based InPower Institute’s Black Healers Collective as a case study, we will invite participants to share how healing justice frameworks can be effectively applied.
Participants will be invited to identify the ways in which they already practice healing work, and dream up strategies to build and sustain community-led approaches to care and crisis intervention in the midst of co-optation by state and corporate entities, relationship ruptures, and deep burnout. Leveraging somatic models and practices such as sites of shaping, we will identify the deep needs and strengths that must be highlighted at individual, interpersonal, local, and organizational levels to recover and move forward in our local work toward racial justice and non-carceral approaches toward safety and accountability. The workshop will end with experiential healing and embodiment practices that participants can bring back to their communities and teams.
In this impactful breakout session, we will delve into the complex issue of systemic racism within the context of homelessness, with a focus on centering the voices and experiences of those with lived experience.
Through interactive discussions, and personal reflections, participants will explore the root causes of racial inequities in homelessness and the importance of centering lived experience in creating effective solutions. We will examine the intersectionality of race, homelessness, and systemic oppression, recognizing that individuals experiencing homelessness often face multiple forms of discrimination.
By centering the voices of those with lived experience, we can gain valuable insights into the unique challenges faced by marginalized communities and develop more inclusive and equitable approaches to solving homelessness and creating an adaptable system.
Help shape the future of California’s new Racial Equity Commission. In this interactive session, participants will learn about this new body and share wisdom and experience to help advance racial equity in government.
Participants will learn about the multi-year advocacy efforts to establish the Commission, get an update on progress so far, and provide guidance as the Commission seeks to develop a racial equity framework for the state. As this work is underway, we seek guidance from you—racial equity practitioners across the nation—so we can capture the best ideas, tools, strategies, and resources and bring them back as we move this work forward.
In 2024, California Governor Gavin Newsom established the state’s first Racial Equity Commission via Executive Order N-16-22, after two years of tireless advocacy from the independent Coalition for the California Racial Equity Coalition (C-REC)—consisting of grassroots organizations, racial justice and equity-focused nonprofits, and community advocates.
The Executive Order outlines the Commission’s roles and responsibilities, which include developing a framework, best practices, technical assistance, and resources to address the legacy of institutional and systemic racism in California’s government policies and programs.
Presenters include:
1) Dr. Larissa Estes, inaugural Executive Director of the Commission
2) Julia Caplan, Executive Director of State of Equity, which has provided racial equity capacity building to over 50 California state government entities through the Capitol Collaborative on Race and Equity
3) Maria Barakat of the Greenlining Institute, who co-leads the grassroots coalition C-REC
Anti-Palestinian racism is at an all time high but many can not recognize it when they see it. Learn the ways that Anti-Palestinian Racism manifests in our institutions and is normalized structurally between institutions impacting not only Palestinians, but also Arabs, Muslims, and others. In order to effectively dismantle racism, it’s important to recognize it, but then work towards intentionally dismantling it. This breakout session will go over roots in Islamophobia and the unique ways anti-Palestinian racism manifests and what people in Government (including all institutions) and in the public can work together to dismantle it. Learn lessons from local organizers in NJ who are organizing to build power for inclusive communities for everyone.
Have you ever wondered how the world of gender diversity across humanity has been reduced to only "two genders"? This workshop is an introduction to the past and present connections between race, colonialism, and the gender binary.
Participants will interactively explore how the gender binary operates through white supremacy, and how it was constructed to support exclusive notions of “civilized” manhood and womanhood. Participants will discuss, reflect on, and learn about sex and gender through the lens of race and imperialism, analyzing how racial hierarchies have evolved over time through gender norms.
We'll also build tools and shared language to discuss gender identity and expression through a Black feminist lens. Through a race-explicit lens, participants will learn and discuss:
-How racial hierarchies have evolved over time through gender violence
-The stories of transgender and gender non-conforming African/Indigenous people who resisted colonialism and the gender binary, beginning at least 400 before the Stonewall riots
-Educating and agitating to dismantle these systems through a Black queer feminist lens
Eliminating transphobia from our world requires examining not only bigotry, but also, the political and economic interests of wealthy and powerful people. By the end of this workshop, participants will have a better understanding of how the gender binary functions systemically to maintain white, wealthy, cisgender men and women at the top of a human hierarchy. This workshop will be facilitated by Justice Gaines and Malcolm Shanks.
In August 2014, the shooting of Mike Brown by a police officer in Ferguson, MO, and the subsequent lack of indictment for his killer, brought attention to police brutality and militarization against Black communities in the U.S. This sparked widespread protests with "Black Lives Matter" becoming a rallying cry.
Palestinian American activist Bassem Masri, involved in the protests, drew parallels between the state's response in Ferguson and tactics used against Palestinians, like tear gas and militarized force. During this time, Israel was also assaulting Gaza, resulting in thousands of Palestinian deaths.
Solidarity between the Black and Palestinian liberation movements grew, with Palestinians offering advice and support to Ferguson protesters. This solidarity was visible in Ferguson, with Palestinian flags flown and Palestinians organizing a solidarity contingent to Ferguson in October.
These events in 2014 reignited joint efforts between Black and Palestinian liberation movements. This solidarity aimed to challenge oppressive systems globally and locally, emphasizing the need to confront racism, militarization, and injustice both abroad and within the United States.
In the past decade, this solidarity has only flourished. Two organizers from St. Louis who organized during the Ferguson uprisings, one Black and one Palestinian, will lead a conversation reflecting on a decade of renewed solidarity.
Antisemitism has become an increasingly prevalent force in American society, where it is regularly weaponized to further social division, isolation, intolerance, and hatred and frequently succeeds at undermining progressive movements for equality. Generally perceived as a "Jewish problem," many Americans fail to take antisemitism seriously as a threat to both American democracy and racial justice efforts.
This hands-on, interactive workshop—facilitated by two veteran racial justice organizers—will guide participants through an exploration of what’s missing from our public discourse on antisemitism, anti-racism, and inclusive democracy, what’s changed in the organizing landscape since the start of the Israel-Gaza war, and what the moment now requires of us.
Participants will be given tools to help identify when antisemitism is being weaponized against progressive movements. We will also workshop strategies for sustaining multiracial, multifaith coalitions and for more effective justice-oriented advocacy and organizing in the face of targeted attacks. This session is intentionally designed to help participants—both Jewish and non-Jewish—thoughtfully navigate these very challenging waters.