Anna Castro
Anna Castro is a communications strategist and currently works as the Media Relations Manager for Transgender Law Center. She has extensive experience spearheading strategic communications campaigns to promote migrant justice and protect voting rights.
In collaboration with South Asian activist Deepa Iyer, she launched the Solidarity School in Spring 2019. The Solidarity School is an online training series designed to foster cross-movement solidarity by providing tools that bridge the gap between theory and practice in combating anti-Black racism, Islamophobia, and xenophobia.
Presentations from Facing Race 2020
Better together: How to practice transformative solidarity
Solidarity requires constant practice that must happen in community.
This breakout session explores the internal mechanisms that lead to either performative or transformative acts of solidarity. Under the Trump administration, communities have been relentlessly and explicitly targeted based on race, nationality, faith, gender, and sexual orientation. A scarcity mindset underlies these attacks, and social justice organizations have shifted the narrative by using a solidarity strategy that reveals the true abundance of power that exists when we work together.
This doesn’t happen overnight. It requires a shared vision of liberation and an understanding that centering the most impacted may require a revaluation of how we organize and operate. By working through the decision-making process that happens when engaging in acts of solidarity, participants will gain insight into how to tackle shifting their organizational culture. Examples from active campaigns in the racial justice, immigrant rights, and MASA movement space will take this dialogue from theory into practice.
Participants will walk away with a toolkit that offers concrete ways to analyze their organizations current solidarity practices, ways to course correct and engage in “movement maintenance”, and ideas to sustain and promote the leadership of younger or junior level staff.
Speakers: Deepa Iyer, Anna CastroPresentations from Facing Race 2018
If You Ran a Solidarity Workshop...
This session will be an open conversation about how people engage in solidarity practice, and the components and elements that they would like to see in a curriculum and workshop emphasizing solidarity. We will be gathering input and ideas for a solidarity practice curriculum tailored towards young people.
Speakers: Deepa Iyer, Anna Castro