Mia Birdsong
Author of How We Show Up and founding Executive Director of Next River, Mia Birdsong is a pathfinder and futurist who reconnects us with our forgotten wisdom and practices of our collective liberation. She brings her contagious curiosity to her writing, interviews, and public conversations. Mia champions the inherent worthiness of people in both her podcast series More Than Enough and her TED talk on The Story We Tell About Poverty Isn’t True. Her most recent work, Freedom’s Revival: Research from the Headwaters of Liberation, charts the interconnected nature of “freedom.”
Presentations from Facing Race 2024
How We Get Free: Living into Liberatory Futures
We’ve been lied to about freedom–what it is, what it feels like, and how to practice it. The conventional beliefs about freedom entrenched in the American psyche are based on fallacies of independence, self-sufficiency, and resource hoarding. America’s culture of individualistic freedom stokes distrust, disconnection, and a zero-sum-game mindset that reinforces the systems of racial, colonial, and capitalist oppression structuring our society. In truth, we are inherently and indisputably interconnected and so is our freedom. To find our collective path toward the liberated, just world we want and deserve, we must (re)learn and embody different beliefs about what freedom is and how it’s practiced. We must reclaim a freedom that centers our inherent connection, prioritizes mutual responsibility as liberatory action, and nourishes the cultivation of caring community. This experiential session will guide participants to: -Interrogate their beliefs about freedom -Recognize how interconnected freedom already shapes their lives -Apply an interconnected freedom frame to their work -Cultivate liberatory practices to bring a freer world into being
Speakers: Mia Birdsong, Sarah Crowell