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Homospun Collective Events
Cracks in the Concrete
Building a movement against poverty in Victoria, Coast & Straights Salish Territories
May 13 - 15, 2011
Join us for a weekend of skill-sharing, community-building and collective empowerment!
Free Registration! Free Food! Free inspiration!
Cracks in the Concrete is a weekend-long event of teach-in/learn-in workshops and discussions that aims to inspire, strengthen and connect people and communities interested in fighting poverty. If you're looking to gain new skills for community work or activism, learn about poverty-related issues, meet new people, organize actions or draw others into the work you're already doing, Cracks in the Concrete is the place to be!
Cracks in the Concrete will offer 20 free workshops to choose from, several group discussion periods to generate ideas for action and endless possibilities for collective agitation, revolt and change.
The basic schedule for this event, a note on accessibility and a note on getting involved are directly below. For more information on workshop content, scroll down further or visit us online at www.cracksintheconcrete.org.
SCHEDULE
May 13th
Opening panel, feast and music
6 - 9 pm
The Church of St. John the Divine Hall
925 Balmoral St.
FREE food, free music, and some good ideas. More details coming soon!
May 14th - 15th
Cracks in the Concrete: Workshop, discussions and community meals
10 am - 8 pm (doors open at 9:30 am for morning snacks both days)
BCGEU, 2994 Douglas
FREE morning snacks and lunch will be served Saturday and Sunday. A community meal will be served Saturday.
Workshop topics include colonialism, health, media, anti-poverty organizing, disability, guerrilla art, unlearning & alternative education and more. For a complete list, scroll down to the end of this message or visit http://cracksintheconcrete.org/learn-inteach-in-schedule
Groups interested in tabling throughout the event can reach us at antipov...@gmail.com
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ACCESSIBILITY
Cracks in the Concrete aims to be an accessible event, and will provide the following services / accommodations as needed:
• translation / ASL (upon request)
• travel stipends (upon request)
• child care
• serious dietary restrictions
• billeting (depending on availability)
To let us know about your specific accessibility needs, please email antipov...@gmail.com with ‘accessibility’ in the subject line. We will be able to best provide for your specific needs if contacted 1 week in advance.
*all events are wheelchair accessible
*childcare will be provided on-premises
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GETTING INVOLVED & HELPING OUT: THE CRACKS IN THE CONCRETE WISH LIST
The Cracks in the Concrete organizing collective needs you! We're looking for people to help with:
• Postering and outreach
• Billeting out-of-town panelists and guests
• Cooking and food serving
• Setting up an art space/chill-out room
• Working the door at the event
• Set-up and clean-up at the event
• Recording/filming/photographing some workshops
• Assisting presenters and facilitators during workshops
• Ensuring there are people present with first aid, and CPR training
• Inviting all your friends, families, extended families, neighbours and random strangers.
If you can help with any of this, please contact us at antipov...@gmail.com or 250-472-4386.
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WORKSHOP DESCRIPTIONS
For the event schedule and workshop descriptions in PDF, check out http://cracksintheconcrete.org/learn-inteach-in-schedule/
Workshop Descriptions
SATURDAY, May 14th 2011
10:00 – 11:30
Workshop Slot A
Title: Activism on the Internet: Making friends and mastering enemies
Description: In the contemporary digital era, activists have embraced the breadth of possibilities now available to mobilize, educate and agitate using the internet.
While the internet is a powerful outreach tool, social justice activists, human rights advocates, legal observers, political dissidents, and even independent media should be aware that it also provides a wealth of information of interest to the state.
This workshop will begin by offering a quick look at how to harness the net and use social media tools, such as facebook, twitter and wordpress, in community organizing. Next, the workshop will turn to how to take back your rights to privacy and freedom of speech by learning safer-surfing practices in cyberspace. The workshop will offer the participant an introduction to best practices for secure online behaviour, and communications, including anonymization and encrypted email.
Presenters: Kimberly Creatrix and Tamara Herman
Kimberly Creatrix is an artist and writer who conspires with the Camas Books Collective, schemes with the Victoria Anarchist Bookfair, and machinates with Forest Action Network.
Tamara Herman is an anti-poverty organizer and works at the Vancouver Island Public Interest Research Group (VIPIRG). Her work with local groups has led her to (somewhat reluctantly) develop skills in web-based outreacb, which she is eager to pass on!
10:00 – 11:30
Workshop Slot B
Title: Getting Un-Stuck: What’s Worked and what has not. An Anti-Poverty Retrospective.
Description: This workshop will focus on looking back over 15 years of local, grassroots anti-poverty organizing, as a place to start a conversation about what organizing practices work and which ones do not. We will focus on the creation of local initiatives as the place to build a sustainable community of resistance to the devastation of poverty. It is the belief of the presenters that the local domain is the most important portal for engaging in anti-poverty organizing, both here and abroad, and that the creation of sustainable long term projects are the most essential of our organizing efforts.
Presenters: Shane Calder, Jacquie Ackerly and Art Farqueson
Shane, Jacquie and Art are long-time Victoria anti-poverty community organizers.
10:00 – 11:30
Workshop Slot C
Title: Building Stronger Communities and Radical Potential through an Anti-Colonial Analysis: questioning assumptions about activism, environmentalism, political organizing, community and solidarity
Description: We are
coming from an understanding that poverty, as well as other forms of oppression
and destruction inherent in dominant society, are due to a lack of real
community, and real community is
continually under attack by the colonial systems and structures which serve to
alienate people from their land, cultures, and each other. The
facilitators are coming from different positions within Colonial society, and
are all invested in building a truly effective anti-colonial movement. We
are coming together to discuss and (re)-examine:
-the colonial roots of environmental destruction, social injustices and
political apathy;
-the ways that dominant forms of activism can perpetuate colonial power
structures and ways of relating to each other;
-the necessity to be responsible to the land and the people of this land; and
what this might look like.
Presenters: Kelsey, Carol and Molly.
Kelsey is of European
(Scottish, German and French) ancestry
Carol is Mestiza from Chile
Molly is Gitdumden (bear/wolf) clan of the Wet'suwet'en Nation
15 minute break
11:45 – 12:45
Workshop Slot A
Title: Guerrilla Art
Description: Guerilla Art is the act of creating forms of spontaneous public art that are unmediated by law, social convention or "acceptable" venues for exhibition. I will discuss the history of guerrilla art movements around the world, its various forms [happenings, performance art, graffiti, installations, Temporary Autonomous Zones, etc.] and how it is used as a form of direct action or social protest, and why it is an effective way to communicate important messages. I will share my experiences as a veteran guerrilla artist, telling about some of the projects I've participated in, how these projects impacted individuals & communities, & how the media & authorities have reacted. The talk will be followed by a series of participatory exercises designed to inspire uninhibited, spontaneous artistic expression within public spaces.
Presenters: jody franklin
jody franklin is a multidisciplinary artist working in performance art, sound art/experimental music, visual art, guerrilla art, installation art & video. His work is raw, spontaneous, emotional, intuitive, honest, visceral, experiential: semi-structured, non-academic [amateur, untrained], participatory, breaking down hierarchies: anarchistic, queer, survivor. His goal is to create resonance with audiences using emotional dissonance.
11:45 – 12:45
Workshop Slot B
Title: Health Services for all!: Shifting tactics in ongoing struggles for essential health services for people who use drugs in Victoria
Description: Victoria's fixed needle exchange was closed May 31st, 2008. This action heightened the criminalization of, and discrimination against, people who use drugs in Victoria. Three years later, local and provincial authorities continue to deny essential health services to people who use drugs. Harm Reduction Victoria (HRV), in partnership with the Society of Living Intravenous Drug Users (SOLID), will co-host a workshop assessing past struggles and current organizing for peer-run supervised consumption services in Victoria.
Topics to be covered include:
* Institutional barriers to essential health services for people who use drugs in Victoria
* The Beddow Centre: a long-term project for peer-run supervised consumption services in Victoria
* Reflections on the roles of allies in this type of organizing work
Presenters: Heather Hobbs and Mark Willson
Heather Hobbs works with people who use illicit drugs in Victoria and has been organizing with Harm Reduction Victoria since 2008.
Mark Willson does legal and research work with HRV, and board support for the Beddow Centre.
11:45 – 12:45
Workshop Slot C
Title: Food Security and Seed Saving
Description: This workshop will teach participants everything they need to know to become seed-savers. The workshop will also frame the necessity of learning this skill around a discussion of food security on Vancouver Island.
Presenters: Jessy Rucker
Jesse has worked with the Growing Schools program with LifeCycles, completed an organic farming course through Camosun, and avidly saves seeds!
Lunch
2:00 – 3:30
Workshop Slot A
Title: Harnessing the press: Using and being the media
Description: Making change happen means spreading the word. This workshop will look at how to work with mainstream media in anti-poverty organizing and how to create our own media. A panel of independent journalists, community organizers and alternative media collectives will share tips and words of wisdom.
Presenters: TBC
2:00 – 3:30
Workshop Slot B
Title: Copwatching: exploring lived struggles with police brutality through forum theatre
Description: An interactive workshop including interactive theatre and popular education of your legal rights
Presenters: Theatre of the Oppressed, Kym Hothead, River Chandler
2:00 – 3:30
Workshop Slot C
Title: (Re)claiming our health! For ourselves and our communities
Description: This workshop will explore the interconnections between individual and collective health, capitalism, and healing with the understanding that we are all our own experts. During the workshop, we’ll use creative activities to share perspectives on health and healing and develop strategies for building and (re)claiming healthier lives and communities.
Presenters: Setareh Mohammadi
Setareh is an Iranian exile who has been living on unceded Coast Salish Territories – Lekwungen, Swxwú7mesh, Tsleil-Waututh, and Musqueam – for most of her life. Raised within activist communities, setareh has been involved with anti-capitalist social and environmental justice since birth. She is currently a candidate for graduation with the Canadian School of Natural Nutrition awaiting Registered Holistic Nutritionist designation. As the 2nd generation in her family to have a refrigerator, setareh places importance on (re)learning her traditional/cultural food knowledge in a far away luscious land of no pomegranate trees. When setareh is not wild harvesting, growing, preserving, cooking, and eating food with others, she creates visual art, writes shy poetry, and swims in the wild wild west ocean.
15 minute break
3:45 – 5:15
Workshop Slot A
Title: Anti-Poverty Organizing
Description: TBC
Presenters: TBC
3:45 – 5:15
Workshop Slot B
Title: The Disability Application Process: The Ins and Outs
Description: In this workshop, disability advocates will go through the sections of the application process and discuss its requirements. They will also cover legal decisions that affect the application positively, and present on significant findings of the ombudsman's report that could be helpful to people who are in the system.
Presenters: Joanne Neubauer and Renee Ahmadi
3:45 – 5:15
Workshop Slot C
Title: Staying Strong: the role of self care and aftercare in activist communities. An exploration into how radical movements can stay resilient and effective in times of increasing repression from the state. Community acupuncture session offered at the end.
Description: This workshop will explore what some barriers to self care are (e.g. activist martyr complex, heteronormative gender roles, pure overwhelm), what we can give to ourselves and to each other in order to stay strong and healthy while we create a new world in the shell of the old. There will be a community acupuncture session offered to end the session!
Presenters: Lisa Baird and Laurel Irons
Lisa and Laurel are Vancouver-based community acupunkturists with a focus on working with activists and folks who are low-income/otherwise marginalized. They gave multiple free community acupuncture sessions at a collectively-run space in East Van following the police violence during the G20 protests last summer, and at the recent reConvergence in Vancouver.
45 minute break
6:00 – 8:00
Dinner and Discussion
Workshops in the teach-in follow five tracks (or can be grouped into five themes). At tonight’s dinner each table will have a theme listed on it. Please feel free to sit at the table that has a theme that reflects the workshops you took part in today, or check out one of the “yet-to-be themed” tables and develop your own launching point for discussion.
SUNDAY, May 15th 2011
10:00 – 11:30
Workshop Slot A
Title: Thinking Outside the Box: Alternative Approaches to Education
Description: There is much more we can learn from one another than is allowed within our current educational systems. A compulsory and one-size-fits-all approach to learning and teaching ignores the differences existing between communities, each with their own distinct circumstances and educational needs. Alternative approaches to education such as self-directed studies, home schooling, Montessori, Waldorf, free schools, and de-schooling, among others, offer divergent opportunities for learning that each come with their own rewards and challenges, solutions and problematics.
Presenters: Wayward School, Transition Victoria, Underground Curriculum
Transition Victoria is part of a global
grassroots movement supporting citizen action toward reducing oil dependence
and building local community resilience and ecological sustainability. http://transitionvictoria.ning.com/
The Wayward School is a co-operative school of thoughts and actions that
takes shape as a series of thematically organized lectures, workshops, and
gatherings in Victoria, BC.
http://waywardschool.wordpress.com
Underground Curriculum is a student-led, grassroots education system
that runs parallel to the conventional system to explicitly enable people to
take ownership of their learning experiences. The UC does so by providing a
framework for people to network, host workshops and take on meaningful projects
in their community.
https://sites.google.com/site/undergroundcurriculum
10:00 – 11:30
Workshop Slot B
Title: Building a Bridge between Advocacy and Activism
Description: TAPS advocates will host a workshop focused on two areas. The first section of the workshop will focus on some of the key skills involved in effective advocacy. This will lead into a discussion about how individual advocacy can influence the broader goals involved in activism. There will be member of both the board and staff involved in the facilitation of the workshop.
Presenters: Kelly, Executive Director of TAPS and other TAPS advocates
10:00 – 11:30
Workshop Slot C
Title: Exploring Anti-Colonial Strategies for Community Organizing
*This workshop is for self-identified People of Colour and Indigenous People.
Description: In this workshop we hope to create an intentional space where Indigenous people and People of Colour can come together to explore anti-colonial strategies for anti-poverty work that can strengthen our efforts to (re)create healthy, resilient and sustainable communities.
We seek to foster a space of dialogue and relationship building, where we can share experiences, strategies and organizing efforts happening in our respective communities, and explore some of the places of tension, commonality, divergence, as well as possibilities for solidarity.
Presenters: TBC
15 minute break
11:45 – 12:45
Workshop Slot A
Title: Student loans for Community Organizing: or, how to use students loans to subsidize your art/activism and get away with it
Description: Shifts in state spending over the past two decades have severely limited spaces for creative work and activism. Massive cuts to welfare, cuts to grants for students (combined with increased university tuition), cuts to arts funding, and cuts to NGOs focused on advocacy work mean there are less and less spaces for experiencing, developing and sharing lifestyles and practices based in creative commitments to social justice.
Student loans are possibly the last remaining source of non-market funds for youth committed to social change. Unfortunately, misinformation about student loans and a puritan fear of debt discourages the full use of student loans as a resource for social change. The effects are broad: interesting people are too busy getting by at crappy jobs to fully commit to social justice work; the university (and its resources) are abandoned to busier, wealthier and more conservative students.
This workshop will be a space for knowledge-sharing about ongoing changes in student loans rules and additional funds available to students on loans, and for discussing practical strategies to prevent the use of student loans now from ruining your life later. The overall aim is formulate long-term strategies for the most effective uses of student loans as part of a lifelong commitment to social justice work.
Presenters: University Research Lab
Speakers/facilitators include a musician and former undergraduate student whose loans were defaulted due to statute of limitations restrictions, and a current PhD student who anticipates defaulting on significant student loans through bankruptcy and consumer proposals.
11:45 – 12:45
Workshop Slot B
Title: TBD
Description: TBD
Presenters: TBD
11:45 – 12:45
Workshop Slot C
Title: Radical Environmentalism
Description: The workshop will start by stating an expectation for anti-oppressive behavior from all participants. Next, definitions of the words "radical" and "environment" will be advanced, and then participants will be invited to split off into discussion groups that focus on the intersection of environmentalism and topics such as patriarchy, racism and colonization, and capitalism. Each workshop will be facilitated by someone with experience organizing around that topic. At the end of the session groups will re-convene and present the highlights of their discussion to the whole.
Presenters: Gordon O’Connor
Lunch
2:00 pm – 3:30
Workshop Slot A
Title: The Purple Thistle: Radical Deschooling
Description: The Purple Thistle is a cost-free
youth-collective-run resource centre
for arts and activism in East-Vancouver. Come meet us, learn about the Purple Thistle and what we do. Share ideas on deschooling and building
radical spaces. We welcome questions and participation.
Presenters: Purple Thistle Collective
2:00 pm – 3:30
Workshop Slot B
Title: Resistance Through Solidarity
Description: Capitalism has evolved and so must the tactics we use to fight against it. Capitalism is very real and alive in all of our lives, acting to reduce the common person to a human resource without a name or a face. Together we have a chance to take a stand, fight back and win. This presentation will talk about the work that the Seattle Solidarity Network has done to work with community members in Seattle so they can have very real and personal victories in their own lives. We will also discuss the movement that the solidarity network model has the potential to build.
Presenters: Joel Chavez, Seattle Solidarity
2:00 pm – 3:30
Workshop Slot C
Title: Rewriting the ending of Our Histories
Description: Have you experienced recurring systems of oppression in community organizing where you wish you could pause, rewind, and change the outcome of the moment? This 90- minute workshop will use forum theatre to provide tools to help address the systems of oppression that may arise when we act without reflection.
By inviting people to reflect upon their experiences within community organizing and engage with one another through forum theatre, we hope to create experience-based conversations that address realities that exist for participants.
We will begin by creating community agreements to help prevent the replication of systems of oppression in the workshop itself, and then move to addressing examples of how systems of oppression can and do manifest in community organizing. After, we will introduce the form theatre exercise, and solidify our learnings through a debrief and group check out.
Presenters: Annie Banks, Ruby Diaz
Annie Banks is a white settler woman who is a visitor on unceded Lekwungen and WSANEC homelands. Annie has been active in community organizing for a number of years and has experience in creative arts, violence prevention, facilitation, advocacy and program coordination. Annie is committed to the process of unlearning oppressive behaviour and working with people to collaboratively challenge oppressive systems.
Ruby has been a visitor on unceded Lekwgeun and WSANEC homelands since the Summer of 2010. She was born to Chilean and Jamaican immigrant parents on Plains Cree Territory, and is passionate about community building, decolonization and youth work. Her previous experience has mainly been being involved in Indigenous solidarity groups organizing against the Oil Sands in Alberta, and working with youth in schools to introduce multiple perspectives on "history".
15 minute break
3:45 – 4:45
Title: Building an Anti-Poverty Movement: Small Group Discussions
Discussion: Here we will re-gather in small groups. Rooms are labeled by teach-in track/theme. This is an opportunity to bring together people from different workshops to have discussion and take part in future visioning relating to a particular question or theme of the teach-in.
Presenters: YOU!!!
4:45-5:15
Re-convergence and Conference Wrap Up (main room)
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Tamara Herman
Research Coordinator
Vancouver Island Public Interest Research Group (VIPIRG)
Phone: (250) 472-4386
Email: rese...@vipirg.ca
Web: www.vipirg.ca
Office: UVic student union building room B122
Mail: PO Box 3035 Stn CSC, Victoria, BC, Lekwungen & WSANEC Territories, V8W 3P3
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