Social Emergency Response Center (SERC): This Saturday at Parts and Crafts!

[Katie Gradowski]

We are in the middle of a social emergency

Back in February, Design Studio for Social Intervention hosted the first SERC, which stands for Social Emergency Response Center. Here's their framing of the project, which ran as a three-day workshop.

In natural emergencies like hurricanes or floods, emergency response centers provide food, shelter, and healing.  Social Emergency Response Centers (SERCs) re-imagine these centers to take on the real and pressing social emergency that we are facing today. They help us pivot out of humdrum time, through despair, rage and hopelessness into collective, creative and radical action.  

DS4SI wants to host 5-15 SERCs in the first 100 days of the Trump presidency.  Our goal is to host two events in Somerville between now and May -- a trial run on Saturday March 18, at Parts and Crafts, the second in early May, location TBD.

SERC Somerville:  This Saturday at Parts and Crafts!

March 18, 10-4 pm

Free / all ages / all are welcome

THE SCHEDULE SO FAR

JOIN THE PLANNING GROUP

Somerville SERC will run Saturday March 18 from 10-4 pm at Parts and Crafts, 577 Somerville Ave.  It will run concurrently with open shop, which means there will be child care, with a mix of unconference and set workshops.  Also pizza!

Run a workshop.  Workshops are food for the brain, body, or soul, and can be on anything from screenprinting to Standing Rock, decompression strategies to anti-displacement.  What do you want to learn?  What do you want to share?

Build a cohort.   This is an opportunity for us to strengthen our collaboration muscles and build a cohort of people -- Somervillians, artists, old timers, crafty folks, educators, hipsters, and activists of all stripes -- to reach across boundaries and help to lift each other up.  We need each other now more than ever!  

Intergenerational.  If you've been around the block and have seen all this a million times -- or if you're just-recently-not-a-kid and are terrified out of your mind - we want your perspective and your voice.  Youth leaders and youth organizers especially are invited to help create the template. 

Somerville local (and Cambridge, and Medford, and Arlington)   Occupation, privatization, state-sanctioned violence, displacement, and disruption of everyday life: Donald Trump didn't invent these things. Likewise, strategies for creative resistance, anti-engagement, grassroots mobilization, and DIY organizing have been happening right here for decades.

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www.partsandcrafts.org