Friday, November 7, 2008

Texas Audio Workshops with Hadassah

For folks in Austin and San Antonio who did the audio workshops with Hadassah, here is the link to the collective tracks made in the workshop.

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Video from Collective in Lebanon

Lots of folks have asked where they can find "From Beirut...to Those Who Love Us", the video we showed on some of the stops on the tour. Below is a link.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Saturday, October 25, 2008

Zines made in Alexis Pauline Gumbs' Workshops

One of the most exciting aspects of the tour was Alexis' Pressed For Knowledge workshop. In cities including Greensboro, Miami, Gainesville, and Pensacola, participants collectively designed zines. The PDFs are available online at:
http://brokenbeautifuldowloads.wordpress.com/

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Denton, Texas

The final stop on our tour - Denton, Texas - was arranged by the amazing Ellen Chenoweth, a local Left Turn activist. Denton was one of the most exciting events of the tour. A full house of folks came out to hear about our work, and to share their own stories.

One of the local activists had written a great story about the tour in the local college paper. Other activists showed up from a local organization called Socially Aware Youth, and others represented for the local chapter of Students for a Democratic Society.

Austin, Texas

Thanks to Cory, who organized an amazing visit, cleared out of her own house so we had a place to stay, set up a day of skillshares with Skillshare Austin, and took us on a social justice tour of Austin, where we met the folks from Rhizome Collective, a housing collective that is also an Educational Center for Urban Sustainability and a Center for Community Organizing, and Ecology Action, a project that seeks to create a healthier environment through waste prevention and accessibility to recycling, that is also a worker-run collective, operated by a democratic, horizontal decision making process.

A high point of our visit was visiting Treasure City Thrift, another radical worker-run collective project! Treasure City started in 2006 as a project to raise money and material support for small, local grassroots community groups and projects that traditionally have difficulty with funding. Their main financial and material beneficiary is the Inside Books Project, which sends 18,000 free books a year to Texas prisoners.

We were told that, as a collective, Treasure City also believes that the struggles for social justice are not separate, but in fact all linked together in a broader struggle for liberation - an injustice against one is an injustice against all. From what we saw of Cory and the other collective members, this is definitely true!

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Media Reports from the tour

Thanks to Megan Tady for this great interview/report on the tour!