We are very excited to announce our 2025 Equity, Racial Justice & Culture Lunch & Learn Actionshop Series! Each 90 minute “action” shop will offer education, tools, q&a and opportunities for reflection, engagement, and action! These amazing speakers come with lived expertise and professional experience around each topic. You are encouraged to connect each topic with your own experience and challenge yourself to take small and large steps toward building equitable and racially just systems, and organizational spaces keeping an open mind and heart for your own transformational change.
🌤️ Magandang araw! Kumusta ka!
I hope you’ve been enjoying the beautiful sunshine, amidst the very cold temperatures and unpredictable weather this winter. It seems very much an analogy for the current political climate, yes? I’m so grateful to have local, state, national, and international sources that resonate with my personal and environmental experience, help me decipher current events, and uncover truths among the over abundance of information. My hope is that our 2025 Lunch & Learn Actionshops will offer similar moments of pause, connection, wisdom, and transformation.
To begin, our Winter series will cover two consequential federal policy conversations that can have a significant impact for people who have been intentionally and historically excluded from receiving equal and fair treatment and resources – Transgender and BIPOC (Black Indigenous, and/or people of color) communities.
Please sign up for each meeting separately!
In the Spring, we’ll offer a {R}evolutionary Practice Series for people at the beginning of their racial equity journey, as well as continue our “Operationalizing Equity” series with Tasha West-Baker. We’ll be bringing in a speaker with expertise in creating inclusive environments for autistic or neurodiverse people, as well as inviting a speaker to discuss disability justice. In the Fall we plan to dig deeper into our history of racially motivated, discriminatory housing policies so that we can allow ourselves to be as creative as it takes to stop these cycles of harm.
New offering! Continuing Education Credits for attending Lunch & Learn Actionshops! Please see the registration form for details.
Equity, Racial Justice, and Culture - Lunch & Learn Winter Series:
February 20 @ 11am-12:30pm: (re: Transgender Rights)
"The Great Divider: The Empirical Standard of Transmisia in Neocolonial Politics & How to Subvert It" offered by Ganesha Gold Buffalo
In this presentation, we will be revisiting recent executive orders and policy impacting the trans community and revealing how transmisia is an essential tool of counterinsurgency against class consciousness, solidarity between marginalized groups, and progressive movements as a whole. You will also be equipped with tools to confront this violence as it attempts to permeate our communities in the coming months.
*additional note from Ma.Caroline: If some terms are new to you, please don't worry. In these actionshops, you are invited to learn about the layered complexities and origins of these words including how some are intentionally watered down, weaponized, or are surrounded by false narratives.
12:45-1:30pm: Trans Community Affinity Space will follow the actionshop, using the same zoom link, after a 15 minute break. Attending the actionshop is not required. Ganesha will be holding this space for community members who identify as trans, non-binary, and gender nonconforming people.
Ganesha Gold Buffalo is a Disabled, Black Indigenous cultural healer, ceremonialist, and matriarch of mixed ancestry; educator; national organizer; transdisciplinary performance and audiovisual artist; and community organization contractor hailing from Cherokee, Chickasaw, Shawnee, and Yuchi lands in so-called Tennessee. Her work spans the realms of sex worker advocacy, food and land sovereignty, environmental justice, reproductive justice, youth protections, cultural reclamation, by-and-for community security and safety initiatives, and equitable resource building and redistribution.
REGISTER FOR FEB. 20
March 6 @ 11am-12:30pm:
"'Nah. I'm good.': Understanding the DEI Backlash and Standing Firm on Racial Equity" offered by Bethel Tsegaye, and Ma.Caroline Lopez, MSW
To understand the reasons for the backlash on "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" policies and programs, we travel back to the fight for inclusion and equality during and after the Civil Rights era and how those policies were meant to open up spaces for every person to have the same opportunities. Black people in particular, as well as other non-white people were treated as less than in both policy and practice, rather than human beings with equal rights. In modern day, it's clear that the years of work around equity and racial justice has benefited everyone. During this Actionshop, we'll talk about how social justice efforts won't stop despite the recent executive orders and how genuine progress takes decades, and continues according to the culture and will of the people. Lastly, we'll discuss how racial equity is woven into the fabric - the everyday work of the Housing Alliance, making it impossible to separate it from the whole.
12:45-1:30pm: BIPOC Affinity Space will follow the actionshop, using the same zoom link, after a 15 minute break. Everything is political. The political is personal, and is causing an immense amount of harm. This space will hopefully provide some grounding and healing for people who identify as Black, Indigenous, and/or people of color or multi-racial/multi-ethnic people of color.
REGISTER FOR MARCH 6
As always, Lunch & Learn events are a collective learning environment for speakers alongside participants. Actionshops are offerings of community care where we’re all meant to grow and water, give and receive, listen intently and share abundantly.
I can’t wait to be in space with all of you again!
Mabuhay!
Ma.Caroline
Ma.Caroline Lopez, MSW (she/they)
Director of Equity, Racial Justice, and Culture