Barbara Jefferson on POWER, OPPRESSION & INTERSECTIONALITY

Week of March 7th

Barbara Jefferson is a Seattle-based queer black “experience designer” and facilitator specializing in leadership, collective healing, and community development. A lead trainer with Joanna Macy’s The Work That Reconnects and with the group Generation Waking Up, Barbara is also a full-time business student and the co-host of Black Folk’s Dinner Seattle, a monthly potluck dinner party.

Jade Begay and Lyla June on DECOLONIZING & RECLAIMING INDIGINEITY

Week of March 20th

Jade Begay (Diné and Tesuque Pueblo), a social impact filmmaker and multimedia artist based in Santa Fe, NM, deeply committed to amplifying Indigenous and marginalized voices, works to help bring forth real solutions from within these communities to achieve ecological balance. Jade’s most recent work has been done in partnership with the Indigenous Environmental Network, 350.org, Resource Media, and several other organizations.

Lyla June Johnston was raised in Taos, New Mexico and is a descendent of Diné (Navajo) and Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) lineages. Her personal mission in life is to grow closer to Creator by learning how to love deeper. In 2012, she graduated with honors from Stanford University with a degree in Environmental Anthropology. She is a musician, public speaker and internationally recognized performance poet. Lyla June ultimately attributes any achievements to Creator who gave her the tools and resources she uses to serve humanity.

She currently lives in Diné Tah, the Navajo ancestral homeland which spans what is now called New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Arizona. She spends her free time learning her engendered mother tongue, planting corn, beans and squash and spending time with elders who retain traditional spiritual and ecological knowledge.

MOLLIE CRITTENDEN & RAIN CROWE on SYSTEMIC WHITE SUPREMACY

Week of April 3rd

Mollie Crittenden has worked for the past twenty years as a K-12 educator. After majoring in Ethnic Studies, earning two teaching credentials and Masters Degree in Education, she has been a bilingual elementary school teacher, high school English teacher, and now is in her thirteenth year of directing a Community Engagement Program in a high school in San Francisco. She infuses her understanding of systemic racism and different aspects of oppression in the teaching she does about social justice and cultural competency concepts. Mollie also teaches groups of white adults with The UNtraining, an organization that works specifically with the internal aspects of white liberal racism. She has also presented at the White Privelege Conference and leads an ongoing “understanding Whiteness” teacher group at the high school where she teaches. She is a certified integral life coach, and works individually with people in their process of transformational unfolding. Mollie is the mother of two biracial, African-American young boys, practices meditation, connects to nature regularly, and volunteers with non-profit organizations in the bay area. She is committed to embodying love, compassion, and connection in all the work she does.

Yasmin Christopher on EXERTING & EXPANDING OUR RIGHTS

Week of April 17th

Yasmin Christopher is currently a Legislative Aide to Washington State Senator Pramila Jayapal. As a recent graduate of Seattle University Law, she was also a Spring 2014 Legal Extern with the Honorable Justice Mary Yu, during her final months in King County Superior Court, a Fall 2013 law clerk with the U.S. Attorney’s Office and Summer 2013 policy fellow at the Polaris Project, an organization that takes a comprehensive approach to human trafficking, based in Washington D.C. She is also currently Vice President of the OneAmerica Board, a national delegate for We Belong Together, an organization that advocates for immigration rights as a women’s equality issue, and an International Ambassador to the Bangladesh Work Camps Association, an organization that works to foster quality cultural exchange experiences in her native Bangladesh.

Yasmin has also lent her voice and personal family history to raise awareness about human trafficking. She was a part of a King County Metro Bus public service announcement campaign in 2013 and has traveled the state giving lectures at various colleges on her family’s experience and possible public policy improvements on the issue. In addition, Yasmin has donated her time and artwork to various fundraising events through her collaboration with the Refugee Women’s Alliance and the International Rescue Commission that work to provide direct services to trafficking survivors here and abroad. She also has co-founded and continues to consult for an aspiring organization, ASHHO, to work on building resilient communities by providing comprehensive trainings to the community, businesses, agencies, and youth on how to recognize and appropriately respond to Human Trafficking while focusing on prevention and protection.

Malia Hulleman on DIRECT ACTION FROM THE GRASSROOTS

Week of May 1st

Malia Hulleman is an environmental activist, Hawaiian native, water protector, and indigenous woman. She joined the Standing Rock Sioux on the front lines against the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline in the face of human and environmental rights violations. Through changing the culture of disregard and disrespect of nature and indigenous people, her goal is to create a renewable and sustainable future for coming generations.

A lifelong steward of Native treaty lands and sovereign rights at home in Hawaii, she is an organizer with the Mauna Kea movement which is halting construction of the world’s largest telescope on Hawaii’s most sacred mountain.Her commitment to preserving the Hawaiian language is motivated by the similar suppression faced by Native Hawaiians and other Native Americans, including silencing of native language, theft of the most-fertile land, seclusion to low-income areas, and the robbing of ancestral diets.

While canvassing for the Bernie Sanders campaign, she traveled across the country with UpToUs, developing solutions with communities throughout the United States. Organizing with Rezpect Our Water, an indigenous youth movement, brought her to the front lines of Standing Rock where she endured violence by law enforcement with less-lethal weapons. She was maced three times at Standing Rock (each time, she says, it definitely does not get any better), and faced snipers.

Malia brings what she’s learned from the Standing Rock movement to nationwide goals such as adopting sustainable energy, and continuing to live a life of pono, or righteousness, as is said in Hawaiian. She inspires people to continue on the path towards permanently halting the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline through the Missouri and Cannon Ball Rivers, despite setbacks and losses.

She inspires other women towards leadership with consideration for their neighbors and for the planet.

Joanna Macy on KEEPING SANE & ACTIVE AMID MASS PSYCHOSIS

Week of May 8th

Joanna Macy Ph.D., is a scholar of Buddhism, systems thinking and deep ecology. A respected voice in movements for peace, justice, and ecology, she interweaves her scholarship with learning from five decades of activism. As the root teacher of the Work That Reconnects, she has created a ground-breaking theoretical framework for personal and social change, as well as a powerful workshop methodology for its application.

Her wide-ranging work addresses psychological and spiritual issues of the nuclear age, the cultivation of ecological awareness, and the fruitful resonance between Buddhist thought and contemporary science. The many dimensions of this work are explored in her books.