Events

Join Adrian Shanker, author of Bodies and Barriers: Queer Activists on Health, fir Denormalizing Smoking and Vaping in the Lgbttq+ Community with others on THURSDAY, JUNE 17, 2021 AT 3:30 PM – 4 PM EDT.

Why are efforts to denormalize smoking within the LGBTTQ* community failing? Join us for a live discussion where we’ll uncover why the LGBTTQ* community faces higher rates of smoking, how social stigma exacerbates the issue and what resources are available locally that are relevant and tailored to the needs of this community. Learn more and register here.

PANELISTS

Roger Tam is a clinical pharmacist and certified diabetes and tobacco educator. He is a board member of at Our Own Health Centre in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Adrian Shanker is the founder and executive director of the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Centre in Allentown, PA. He is also a writer and recently was the editor of the book Bodies and Barriers: Queer Activists on Health.

Rahim Thawaer is a registered social worker and psychotherapist, clinical supervisor, and sessional lecturer in Toronto, Ontario. He has been involved in mental health, HIV/AIDS, and queer Muslim activism for over a decade.

About the book:

LGBT people pervasively experience health disparities, affecting every part of their bodies and lives. Yet many are still grappling to understand the mutually reinforcing health care challenges that lead to worsened health outcomes. Bodies and Barriers informs health care professionals, students in health professions, policymakers, and fellow activists about these challenges, providing insights and a road map for action that could improve queer health.

Through artfully articulated, data-informed essays by twenty-six well-known and emerging queer activists—including Alisa Bowman, Jack Harrison-Quintana, Liz Margolies, Robyn Ochs, Sean Strub, Justin Sabia-Tanis, Ryan Thoreson, Imani Woody, and more—Bodies and Barriers illuminates the health challenges LGBT people experience throughout their lives and challenges conventional wisdom about health care delivery. It probes deeply into the roots of the disparities faced by those in the LGBT community and provides crucial information to fight for health equity and better health outcomes.

The contributors to Bodies and Barriers look for tangible improvements, drawing from the history of HIV/AIDS in the U.S. and from struggles against health care bias and discrimination. At a galvanizing moment when LGBT people have experienced great strides in lived equality, but our health as a community still lags, here is an indispensable blueprint for change by some of the most passionate and important health activists in the LGBT movement today.

Adrian Shanker is an award-winning activist and organizer whose career has centered on advancing progress for the LGBT community. He has worked as an arts fundraiser, labor organizer, marketing manager, and served as President of Equality Pennsylvania for three years before founding Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center in Allentown, PA, where he serves as executive director. An accomplished organizer, Adrian has led numerous successful campaigns to advance LGBT progress through municipal nondiscrimination and relationship recognition laws and laws to protect LGBT youth from conversion therapy. A specialist in LGBT health policy, he has developed leading-edge health promotion campaigns to advance health equity through behavioral, clinical, and policy changes.

Join Akilah S. Richards, author of Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work, for the Juneteenth Joy Series on Instagram with parenting influencer Joy Marilie from June 18th to 20th. Learn more and tune in here.

About Raising Free People:

No one is immune to the byproducts of compulsory schooling and standardized testing. And while reform may be a worthy cause for some, it is not enough for countless others still trying to navigate the tyranny of what schooling has always been. Raising Free People argues that we need to build and work within systems truly designed for any human to learn, grow, socialize, and thrive, regardless of age, ability, background, or access to money.

Families and conscious organizations across the world are healing generations of school wounds by pivoting into self-directed, intentional community-building, and Raising Free People shows you exactly how unschooling can help facilitate this process.

Individual experiences influence our approach to parenting and education, so we need more than the rules, tools, and “bad adult” guilt trips found in so many parenting and education books. We need to reach behind our behaviors to seek and find our triggers; to examine and interrupt the ways that social issues such as colonization still wreak havoc on our ability to trust ourselves, let alone children. Raising Free People explores examples of the transition from school or homeschooling to unschooling, how single parents and people facing financial challenges unschool successfully, and the ways unschooling allows us to address generational trauma and unlearn the habits we mindlessly pass on to children.

In these detailed and unabashed stories and insights, Richards examines the ways that her relationships to blackness, decolonization, and healing work all combine to form relationships and enable community-healing strategies rooted in an unschooling practice. This is how millions of families center human connection, practice clear and honest communication, and raise children who do not grow up to feel that they narrowly survived their childhoods.

Akilah S. Richards is a public speaker and the founder of Raising Free People Network, a social enterprise focused on resolving the ways that unexamined experiences with bias and oppression disrupt families’ and organizations’ capacity to sustain cultures of belonging.

Join Akilah S. Richards, author of Raising Free People: Unschooling as Liberation and Healing Work, and many others for Teacher Tom’s Play Summit online conference taking place June 20-25. Akilah’s talk will be on Sunday, June 20th from 9am to 11am ET. Learn more and register here.

About Raising Free People:

No one is immune to the byproducts of compulsory schooling and standardized testing. And while reform may be a worthy cause for some, it is not enough for countless others still trying to navigate the tyranny of what schooling has always been. Raising Free People argues that we need to build and work within systems truly designed for any human to learn, grow, socialize, and thrive, regardless of age, ability, background, or access to money.

Families and conscious organizations across the world are healing generations of school wounds by pivoting into self-directed, intentional community-building, and Raising Free People shows you exactly how unschooling can help facilitate this process.

Individual experiences influence our approach to parenting and education, so we need more than the rules, tools, and “bad adult” guilt trips found in so many parenting and education books. We need to reach behind our behaviors to seek and find our triggers; to examine and interrupt the ways that social issues such as colonization still wreak havoc on our ability to trust ourselves, let alone children. Raising Free People explores examples of the transition from school or homeschooling to unschooling, how single parents and people facing financial challenges unschool successfully, and the ways unschooling allows us to address generational trauma and unlearn the habits we mindlessly pass on to children.

In these detailed and unabashed stories and insights, Richards examines the ways that her relationships to blackness, decolonization, and healing work all combine to form relationships and enable community-healing strategies rooted in an unschooling practice. This is how millions of families center human connection, practice clear and honest communication, and raise children who do not grow up to feel that they narrowly survived their childhoods.

Akilah S. Richards is a public speaker and the founder of Raising Free People Network, a social enterprise focused on resolving the ways that unexamined experiences with bias and oppression disrupt families’ and organizations’ capacity to sustain cultures of belonging.

Join Matthew N. Lyons, author of Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire, and others for “Mapping Online Extremism and the Far Right,” a virtual panel on Tuesday, June 22nd at 5pm UK time, 12noon ET, 9am PT. This panel is part of Reactionary Digital Politics: Ideologies, Rhetorics, Aesthetics, a five-day series of unique interdisciplinary conversations about online politics, right-wing populism and reactionary ideologies. Learn more about the panel and series and register here.

About the Session:

Come listen to and participate in an online dialogue on taking climate action from PM Press authors Cynthia Kaufman, Jeremy Brecher, and Eddie Yuen on Wednesday, June 23rd at 5pm PT / 8pm ET. This is also a celebration of Cynthia Kaufman’s new book, The Sea is Rising and So Are We: A Climate Justice Handbook (PM Press, 2021).

Register at https://tinyurl.com/SeaIsRisingJune23

Cosponsored by the Labor Network for Sustainability (https://www.labor4sustainability.org/) Fossil Free California (https://fossilfreeca.org/) and PM Press.

– Cynthia Kaufman is the author of The Sea is Rising and So Are We: A Climate Justice Handbook
– Jeremy Brecher is the author of three books on the climate crisis with PM Press, including Common Preservation: In a Time of Mutual Destruction, Save the Humans? Common Preservation in Action, and Against Doom: A Climate Insurgency Manual
– Eddie Yuen is co-author of Catatrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth

The Sea is Rising and So Are We: A Climate Justice Handbook is an invitation to get involved in the movement to build a just and sustainable world in the face of the most urgent challenge our species has ever faced. By explaining the entrenched forces that are preventing rapid action, it helps you understand the nature of the political reality we are facing and arms you with the tools you need to overcome them. The book offers background information on the roots of the crisis and the many rapidly expanding solutions that are being implemented all around the world. It explains how to engage in productive messaging that will pull others into the climate justice movement, what you need to know to help build a successful movement, and the policy changes needed to build a world with climate justice. It also explores the personal side, including how engaging in the movement can be good for your mental health. It ends with advice on how you can find the place where you can be the most effective and where you can build climate action into your life in ways that are deeply rewarding.

Join Peter Cole for an online discussion of Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly hosted by Maritime Education for Students of the Sea (MESS) on Thursday, June 24th at 11am PT / 2pm ET. Learn more and register here.

Ben Fletcher, an African American who helped lead the IWW’s most militant and effective interracial branch, epitomized the union’s brand of anti-capitalism and anti-racism. Fletcher (1890−1949) was a tremendously important and well-loved member of the IWW during its heyday, the first quarter of the 20th century. A brilliant union organizer and a humorous orator, Fletcher helped found and lead Local 8 of the IWW’s Marine Transport Workers Industrial Union. When founded in 1913, this union was a third African American, a third Irish and Irish American, and a third other European immigrants. Despite being hated by the bosses and redbaited by the government, Local 8 controlled the waterfront for almost a decade.

Peter Cole, a Professor of History at Western Illinois University and Research Associate in the Society, Work and Development Program at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. He is the author of Wobblies on the Waterfront: Interracial Unionism in Progressive Era Philadelphia and the award-winning Dockworker Power: Race and Activism in Durban and the San Francisco Bay Area. He also is the founder and co-director of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 Commemoration Project (CRR19). He tweets from @ProfPeterCole.

Book launch for Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement & Resistance on Sunday, June 27th at 4pm PDT. Learn more and register here.

Counterpoints combines work from within the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP) with contributions from dozens of local artists, organizers, scholar-activists, and residents—from longtime community members who have been fighting multiple waves of racial dispossession to elementary school youth envisioning decolonial futures.

As an atlas co-created with community, Counterpoints expands knowledge on displacement and resistance in the Bay Area with, rather than for or about, those most impacted. With over 225 illustrations, photographs, and data visualizations; and 120,000 words of essays, poetry, oral histories, and more, Counterpoints is full of data to get organized around; stories to be inspired by; and essays and artworks to imagine a more just future with.

This atlas is the work of many hands over many years. To celebrate the launch of Counterpoints, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project is hosting a virtual launch party featuring a panel discussion reflecting on the promise and pitfalls of the atlas, followed by an interactive open house where attendees can learn more about AEMP’s ongoing work.