Continuing Revolution 2021 Online: Love in Hope, Grief, Rage, and Action

NB: Registration deadline for Continuing Revolution 2021 is 9am, Thurs., June 3rd.

Do you find yourself…

• Needing space to grieve and feel the realities of the last year of pandemic, US empire collapse, and more?
• Wanting to build a better world but feeling disconnected from a sense that it is possible?
• Seeing patterns of rage and call outs and wondering how to meet them and move toward healing, accountability, and action?
• Feeling frustrated with how young people seem to be shouldered with providing hope for older generations?
• Wanting to move through deep feeling to a place of possibility?
• Seeking grounding in Spirit amidst the unknown?

…then Continuing Revolution 2021 Online might be for you!

More on the Theme

This year in Continuing Revolution we are challenging ourselves to feel deeply. Organizing for a better world has felt both incredibly urgent and, at times, deeply difficult during the past season of global pandemic, white supremacist resistance to change, ongoing climate catastrophe, and more. While closing ourselves and our hearts off to feeling the depths of grief, rage, hope, love, and more is an understandable coping strategy, it may not serve ourselves or movements for change for the long haul. We therefore come together humbly and faithfully to worship, feel, and seek in faithful community.

This year, drawing on work from adrienne maree brown, Mia Mingus, Joanna Macy, Kazu Haga, Ricardo Levins Morales, and more, we seek to create a space for honest feeling in a movement toward embodied hope and action. We will explore bridges between love, hope, grief, anger, and action, and look to the lived experiences and stories of those who hold these feelings in their own work for justice. We believe that hope is a collective commitment to the future, and will make concrete time to ground in tangible action steps in that commitment.

Participants will:

• Share stories and ritual to acknowledge love, hope, grief, joy, and rage;
• Spend time creatively meeting feelings and transforming them through writing, movement, song, silent worship, or other creative methods;
• Explore some of the movements that have made progress through the breaking open of the past year;
• Explore how to build collective commitment to the future, or embodied hope.

Session Schedule – more detail coming soon!

Friday, June 4 ~ Opening
7:00pm-9:00pm Welcome and Opening with Dwight Dunston and Lina Blount

Saturday, June 5 ~ Love and Hope
10:00am-12:00 pm Definitions, stories, weaving with Dwight and Lina
2:00pm-4:00pm Exploring Active Hope with Francisco Burgos
7:00pm-9:00pm Creative Exploration with Dwight and Lina

Sunday, June 6 ~ Love and Grief
10:00am-12:00pm Definitions, stories, weaving with Dwight and Lina
2:00pm-5:00pm Exploring Grief and Ritual with Rev. Rhetta Morgan(please note longer than other days)
7:00pm-9:00pm Racial Affinity Groups with Dwight and Lina

Monday, June 7 ~ Love and Rage
10:00am-12:00pm Definitions/reflections, stories, weaving with Dwight and Lina
2:00pm-4:00pm Love and Rage with Zenaida Peterson
7:00pm-9:00pm Love and Rage in Action Panel with Xelba Gutierrez, Ingrid Lakey, Rev. Rhetta Morgan, and Sophie Sarkar

Tuesday, June 8 ~ Love and Action
10:00am-12:00pm Definitions/reflections, stories, weaving with Dwight and Lina
2:00pm-4:00pm Visioning Action with Richie Schulz
7:00pm-9:00pm Closing with Dwight and Lina

NB: All scheduled events are Eastern Time (US & Canada).

Co-Coordinators

Dwight Dunston is a West Philly-based facilitator, hip-hop artist, educator, and activist with roots in the Carolinas and deeper roots in West Africa. His passions/gifts include supporting folks to tap into their super powers and supporting communities to develop the tools, skills and techniques to stay connected across different identities.

Most recently Dwight served as the Coordinator of Equity and Justice Education at Friends Central School where he also coached track and field and co-developed two courses in the Literature department on the Black experience in 20th century America and exploring the meaning of love and community in the anthropocene. He is a trainer with AORTA (Anti-Oppression Resource and Training Alliance) and also a trainer and Relationship Manager with Lion’s Story, a Philadelphia based org that uses Dr. Howard Stevenson’s theory on racial literacy to support individuals to develop skills in navigating racially stressful encounters. As an artist, he is a founding member of the nine-piece hip-hop group Hardwork Movement and the musical group City Love, and has performed at schools, venues, and festivals across the country, sharing the stage with Questlove, Talib Kweli, Michelle Alexander, Jonathon Kozol, and many others.

Lina Blount is an organizer, trainer, and nonviolent action strategist who has been working on environmental justice campaigns in the Philadelphia area for over ten years. Lina currently works as the Education Coordinator for Pendle Hill and just rotated off as co-clerk of the Earth Quaker Action Team (EQAT) board, which she has served since 2013. Lina has also worked with the Divestment Student Network and spent two years as a canvass director and anti-fracking organizer in Pennsylvania.

Financial aid may be available. If you are seeking funds to participate in this program, click to review and complete our Financial Assistance Application and a Pendle Hill staff member will follow-up with you shortly (please do NOT register online). Thank you for your interest.

Leader(s)

Francisco Burgos is Pendle Hill’s executive director and has facilitated spiritual retreats and <em>lectio divina</em> sessions for different audiences. He was a De La Salle Christian Brother for almost ten years, serving in Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and Costa Rica, and has been a Friend since 2004. Francisco is a member of Harrisburg Friends Meeting and has attended several monthly meetings, including Monteverde Friends Meeting in Costa Rica and Adelphi Friends Meeting in MD.

Xelba Gutierrez (they/she) is a queer, immigrant, community organizer, educator, and facilitator made of fierce indignation and gentle compassion. They were born in Venezuela, from revolutionary parents, and spent their formative years between Santiago, Chile and Miami, Florida. After living on the West Coast for some years, Xelba made Philadelphia home where she became increasingly involved in organizing across many issues and earned a master’s degree in Environmental Studies with a concentration in Environmental Justice from UPenn. Xelba brings a global view, heavily influenced by their South American roots and they are passionate about challenging systems and having hard conversations about decolonizing and unlearning harmful frameworks. They firmly believe that there is a world without prisons and police in our future and is happy to join conversations about the transformation needed to get us there.

Ingrid Lakey is one of the founders of Earth Quaker Action Team, a grassroots organization working on a nonviolent direct action campaign at the intersection of environmental, economic, and racial justice. More than ten years ago she gave up a career in public radio to follow her leading to be a climate justice activist. Ingrid has been a trainer and facilitator for 25 years, leading workshops on anti-racism, diversity, team-building, non-violent direct action, and conflict. She is a member of Central Philadelphia Monthly Meeting.

Reverend Rhetta Morgan is a singing healer, spiritual activist, and interfaith minister who has been gathering tools for healing and inspiration for over 40 years. Through her gifts of prayer, poetry, facilitation, and sermonizing she cultivates hope and nurtures connection in her community as a pathway back to belonging and wholeness. As a facilitator and coach, Rhetta is known for her ability to support others to be bold, heal their self-limiting beliefs, and integrate their internal healing with their social movement work. This support is essential to cultivate the powerful spiritual activism that is needed in these times.

As an active facilitator in the Philadelphia region and beyond, Reverend Rhetta currently works with the Unitarian Universalist National Ministers Association, the Center for Contemporary Mysticism, the People of the Global Majority in the Outdoors, Nature, and Environment and more. She also founded and leads the Ecclesia Spirit Interfaith Community as well as Ritual for Change Makers, an 8-month program for activists seeking to renew their spiritual connection to the transcendent and to land. For more information see https://reverendrhetta.com.

Zenaida Peterson (they/them), author of Breakfast for Dinner and Other Blasphemous Things, published by Pizza Pi Press, is a mystic, an organizer, a house plant gardener, and a Black non-binary poet from the south currently doing restorative justice organizing in Boston, Massachusetts. They are the founding director of Feminine Empowerment Movement Slam (FEMS), an all ages radical poetry slam centering marginalized people and celebrating the feminine. They are prepping for the apocalypse by learning to make plant medicine, engaging in restorative justice, and farming. They are fellow of the Nurturing Faithfulness Program and a Boston alum of Quaker Voluntary Service, where they currently do recruitment and equity work..

Sophie দীপ্তি Sarkar (she/her) is facilitator, community organizer, and artist based on the ancestral lands of the Lenni Lenape in what is now called Philadelphia. Both her art and organizing exist at the intersection of climate justice and racial healing and in both she works in community with other Black, Indigenous, and People of Color to heal and deepen our relationships with each other, with our ancestors, and with the Earth. Some recent engagements include organizing with residents in North Philadelphia to address urban heat inequity, co-directing the PGM ONE Summit for BIPOC who love the Earth, and co-designing and facilitating Interwoven, a multi-week series on Black and Asian solidarity. She values leading with connection, healing ourselves to heal our systems, holding space for multiple truths, cultivating joy, embracing the wisdom of our bodies and the Earth, and building resilient relationships to address the crises to come.

Sophie also collaborates with her cousins Miki Palchick and Andrienne Palchick as a member of Round Rock Collective, a family art collective.

Richie Schulz (he/him) is the community educator at Lutheran Settlement House (LSH), where he trains people on how to support survivors of domestic violence in their professional and personal contexts. At LSH he also co-facilitates the Masculinity Action Project, which focuses on organizing masculine-identified folks into gender justice work. Some of his movement work has included training and organizing white folks (including Quakers) into racial justice campaigns with Showing Up for Racial Justice, facilitating and organizing capacity-building programs with the Philly-based prison abolition organization Reconstruction Inc, and offering political education spaces on the connections between defunding the police and grassroots anti-domestic violence work. He has also served as a coach with By the People’s direct-action campaign that successfully pressured Congress on impeachment in 2019, and he has been involved in other direct action rabble rousing in climate and migrant justice campaigns.

Travel directions to Pendle Hill.