REAL COMMUNITIES
Welcoming Community Dialogue Groups Host Virtual Retreat and Summit by Jennifer Bosk
Twenty-seven community advocates for inclusion and change from the Real Communities Partnership (RCP) and the Welcoming Communities Dialogues (WCD) groups gathered virtually from August 19 to 21 for their annual retreat. For those three days, the work centered around their response to a movie called “Why I Write,” a film about bettering one’s community through art and action, developed and produced by the Hearts and Minds Film Initiative and TELEDUCTION. “We were excited to hear the community discussion around the movie and to discover what was familiar to retreat attendees, what was unfamiliar and what was a challenge for some,” said
Malaika Geuka Wells, community organizing coordinator for Global Ubuntu, the organization that manages RCP and WCD. During the retreat, people were asked to express their vision of what their community would look like within the next five years via art. Using supplies on hand, from paper to magazines to pictures, participants spoke through their art about their hopes and dreams for their communities in achieving the Welcoming Communities’ mission to pave the way toward an equitable and just society where people across race, ethnicity, culture, class, socioeconomic background, educational status, abilities, gender and religion are treated with dignity and respect. The retreat was followed by three virtual workshops that helped participants understand the fundamental forces of the current economic and governance
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MAKING A DIFFERENCE MAGAZINE
systems; envision a democratic and sustainable future; and strategize toward building a new solidarity economy, which is an economy that is created with people, instead of profit, in mind. These workshops provided an introduction to Highlander’s Mapping Our Futures curriculum, which shares innovative strategies from across the globe that are advancing new economies and shifting the ways groups organize themselves, govern their work together, resist capitalism’s structurally designed inequities and transform people’s lives and conditions.
Using supplies on hand, from paper to magazines to pictures, participants spoke through their art about their hopes and dreams for their communities during the retreat.
OUR GOAL IS TO DESCRIBE SYSTEMS OF INJUSTICE, ROOT OUT AND REMOVE SYSTEMIC ISSUES, AND SUPPLY THE SAFE SPACE TO TALK ABOUT IT. The workshops focused on Setting the Stage and Community Mapping; Capitalism and the Solidarity Economy; and Beautiful Solutions: Examples of Solidarity Economy.
