Build Our World (Liberation Line

About Free Minds Free People Education for Liberation Network

In this period of sustained challenges to our humanity, it is with great enthusiasm that we announce the 2019 Free Minds, Free People National Conference will be held in Minneapolis-St Paul, Minnesota. The FMFP Twin Cities conference will be about imagining educational possibilities— ensuring a vibrant youth presence, honoring the region’s deep Indigenous heritage, and centering transnational and multiple communities of color. Minnesota occupies Dakota and Anishanabek land. It has been and become home to many Indigenous peoples. The conference will take place on sacred and stolen Dakota land, where communities continue to fight each day for survival. Indigenous justice and land rights are a core component of the educational struggle that confronts us.

The often untold Minnesotan history of resistance, yesterday and today, will deeply shape the conference landscape. The 2019 Free Minds, Free People Conference will build from the amazing gathering in Baltimore (2017) to envision a different way of doing/being educational freedom work. As the conference has always done, we will bring multiple communities together building new possibilities, uniting us toward the education we deserve. In 2019 we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the African & African American Studies department at the University of Minnesota, as many other universities across the country share similar anniversaries. An important aspect of the conference will explore the state of ethnic studies nationally from Pre-K through Ph.D., in an effort to continue the legacy of those who have struggled so that we can know our rich pre-colonial heritages and honor our ongoing resistance to colonialism and imperialism. Together, we will struggle as youth, teachers, scholars, community, activists, and visionaries, and together we will fulfill the promise of education for liberation. See you in the

Twin Cities in July, 2019!

organizing structure & process In light of the global pandemic, ELN surveyed the FMFP community in spring 2020 to assess interest in having some form of conference during our regularly scheduled year (2021), or to hold off until the following year when travel would likely be more feasible. The consensus was to host a virtual event and not skip a year. A small group of planners then came together in November to figure out an approach for envisioning FMFP’s design and invited some of FMFP’s long time organizers to design FMFP 2021. After imagining different flows from a week-long to a two-week event, the organizers eventually decided on a monthlong conference. See the FMFP website for a list of some of this year’s organizers.

2021 virtual

Main Sites Whova (main platform) with Zoom & YouTube

Numbers Registration is ongoing as of this “printing.”

context The collective vision for FMFP 2021 is to welcome our community home to an energizing, love-filled space of healing, connectedness, and of necessary learning

and unlearning. This virtual gathering will include some events and activities open to the public, and some programming for a specific participants, like Young

Activists and RadPD. It is organized around four themed weeks (see graphics below). Each one is focused on an issue FMFP/ELN has done well and one it needs to more fully advance its learning and practice, and includes our regular mix of plenaries, workshops, and assemblies. Conscious of Zoom fatigue, our offerings are fewer in number. Creative community and cultural spaces will help evoke the FMFP homecoming vibe.

we carry our geographies with us, honoring the ancestral lands of the Indigenous people where planners & participants live

We open by honoring the Indigenous people on whose ancestral lands the Free Minds Free People community has previously gathered — the Potawatomi, Miami & Illinois (Chicago 2007, 2013); Karankawa, Sana, Atakapa-Ishak, and Coahuiltecan (Houston 2009); Narragansett (Providence 2011); Ohlone (Bay Area, 2015); Piscataway (Baltimore 2017);and Ojibwe, Dakota and Sioux (Minneapolis 2019). And we honor those lands from which this year’s planners and participants are joining. We welcome people of all ages and from all racial, ethnic, religious, and national backgrounds, those who are LGTBQIA2s+, those whose gender is fluid or who live outside of any binary or gender label, those whose first language is other than English, and those who are living with disabilities, visible or unseen. We welcome people who are most affected by mis-education, undereducation, school pushout, school-based surveillance, culturallyirrelevant curriculum and other forms of educational injustice, particularly BIPOC youth. We welcome parents, K-12 teachers, activists and organizers, and people working in higher education impacted by and/or working for education liberation. We welcome and honor our ancestors and living guides from whom we marshal wisdom, direction and strength.

Áṣẹ

Free Minds Free People 2021 is a homecoming, a space for our community to gather as we do every two years for self- and collective expression, and for growing in liberation and love. In this moment of a global pandemic and relentless racialized violence, our need for healing and connectedness is all the more vital, as is the necessity that we unlearn ideas and ways of being that undermine our liberation. Where every two years FMFP is hosted in a different city with the local organizers curating our place-based experience, this year’s virtual space means we bring our geographies with us— our multiple, intersectional identities and the places that shape them.

The Planning Committee spent time asking ourselves, what is the opportunity of gathering virtually? What can we create newly or differently that we might not do so in person? For one, we could make it longer and more leisurely, allowing folx to pop in and out as little or as much as they like. With a bigger window, we could also have more than one theme for the conference. We eventually decided on four intersectional themes that paired a strength of FMFP and Education for Liberation Network with an area we are working to strengthen, to better show up for and push conversations forward into more evolved understandings.

Although we will be physically distant, we trust FMFP continues to be a space for social deepening. Between the heady dialogue in workshops and plenaries, make sure to take in those spaces designed to feed our spirits and free our bodies. Please also take a moment to read our Community of Care Statement (on the FMFP website) written to anchor our emphasis on being in right relationship with each other.

In love and solidarity, The FMFP Planning Team 45

Build Our World

Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear

her breathing.– Arundhati Roy

12 Years Free! included an artmaking activity to engage participants in freedom dreaming. They used markers and fabric to create a strip for a communal liberation line. The strips were later sewn together into several larger pieces, which are pictured on the next few pages.