You're Invited to
CROSSPOLLINATION 2024
A We Rise Production Activate Oakland event series sponsored by the City of Oakland & Radically Fit
located in the gym & cul de sac at Radically Fit 1035 22nd Avenue, Unit 5, Oakland
We Rise Production invites you to our first-ever series of free, family friendly, and open to the public, seasonal block parties & community dialogues. Each block party will focus on one theme, and will contain the following elements:
– A speakers panel & community dialogue
– Tabling from local businesses and organizations
– A community art project
– Local food
– A raffle, including offerings or services from local QTBIPOC (queer trans Black, Indigenous, & people of color) small businesses & wellness workers
Please RSVP to our Summer, August 3rd event so we may better support our guests!
Our themes will deepen into an exploration of how WE TAKE CARE OF US.
We Take Care of Us is a phrase that comes out of BIPOC-led community spaces dedicated to the practice of mutual aid & abolition as a strategy for long-term collective wellbeing. We use this phrase intentionally to lift up & carry forward this invitation in our own communities as we crosspollinate.
Conditions of Safety: Emergent Orgs for the People
Winter, March 23, 2024
Diasporic Care: We Show Up for Each Other
Spring, June 8, 2024
Roots of Justice: Protecting the Land, Protecting the People
Summer, August 3, 2024
Our final iteration of the series is Roots of Justice: Protecting the Land, Protecting the People. Join us as we dive into climate justice, food sovereignty, QTBIPOC land stewardship, rematriation, & relationship to land.
These in-person events aims to strengthen and deepen existing connections and initiate new ones, after the changing culture and community landscape Oakland experienced in years of social distancing and pandemic.
We Rise Production is committed to offering free education and raising awareness on important community work and causes through live events and cultural production. Therefore, each speakers panel will be recorded and distributed on the We Rise podcast and media platforms. This series of seasonal intercommunity block parties will cultivate cross-pollination of intergenerational and intersectional identities coming together to learn about & support social justice, community safety, local businesses, & celebrate our artistic abundance.
Accessibility Information
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This is a masks on indoors event. We encourage folks to wear masks in crowded areas outdoors.
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Two ADA accessible bathrooms are on the ground floor of Radically Fit.
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Sidewalk has steep ramps
Support our work!
If you are interested in sponsoring our Crosspollination series please review our Sponsor Crosspollination guidelines.
Roots of Justice: Protecting The Land, Protecting The People
Summer • Saturday August 3, 2024 • 12PM - 4PM
12:15PM Opening Circle
1PM - 2PM Speakers Panel
We would love to see you at our last Crosspollination block party of the year!
Nourishment for our community includes food from our neighbors Carrie Dove Catering - thank you for your support & sponsorship! Food is free for our attendees! There are many ways to support this work, learn how you can become a sponsor of Crosspollination.
Stay tuned for updates on special guests, organizations and vendors who will join us.
We are honored to have Dr. Rupa Marya of Deep Medicine Circle join us to moderate the panel. She’ll be joined by Layel Camargo of Shelterwood Collective, AniyaButler of Youth VS Apocalypse, & Andrew Yeung from Mycelium Youth Network.
Read more about our inspiring line up of guests...
Dr. Rupa Marya is a physician, activist, writer, mother, and a composer. She is a Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and a co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition. Her work sits at the nexus of climate, health and racial justice. She is the co-author with Raj Patel of the book Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice. She works to decolonize food and medicine in partnership with communities in Lakhota territory at the Mni Wiconi Health Circle and in Ohlone Territory through the Deep Medicine Circle. She has toured twenty-nine countries with her band, Rupa and the April Fishes, whose music was described by the legend Gil Scott-Heron as “Liberation Music.”
A women-of-color-led, collaborative 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofit organization dedicated to repairing critical relationships that have been fractured through colonialism. Starting from a place of correcting relationships between Indigenous and Diasporic peoples, Deep Medicine Circle cultivates a culture of care to support the health & healing of people & communities of plants & animals which are critical for our survival & thriving.
A collective of farmers, elders, physicians, healers, herbalists, ecological designers, scholars, political ecologists, movement workers, educators, youth, storytellers and artists. We adhere to earth-based, ecofeminist principles of organizing, with participatory circles of decision-making. We understand the existential threat of climate change as the end-stage of colonial capitalist destruction, and we innovate structural solutions based in cosmologies that can heal ruptured relationships of people to one another and of people to the web of life. We support Indigenous communities in their processes of healing through facilitating land return, acknowledging their sovereignty and advancing practices that bring communities together in shared learning. We create opportunities for other groups marginalized through colonial structures to partner in this work while advancing structural solutions for health and vitality.
Aniya Butler is an 18 years old spoken word poet, environmental justice, and youth organizer. She organizes with Youth Vs Apocalypse as a cultural and relational strategist directing the Hip Hop & Climate Justice Initiative and coordinates the No One Is Disposable action planning team. Through poetry, hip hop, and organizing, Aniya aims to shift what environmental Justice means to frontline communities, engage youth in the movement for collective liberation, and rebuild a world with foundations of sustainability, equity, and love so that every living thing can truly thrive.
Co-Founder & Cultural Strategy Lead
of Shelterwood Collective
Layel (they/them) is Yaqui and Mayo of the Sonoran Desert born on the ancestral lands of the Kumayaay. As a transgender and gender non-conforming person, they've dedicated the last decade advancing climate justice through storytelling, cultural strategy and art making by creating campaigns like Climate Woke with The Center For Cultural Power and supporting media projects like The North Pole Show with Executive Producers Rosario Dawson and Movement Generation, Justice and Ecology Project. They are the producer and host of Did We Go Too Far?, a climate justice podcast with Movement Generation. Most recently, Layel was named on the Grist 2020 Fixers List, and co-awarded a Humanitarian Award by the international association of sufism. They graduated from UC Santa Cruz with degrees in Feminist Studies and Legal Studies.
Layel Camargo
Andrew Yeung (he/they) is a community-based educator and organizer learning and laboring at the intersections of gender, race, class; power, violence, hegemony; and education as freedom struggle. Andrew was born in San Gabriel, California – the unceded territories of Kizh and Tongva peoples – and raised by East Asian working class immigrant parents. They now work to be a good guest and neighbor on unceded Lisjan Ohlone land. For over ten years, Andrew has labored to de-center and dismantle the school-prison nexus; to co-create, mentor, and steward the agency and emancipatory spirit of Black, Indigenous, youth of color; and alongside youth leaders, reclaim the dignity of education as a practice of freedom. They are particularly engaged with youth power building as means of rupture against economies of violence and extraction. Andrew also labors as a core organizer with Teachers for Social Justice and co-leads a neighborhood mutual aid project. In previous capacities, Andrew has served as a writing mentor with the Asian Prisoner Support Committee, the board secretary of Richmond LAND, and as Economic Justice Program Manager at the RYSE Youth Center. He is also a retired punk (for now), polite anarchist, and wikipedia enthusiast.
Roots of Justice Cultural Performers
Nikbo
Third Culture Kid who makes Third Culture Pop
Nikbo (she/they) belongs to a diaspora of caregivers, meal sharers, plant whisperers, artists, and organizers. She makes music to reflect our collective wisdom and stories. Supporters and fans can find links to their work and receive invitations to community events at NikboMusic.com.
Sam
Cultural Worker & Member of GABRIELA OAKLAND
Sam is a member of GABRIELA Oakland. She is a daughter of Ilokano matriarchs. As a cultural worker for the National Democratic Movement, she strives to make and share music that inspires, consoles, and especially activates the propagandists in all of us.
Listen to
We Rise podcast episode 50: Crosspollination | Diasporic Care, Part One
We Rise podcast episode 51: Crosspollination | We Show Up For Each Other, Part Two
Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, & Spreaker • Transcripts coming soon!
Diasporic Care: We Show Up For Each Other
Spring • Saturday June 8, 2024 • 12PM - 4PM
12:15PM Opening Circle with Dr. Uzo Nwankpa
1:30PM - 2:30PM Speakers Panel
How do we take care of us? What practices sustain us in these challenging times?
What wisdoms are we drawing from to strengthen each other & our movements? How are we engaging in a diversity of tactics? For many of us, as we show up for each other here in Huchiun, we are also caring for our communities in our motherlands. We know all land is connected, all waters are connected. Like seeds, we know the power of diaspora, the potency of biodiversity to nourish & create liberatory ecosystems, never forgetting where we come from. From Huchiun to Palestine, from the Philippines to Mexico, we honor our interconnectedness across borders.
Nourishment for our community includes food from Reems, Cafe Gabriela, and Arizmendi - thank you for your support & sponsorship! Food is free for our attendees!
Artists & organizations tabling offered mutual aid opportunities to directly support Palestinian families in Gaza as well as uplift calls to action & support the indigenous Lumad in the islands known as the Philippines.
Photos of this event were taken by Stephen Flynn Photography, thank you so much!
Community came out to witness live artwork for the people by Melanie Cervantez and Jesus Barraza Dignidad Rebelde and a speakers panel featuring local leaders...
Ant Lorenzo is an artist and organizer from Los Angeles, California (unceded Tongva Land) and is currently based in Oakland, California (Ohlone Land). Since 2021, they have acted as the Chair of the US-based chapter of Liyang Network, after helping to cofound the Southern California regional committee in 2020. Ant completed a MFA in Environmental Art and Social Practice at UCSC in June 2024, before moving to the Oakland. In the inexorably interconnected spaces of our globalized contemporary, their practice begins and ends in contemporary grassroots movements and internationalist struggles.
Liyang Network s a local to global advocacy network that amplifies the calls to action of grassroots communities in the Philippines. Liyang started in the Philippines at the request of Lumad indigenous communities in Mindanao who wanted a network to bring together their allies from the Philippines and beyond to help promote their calls to action. In 2020, Liyang expanded their advocacy work to include land & environmental defenders & other grassroots communities throughout the country.
Lubna Morrar was born and raised in the Bay Area, has been organizing since forever for a free Palestine. Born to parents from Palestine via Venezuela, she organized with GUPS at San Francisco State University, Palestinian Youth Movement, and now the Palestinian Feminist Collective. She has trained new generation of Palestinian youth to take the helm towards a new awakening of the movement to free the lands. She is a poet, artist, and business owner.
Organizer & Core Member
of ASATA - Alliance of South Asians Taking Action
Mansi has worked across social movements for the last decade, working as an organizer across political, labor, and community organizations. They’re committed to global justice, anti-war, and anti-facsist organizing, including fighting Hindutva. Mansi is founder of Chicago South Asians for Justice and a core member of ASATA - the Alliance of South Asians Taking Action.They currently work as a field strategy and research analyst at the Othering and Belonging Institute.
After nearly a decade in Chicago, Mansi moved to Oakland in 2020 to pursue a masters in public policy at Berkeley. You can find them reading by the lake, at a queer dance party, or cooking up something new in their kitchen.
Mansi
Jesse Strauss is an abolitionist and anti-zionist Jewish organizer with the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN) in the Bay Area. He works as a journalist at the country's longest running-free speech radio station, KPFA, where he co-created the first-ever daily abolitionist radio program called Law & Disorder. He is the grandchild of survivors of the Nazi holocaust in Poland. Jesse was born and raised in Oakland, and graduated from The Evergreen State College and then the University of Amsterdam before working at Al Jazeera English in Qatar during the so-called 'Arab Spring'. Jesse is also a professional musician as well as a parent to a loving dog named Bamboo.
Jesse Strauss
Abolitionist & Anti-Zionist Jewish Organizer with the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN)
Mira Stern
Educator & Advocate for Justice with
Jewish Voice For Peace
Mira Stern is a queer white Jew born and raised in San Francisco, and currently living in Oakland as a settler on Chochenyo Ohlone land with her partner and daughter. She is an educator and advocate for justice, focusing on developing white antiracist consciousness and capacity for change. Mira consults with tech companies, organizations, and school systems to develop equity strategies for long-term impact, rooted in racial justice and community building. Her work in the Jewish community is centered on anti-Zionist organizing and rerooting in ancestral values pre-whiteness. Mira is also a longtime theater actor who made a recent transition to build a screen career, where she aims to fuse her social justice politics with content that pushes humanity forward. Mira recently co-founded a women and femme-run creative collective, focusing on comedic social justice content production.
Sarah O’Neal is a queer Moroccan, Black, and Muslim artist and writer born and raised in the Bay Area. Sarah’s work grapples with the impact of colonial violence on familial memory and the way systems of oppression shape the most intimate detail of our lives. Sarah’s debut collection, Even Two Hands Pressed Together Are Split, brought together poetry, photography, and ephemera to create an immersive experience for readers to explore the way embodied trauma shapes all of our relationships. Her writing has been featured in the Institute for Palestine Studies, The Nation, and Teen Vogue. When she is not writing, you can find her scheming on the end of empire, swimming laps, or on IG and Twitter @atayqueen.
Sarah O'Neal
Artist & Writer
Diasporic Care Cultural Artists
Melanie Cervantes is a Xicanx cultural worker whose work attempts to translate the hopes and dreams of social justice movements into images that agitate and inspire. Jesus Barraza is an interdisciplinary artist, lecturer in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, and member of Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative and the Consejo Gráfico de Talleres (Graphics Council of Workshops), a network of artist run print shops dedicated to advancing Latinx printmaking in the United States.Together Cervantes and Barraza founded the San Leandro based collaborative Dignidad Rebelde (Est. 2007). Following principles of Xicanisma and Zapatismo, they create work that amplifies people’s stories and to create art that can be put back into the hands of the communities who inspire it. In this spirit of collaboration among artists, they are also members of the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, and the Consejo Gráfico.