Launching the 2022 COO Speaker Series: GROUNDED
The 2021 “Cultivating Community” Speaker Series was about the journey – reflecting on lessons learned, amplifying and uplifting partners, and imagining ways to transform and heal our communities, organizations, and ourselves to create greater equity, justice, and well-being. These six sessions highlighted a range of stories and just some of the wisdom and leadership that exists in King County and beyond.
In the first session, we looked at the journey of Communities of Opportunity (COO) and how the initiative was founded with the values and intentions to transform our region through cross-sector, community-led collaborative work focused on root causes of inequities and supporting the leadership, expertise, and strengths found within community.
In the second session, Cultivating Community Imagination: The New Economy, we heard from Evana Enabulele (Queer the Land), Tepatasi Vaina, (UTOPIA WA), and Njuguna Gishuru (People’s Economy Lab) spoke about the ways in which they are engaging with community, shifting practices, and leaning into cultural values and traditions to reimagine land ownership and local economies.
In Cultivating Community Imagination: Culture Shifts we heard from Jaimée Marsh (FEEST), Mary Kummer (Seattle Urban Native Nonprofits (SUNN)), and Ginger Kwan (Open Doors for Multicultural Families) on the ways in which they are shifting culture in their organizations, communities, and our broader region, to advance equity, anti-racist practices, and greater community self-determination.
In our fourth session, we heard stories of about abundance and shifting how philanthropy can support and invest in community in a way that promotes collaboration, healing, and joy.
And finally, the last two sessions of the 2021 Speaker Series focused on how we cultivate and grow spaces for healing — healing for individuals, healing within community, and healing as a cultural practice – and cultivating space for imagining new and different futures and possibilities for community transformation and what is needed to sustain and support that work and visioning.
We now invite you to join us for the 2022 GROUNDED Speaker Series, a free, online event series that moves from cultivating to grounding, and from storytelling to conversations on implementation and how groups and organizations have moved forward with their visions to action and outcome.
The GROUNDED Speakers Series is designed to learn from the efforts of community-driven programs, projects, initiatives, and organizations. This 5-part series will share the “how to” of how organizations are:
June 16, 12-1:30pm: Contributing to community building and transformation. How places of worship transformed into places of access and resources during the course of the pandemic, and how these places transforming their role in communities.
July 21, 12-1:30pm: Reclaiming and making of home in the age of displacement. How organizations are strategizing to reclaim and reconnect to land, space and community in the face of gentrification and displacement.
August 18, 12-1:30pm: Creating a culture for youth to lead. How adults are stepping aside, and alongside youth in support of youth leadership and ownership of transformative organizing work. How local organizations are creating a culture for youth to lead.
September 15, 12-1:30pm: Creating equitable budgets. Abundance is possible and local organizations and coalitions are shifting their practices and narratives, in order to support larger transformations towards abundance and away from scarcity models and cultures. Learn from presenters how to create equitable and sustainable budgets that are rooted in race equity principles.
October 20, 12-1:30pm: Centering our voices in our stories. Being able to tell our stories, in our words, is incredibly powerful. Join to learn how others are using their voices in crafting and uplifting their own stories.