Baobab Abolitionist Coalition Juneteenth Event

Who we are: Baobab Abolitionist Coalition

Baobab Abolitionist Coalition organizes communities to liberate folks from the sunken place. Leading with an audaciously Black voice, we provoke people to interrupt anti-Blackness and support thriving across the Black diaspora through power mapping and a holistic grassroots approach.

The Event: Our goal is to create a welcoming and warm virtual space for Black people in the Pacific Northwest to gather for Juneteenth 2021 and celebrate our Blackness - with food and community. This event is intended to promote resilience, healing, and joy in addition to providing direct aid to attendees. 

Want to hear more? The program will consist of a welcoming ceremony with a land and human rights acknowledgement and a brief awards ceremony recognizing leaders in the movement for Black liberation. Participants will then have the opportunity to go into break-out rooms of their choice  with workshops that are dedicated to: Healing + Joy, Unpacking White Supremacy, and Eradicating White Supremacy. The overall goal of this event is to provide space specifically for Black folks to heal from their trauma and develop strategies to address white supremacy. These strategies can range from attending an inclusive, trauma-informed Yoga class to addressing the ways that Black artists and designers face limitations to their creativity, depending on the workshop that participants  choose to attend.

Black youth and young people, Black femmes, Black trans folks and Black women are core community groups who are often further marginalized due to misogynistic, transphobic, and anti-Black socio-economic structures that play a role in determining their access to resources, opportunities, and support. We are centering folks from these marginalized backgrounds in our program to allow space for them to share their leadership, and hold space to share information, lead unapologetically and offer best practices for all Black attendees to be gifted with the opportunity of centering inclusive efforts that embody all Black identities and not just a select few.

Following the event, we will ask for feedback from attendees and use this information to create future programming. We will also provide a link where people can submit their information if they are interested in becoming members of the Baobab Abolitionist Coalition and attending similar events in the future. 

We are so excited to share this opportunity to directly support our work! We know that you care about Black liberation and invite you to contribute generously.

Date: June 19th 2020 (for those interested in attending, Save the Date please!)

Location: Zoom

Time: 11 am to 1pm, PST

Theme: All About Our Blackness

Our Funding Goal: We are asking our communities for $15,000 in order to make this event a reality! Funding will support direct aid for attendees, gift certificates for meals (we said there would be food!), honorariums for folks leading spaces or performing, and payment for services rendered.

Funds are appreciated as soon as possible-- we are hoping to reach our goal of $15,000  by June 9th, 2021 in order to finalize planning. 

Any additional funds raised will be used for operational costs for BAC throughout the year.

In liberation, 

The Baobab Abolitionist Coalition Advisory Council