The Resilient Activist JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) Book Club

Are you interested in learning more about justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) in America with a group of like-minded and open-hearted people?

Do you enjoy reading and discussing books that expand your understanding of yourself and the world?

If these questions touch a chord, then The Resilient Activist JEDI Book Club is for you!

For the May 17th JEDI Book Club, we are excited to be reading two books by Asian American authors, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning by Cathy Park Hong and Prairie Lotus by Linda Sue Park.

Register at this link.

Please feel welcome to attend, even if you missed earlier meetings. This is an open group, and we understand that our lives are busy and not everyone will be able to attend each month!

The JEDI Book Club is facilitated by Resilient Activists Brenda Bennett-Pike and Anne Melia. We hope you will join us!

The Resilient Activist JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) Book Club

Are you interested in learning more about justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) in America with a group of like-minded and open-hearted people?

Do you enjoy reading and discussing books that expand your understanding of yourself and the world?

If these questions touch a chord, then The Resilient Activist JEDI Book Club is for you!

For the June JEDI Book Club, we will be reading, Poet Warrior by Joy Harjo.

Below is a review of the book by Goodreads:

Poet Laureate Joy Harjo offers a vivid, lyrical, and inspiring call for love and justice in this contemplation of her trailblazing life.

In the second memoir from the first Native American to serve as US poet laureate, Joy Harjo invites us to travel along the heartaches, losses, and humble realizations of her “poet-warrior” road. A musical, kaleidoscopic meditation, Poet Warrior reveals how Harjo came to write poetry of compassion and healing, poetry with the power to unearth the truth and demand justice.

Register at this link.

Please feel welcome to attend, even if you missed earlier meetings. This is an open group, and we understand that our lives are busy and not everyone will be able to attend each month!

The JEDI Book Club is facilitated by Resilient Activists Brenda Bennett-Pike and Anne Melia. We hope you will join us!

The Resilient Activist JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) Book Club

Are you interested in learning more about justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) in America with a group of like-minded and open-hearted people?

Do you enjoy reading and discussing books that expand your understanding of yourself and the world?

If these questions touch a chord, then The Resilient Activist JEDI Book Club is for you!

For the July JEDI Book Club, we will be reading, “On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous“ by Ocean Vuong.

Below is a review of the book by Goodreads:

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one’s own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard.

Register at this link.

Please feel welcome to attend, even if you missed earlier meetings. This is an open group, and we understand that our lives are busy and not everyone will be able to attend each month!

The JEDI Book Club is facilitated by Resilient Activists Brenda Bennett-Pike and Anne Melia. We hope you will join us!

The Resilient Activist JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) Book Club

Are you interested in learning more about justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) in America with a group of like-minded and open-hearted people?

Do you enjoy reading and discussing books that expand your understanding of yourself and the world?

If these questions touch a chord, then The Resilient Activist JEDI Book Club is for you!

For our August JEDI Book Club we will be reading, You Are Your Best Thing, Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience, an anthology co-created by Tarana Burke and Brené Brown.

Here is a blurb about the book from Brené’s website.

This anthology is a space to recognize and process the trauma of white supremacy, a space to be vulnerable and affirm the fullness of Black life and Black possibility, a space that gives Black humanity breathing room. Featuring essays by Jason Reynolds, Austin Channing Brown, Tanya Denise Fields, Kiese Makeba Laymon, Prentis Hemphill, Tracey Michae’l Lewis-Giggetts, Marc Lamont Hill, Keah Brown, Luvvie Ajayi Jones, Shawn A. Ginwright, Kaia Naadira, Deran Young, Sonya Renee Taylor, Irene Antonia Diane Reece, Yolo Akili Robinson, Laverne Cox, Jessica J. Williams, Aiko D. Bethea, and Imani Perry.

Learn more.

Register at this link.

Please feel welcome to attend, even if you missed earlier meetings. This is an open group, and we understand that our lives are busy and not everyone will be able to attend each month!

The JEDI Book Club is facilitated by Resilient Activists Brenda Bennett-Pike and Anne Melia. We hope you will join us!

The Resilient Activist JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) Book Club

Are you interested in learning more about justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) in America with a group of like-minded and open-hearted people?

Do you enjoy reading and discussing books that expand your understanding of yourself and the world?

If these questions touch a chord, then The Resilient Activist JEDI Book Club is for you!

For our September JEDI Book Club, we will be reading James Baldwin’s, Go Tell it On the Mountain. Below is a summary of the book provided by Goodreads:

Go Tell It On The Mountain, first published in 1953, is Baldwin’s first major work, a semi-autobiographical novel that has established itself as an American classic. With lyrical precision, psychological directness, resonating symbolic power, and a rage that is at once unrelenting and compassionate, Baldwin chronicles a fourteen-year-old boy’s discovery of the terms of his identity as the stepson of the minister of a storefront Pentecostal church in Harlem one Saturday in March of 1935. Baldwin’s rendering of his protagonist’s spiritual, sexual, and moral struggle of self-invention opened new possibilities in the American language and in the way Americans understand themselves.

Learn more.

Register at this link.

Please feel welcome to attend, even if you missed earlier meetings. This is an open group, and we understand that our lives are busy and not everyone will be able to attend each month!

The JEDI Book Club is facilitated by Resilient Activists Brenda Bennett-Pike and Anne Melia. We hope you will join us!

The Resilient Activist JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) Book Club

Are you interested in learning more about justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) in America with a group of like-minded and open-hearted people?

Do you enjoy reading and discussing books that expand your understanding of yourself and the world?

If these questions touch a chord, then The Resilient Activist JEDI Book Club is for you!

For our October JEDI Book Club, we will be reading: The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After 
by Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil

Here is the review from Goodreads:

A riveting story of dislocation, survival, and the power of the imagination to save us.

Clemantine Wamariya was six years old when her mother and father began to speak in whispers, when neighbors began to disappear, and when she heard the loud, ugly sounds her brother said were “thunder.” It was 1994, and in 100 days more than 800,000 people would be murdered in Rwanda and millions more displaced. Clemantine and her fifteen-year-old sister, Claire, ran and spent the next six years wandering through seven African countries searching for safety–hiding under beds, foraging for food, surviving and fleeing refugee camps, finding unexpected kindness, witnessing unimaginable cruelty. They did not know whether their parents were alive.

Learn more.

Register at this link.

Please feel welcome to attend, even if you missed earlier meetings. This is an open group, and we understand that our lives are busy and not everyone will be able to attend each month!

The JEDI Book Club is facilitated by Resilient Activists Brenda Bennett-Pike and Anne Melia. We hope you will join us!

The Resilient Activist JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) Book Club

Are you interested in learning more about justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) in America with a group of like-minded and open-hearted people?

Do you enjoy reading and discussing books that expand your understanding of yourself and the world?

If these questions touch a chord, then The Resilient Activist JEDI Book Club is for you!

For our November 2022 JEDI Book Club, we will be reading The Color of Food: Stories of Race, Resilience and Farming by Natasha Bowens.

Below is a summary from the publisher, New Society.

Imagine the typical American farmer. Many people visualize sun-roughened skin, faded overalls, and calloused hands-hands that are usually white. While there’s no doubt the growing trend of organic farming and homesteading is changing how the farmer is portrayed in mainstream media, farmers of color are still largely left out of the picture.

The Color of Food seeks to rectify this. By recognizing the critical issues that lie at the intersection of race and food, this stunning collection of portraits and stories challenges the status quo of agrarian identity. Author, photographer and biracial farmer Natasha Bowens’ quest to explore her own roots in the soil leads her to unearth a larger story, weaving together the seemingly forgotten history of agriculture for people of color, the issues they face today, and the culture and resilience they bring to food and farming.

The Color of Food teaches us that the food and farm movement is about more than buying local and protecting our soil. It is about preserving culture and community, digging deeply into the places we’ve overlooked, and honoring those who have come before us. Blending storytelling, photography, oral history, and unique insight, these pages remind us that true food sovereignty means a place at the table for everyone.

About the Author

Natasha Bowens is an author, farmer, and political activist whose advocacy focuses on food sovereignty and social issues. As a young biracial woman in today’s agricultural movement, she is dedicated to honoring, preserving, and amplifying the stories of Black, Native, Asian and Latino farmers and food activists. Her multimedia project The Color of Food evolved from her work exploring the intersection of race and agriculture for Grist magazine, and from her blog Brown.Girl.Farming, where she writes about issues related to racial inequality, food sovereignty, and resilience. Natasha has interviewed and photographed over 65 North American farmers of color; her work has garnered her national media attention, and she has been featured on CNN, The Atlantic, and Colorlines.

https://newsociety.com/products/9780865717893

Register at this link.

Please feel welcome to attend, even if you missed earlier meetings. This is an open group, and we understand that our lives are busy and not everyone will be able to attend each month!

The JEDI Book Club is facilitated by Resilient Activists Brenda Bennett-Pike and Anne Melia. We hope you will join us!

The Resilient Activist JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) Book Club

Are you interested in learning more about justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) in America with a group of like-minded and open-hearted people?

Do you enjoy reading and discussing books that expand your understanding of yourself and the world?

If these questions touch a chord, then The Resilient Activist JEDI Book Club is for you!

For our November 2022 JEDI Book Club, we will be reading Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis by Amitav Ghosh.

Below is a summary from Goodreads:

In this ambitious successor to The Great Derangement, acclaimed writer Amitav Ghosh finds the origins of our contemporary climate crisis in Western colonialism’s violent exploitation of human life and the natural environment.

A powerful work of history, essay, testimony, and polemic, Amitav Ghosh’s new book traces our contemporary planetary crisis back to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean. The Nutmeg’s Curse argues that the dynamics of climate change today are rooted in a centuries-old geopolitical order constructed by Western colonialism. At the center of Ghosh’s narrative is the now-ubiquitous spice nutmeg. The history of the nutmeg is one of conquest and exploitation—of both human life and the natural environment. In Ghosh’s hands, the story of the nutmeg becomes a parable for our environmental crisis, revealing the ways human history has always been entangled with earthly materials such as spices, tea, sugarcane, opium, and fossil fuels. Our crisis, he shows, is ultimately the result of a mechanistic view of the earth, where nature exists only as a resource for humans to use for our own ends, rather than a force of its own, full of agency and meaning.

Writing against the backdrop of the global pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, Ghosh frames these historical stories in a way that connects our shared colonial histories with the deep inequality we see around us today. By interweaving discussions on everything from the global history of the oil trade to the migrant crisis and the animist spirituality of Indigenous communities around the world, The Nutmeg’s Curse offers a sharp critique of Western society and speaks to the profoundly remarkable ways in which human history is shaped by non-human forces.

Register at this link.

Please feel welcome to attend, even if you missed earlier meetings. This is an open group, and we understand that our lives are busy and not everyone will be able to attend each month!

The JEDI Book Club is facilitated by Resilient Activists Brenda Bennett-Pike and Anne Melia. We hope you will join us!

The Resilient Activist JEDI (Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion) Book Club

Are you interested in learning more about justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) in America with a group of like-minded and open-hearted people?

Do you enjoy reading and discussing books that expand your understanding of yourself and the world?

If these questions touch a chord, then The Resilient Activist JEDI Book Club is for you!

For the January 2023 JEDI Book Club, we will be reading Caste, The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson.

Below is a summary of the book from Goodreads:

The Pulitzer Prize–winning, bestselling author of The Warmth of Other Suns examines the unspoken caste system that has shaped America and shows how our lives today are still defined by a hierarchy of human divisions.

“As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power—which groups have it and which do not.”

In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.

Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.

Register at this link.

Please feel welcome to attend, even if you missed earlier meetings. This is an open group, and we understand that our lives are busy and not everyone will be able to attend each month!

The JEDI Book Club is facilitated by Resilient Activists Brenda Bennett-Pike and Anne Melia. We hope you will join us!

The Resilient Activist’s

Climate Café

Support as we Navigate Climate Change

April 25, 2022

Open Mic for Storytelling, Poetry, and Song

Fourth Tuesday of each month

6:00-8:00 pm Central

Hosted on our Mighty Networks Online Community via Zoom

This joyous meeting will be for the opening of our voices to each other through storytelling, poetry, and song (voice or instruments).

This meeting will last 2 hours instead of the normal hour and a half. Everyone will have time to share at least 1-2 original pieces (or more!), depending on time. You also are welcome to simply come and listen.

We are excited to express our creativity this month and sing joyously for the coming of spring!

Guidelines for Climate Café Open Mic

• Take risks. There is no judgment here.
• We will have time for reflection and conversation after each performance.
• We will popcorn from act to act and once everyone has performed, we will have another chance for more to be shared.
• We are respectful of others’ unique voices.
• We listen and are interested in each other’s views, and we don’t try to impose our own.
• Silence is fine. Performance is not required.
• Tears and all emotions have a place.
• Performances are not recorded.

This is your best opportunity to connect with a community that gets you, with folks who are experiencing many of the emotions that climate change has brought out in your heart and mind.

There is nothing for you to commit to except to gather your prepared piece, find a comfortable spot with your Zoom window open, and just be you. We can’t wait to share and connect with you.