People of the Global South (Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific Islands) are on the frontlines of the climate crisis. As part of celebrating 50 years of Earth Week, this workshop will create space for young people of color to come together and support each other to heal from the ways the climate crisis is impacting us and our people back home.

We will remember the brilliant ways our people work together in cooperation and harmony with each other and the natural world, precontact and before colonization. We’ll imagine how we want the world to be and our role in it. Drawing inspiration from our cultures, we’ll use art to express our vision for the world that we actually want and need in this moment. We will think about how to share our art via social media and how to tag (e.g. #DecolonizeElmhurst #DecapitalizeElmhurst) the posts to draw attention to the local and global issues we care about. We will invite participants to continue to create art with us over the next week that we will then create a week-long social media action to draw attention to the climate crisis.

This workshop is organized by Sustaining All Life / United to End to End Racism. The co-facilitators, Ana Liza (AL) Caballes and Cecilia Lim, are Queens-based Pinay community organizers and cultural workers working with frontline communities to end the climate crisis.

RSVP/Registration is required. Once we have received your RSVP, you will receive the invitation for the online zoom link for the live event.

This event is free and open to young people and young adults who identify as Black, Indigenous and/or a person of color. We welcome 11 year-old young people up to 30 year-old young adults. Workshop attendees are encouraged to bring pencils, markers, crayons, paper, digital devices and/or other creative supplies that may support their participation in the workshop.

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Sustaining All Life (SAL) and United to End Racism (UER) are international organizations working to end the climate crisis within the context of ending all divisions among people. We have done groundwork with frontline communities in the U.S. and around the world, at United Nations climate talks (COPs) from 2015-2019, the 2018 Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco and the New York Climate Action Summit in 2019. SAL and UER are projects of and use the tools of Re-evaluation Counseling, which currently exists in 95 countries.

To learn more about our work:

Facebook: fb.com/SustainingAllLife
Twitter: @SustainAllLife
Instagram: sustaining_all_life

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THE WORK OF SUSTAINING ALL LIFE & UNITED TO END RACISM

It is possible to limit the effects of human-caused climate change and restore the environment, but some very large changes in our economy and the lives we live are needed for this to happen.

Sustaining All Life (SAL) and United to End Racism (UER) believe the environmental crisis cannot be resolved without ending racism, genocide toward Indigenous peoples, classism, sexism, and other oppressions.

We believe that the barriers to building a large and powerful movement sufficient to make the needed changes include (1) longstanding divisions (caused by oppression, and especially racism and classism) between nations and between groups of people, (2) widespread feelings of discouragement and powerlessness, (3) denial of or failure to engage with the escalating damage to the earth’s climate, and (4) difficulties in effectively addressing the connections between the environmental crisis and the failures of our economic system.

The mental and emotional harm done to us by oppression and other hurtful experiences interferes with our ability to think clearly and sets groups of people against each other. In SAL and UER we have learned that it is possible to free ourselves from these hurts and address barriers to effective organizing. By taking turns listening to each other and encouraging emotional release, people can heal from the mental and emotional harm and become better able to think, speak out, and organize and lead others in building a sustainable world.