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Twin Cities Innovation Alliance (with co-founder Marika Pfefferkorn, an EdLibMN organizer) is hosting the Data 4 Public Good event at Macalester College, November 2-3, 2023.

We’re excited to attend the first in-person FMFP conference since the 2019 Twin Cities FMFP!

The Let’s Get Free Saturdays consisted of five Saturdays in July of intergenerational liberatory educational programs in July 2023. The goal was to create spaces to teach, learn, exchange ideas and strategies, and develop networks. 

CHECK OUT A PLAYLIST OF RECAP VIDEOS FROM LET’S GET FREE SATURDAYS!

July 1: Healing

It was amazing to be a part of a community sharing their gifts and talents. We engaged in deeper dialogue around liberatory education as we moved our bodies, participated in artistic endeavors such as singing, and broke bread together. We thank Black Youth Healing Arts Center for hosting us!

July 8 2023: Advocacy & Agitation

We learned about the practices of community, sharing, and intergenerational learning through a workshop on Capoeira Angola and engaged with ideas about how to parent against white supremacy. Thank you to Sabathani Community Center for giving us a space!

July 15, 2023: Cultural Traditions & Resistance

We looked to our past cultural traditions to learn about how we have and continue to resist! We’d like to thank Academia Caesar Chavez for collaborating with us for a successful day.

July 22, 2023: Justice & Solidarity

We reflected on the themes of justice and solidarity through movement, writing, and play! We thank the Minnesota Humanities Center for hosting us.

July 29, 2023: Land & Kinship

We learned about the Philadelphia Community Farm’s philosophy that distinguishes between land conservation, land access, and land back. We learned about indigenous agricultural practices. For many of us, being out in nature helped us reframe our notions of safety and community. We learned about the possibilities and challenges of flat leadership models. We learned about the farm’s practices to sustain life, land, and interdependence. We would like to thank the farm for their ongoing collaborations with EdLibMN.

The internal political education committee hosted a hybrid book talk by the three co-authors of The School-Prison Trust, a book that explores the relationship of school-prison relations for young Native people, touching on important issues of Indigenous sovereignty, refusal, creativity, and survivance. The authors’ distinction between resistance (which still entails recognition from the settler-colonial nation-state) and refusal (which is about refusing the terms of the debate and asserting sovereignty) gave us a framework for analyzing the kind of work that we do as EdLibMN and which category our work might fit into. 

Link to book talk video

As the kickoff event for the internal political education committee, EdLibMN organizers and members attended a talk by Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly titled “The ‘Late’ W.E.B. Du Bois and the Practice of Mutual Comradeship” at the University of St. Thomas. In a discussion following the talk, we discussed how the concept of mutual comradeship informed the work of EdLibMN as a space with a shared political analysis, shared expectations, and shared political goals for education.

The EdLibMN organizing crew spent a weekend at Philadelphia Community Farm reflecting on their work for the past two years and planning for the next year. We decided that we wanted to pursue a few different projects for the year and have created three committees to do so: (1) community healing/kinship building, (2) internal political education, and (3) political education with/for the broader community.

In May 2022, we celebrated the end of the second cohort of the BIPOC Ethnic Studies Cohort with a gathering at Minnehaha Park. In our second year of the cohort, we learned from outside speakers and artists such as Thomasina Topbear, Ricardo Levins Morales, Keith Mayes, Sydney Latimer and Leigh Patel. We also learned from our youth cohort members, Amina Smaller and Shaunassey Johnson, about Youth Participatory Action Research, and about critical art from Nic Salazar. The cohort members worked in small groups to focus on the intersections of Ethnic Studies and (1) curriculum, (2) pedagogy, (3) self/community care, (4) creative resistance, (5) policy, and (6) grassroots organizing.

On Saturday, October 16, 2021, the new cohort of the BIPOC Ethnic Studies learning/mentoring cohort kicked off their year of work together by attending the Learning from Place: Bdote trip through the Minnesota Humanities Center. The group learned about Dakota history, philosophy, and contemporary life from Dakota educators, Ramona Kitto Statelyand Ethan Neerdaels. It was a beautiful day to be in community with those educators and with each other.

On Friday, April 30th, EdLib MN hosted a public event that focused on centering social justice in labor education movements. We heard from Jesse Hagopian, co-editor of Social Justice and Teachers’ Unions, and Robin Wonsley Worlobah, who is in the running to be Minneapolis’ first Black Socialist City Council member.