Honoring the Complexity of Our Own Real Lives:
The Seventh Annual Retreat for Disability Activists and Allies
This annual retreat provides a space for community building, dialogue, and shared reflection among disability activists and allies who have experienced the radical and transforming power of the Disability Rights Movement. We gather to share our stories and renew our spirits, to connect with community and celebrate our pride.
In this year's retreat, we explore the practice of honoring complexity as a powerful path to sustaining and grounding our activism. Through storytelling, creative writing, music, meditation, laughter and deep listening, we will cultivate a loving compassion that allows us to explore the complexities of our own experience and open our hearts to others. We will investigate our own relationships with our bodies, our sense of sexuality and spirituality, as well as the array of interwoven personal and political identities that shape our lives.
Alongside this inward journey, we will also reflect on ways to more effectively honor complexity through our activism. Despite a larger political climate that fosters fragmentation and often keeps us disconnected from one another, we affirm the profound interconnections between disability communities and other communities resisting oppression. Together, we will share resources and strategies to help frame the Disability Rights Movement as part of a broad effort for justice and liberation.
In addition to exploring our theme, we will have time to enjoy the beauty of the land and to rest, relax, and be in community with disability activists and our allies who are committed to confronting ableism in themselves and the world around them.
Event is gender inclusive
Leader: Julia Watts Belser
Time: Friday, 7 pm – Sunday 1 pm
Cost: $185 ($50 deposit + $135 balance due) Scholarships available
Julia Watts Belser is an author, activist, and anti-oppression educator with a passion for disability rights. In partnership with the Hesperian Foundation, she recently co-authored A Health Handbook for Women with Disabilities, a grassroots health and advocacy manual for disabled women around the world. A strong supporter of the intersections between spirituality and social change, Julia is preparing for ordination as a rabbi and finishing her doctorate in Jewish Studies at the University of California in Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union.
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