Meeting the moment
And upcoming ways join me online over the next couple of months
“Everybody can be great because everybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.”
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Dear ones,
How are you meeting this moment?
Where are you called to serve in these times?
It feels like a treat to have the time, energy, and bandwidth to sit down with you this morning. It is a full, abundant time - the end of the academic year, and I am teaching (strategic nonviolent resistance class). I am stretched and trying to honor my rhythms during this intense period of output, mindful of what I have to give, but also wanting to give as much as I can without overextending and burning out.
At the beginning of the year, in my foundations class lecture on living and loving the questions, I invited students to share the question that brought them to UPEACE, and I have kept these questions on my office altar all year. Many students come with some variation of the question of, “How can I serve?” and an intention of figuring out how to best contribute to the world and their communities. Many go on to do phenomenal work around the world, and it is an inspiration and honor to be connected to their work through the UPEACE alumni network.
In tomorrow’s class on everyday resistance, we will be talking about Deepa Iyer’s social change ecosystem map and where we find ourselves in it, as a way of talking about service and contributing to social transformation. We will also look at the University of Notre Dame’s strategic peacebuilding pathways framework. (We also invite you to join us online tomorrow - more on that below!).
Where do you find yourself in the map, dear reader?
Many people I know are asking themselves these questions - what can I offer this moment? How can I best serve these times? Frameworks like these can show us how there is not one way, and we need all of us, with all of our gifts, to show up and meet this moment in the metacrisis.
In the spirit of service and offering, I wanted to share with you a few ways I am trying to meet this moment, giving what I can, and ways you can join me online over the next couple of months to learn and talk about nonviolence, peace education, world-building, and honoring the rhythms of the earth.
Join our Nonviolence Class on Monday
This coming Monday (tomorrow, as I send this out), my friends from the Metta Center for Nonviolence will be joining us for a conversation about Brazil’s Landless Worker’s Movement, which very much connects to the themes of everday resistance and world-building. You can join us too! Register here.
Critical Conversations in Peace Education: Building Solidarity and Community
On June 4th, I will be co-hosting our second call in the series Critical Conversations in Peace Education on the theme of building solidarity and community. You can watch the recording of our last call and register for the next call here.
Everyday practices for peace and nonviolence with Maryknoll Monarch
I will be giving a talk on June 12th with the Maryknoll Monarch initaitive on practices for everyday peace and nonviolence, as part of a wider series they are offering on nonviolence education and training. You can register for free here!
Solstice Celebration and Ritual
Practice making year-long magic with me and join us for this (summer/winter) solstice gathering on June 20th! This is the third in the series of honoring and attuning to the earth’s cycles and seasons, our belonging to the rhythm of the earth, and the last three calls have been incredibly potent and joyful portals. I hope you’ll join us! Register here.
World-building Workshops with Mazorca Facilitation
This summer, I am collaborating with my friends and co-conspirators Chelsea Viteri and Zia Kandler of Mazorca Facilitation on two online workshops, that are the product of months of dreaming together. We created these workshops in the hopes of offering a spacious space for spaceholders, organizers, educators, worldbuilders, or community makers who are looking to expand their creative tool kits to meet the current context.
Collective Storytelling as Worldbuilding on July 2nd and
Cultivating Spaciousness in the Cracks on July 3oth.
Chel recetly wrote a piece about Play as a Radical Practice that gives you a taste of what our collaboration and facilitation is about. As Chel writes:
In our facilitation, play is a key world-building tool. After all, play is not trivial; it can be revolutionary. It makes space for new ways of relating, being, and dreaming. It can support us in unlearning patterns of control and domination and instead cultivating curiosity, connection, and experimentation. In movements for justice, play can be a strategy, a sanctuary, and a spark. It reminds us that joy, imagination, and creativity are not byproducts of liberation but integral components in the journey.
Register for Collective Storytelling as World-building
Register for Cultivating Spaciousness in the Cracks
Please reach out with any questions - we hope to see you there!
Some additional resources I want to share with you:
Recommended Reading: Pranksters vs. Autocrats
A timely, relevant offering by Srdja Popovic of Serbia’s Otpor movement, with Sophia A. McClennan. There’s a chapter on laughtivisim!
Our nonviolence class collaborative playlist (note: not all songs are nonviolent, but have added to our discussions around strategic nonviolent resistance. It runs the gamut of vibes, so be warned :)
On that note, off to plan a birthday party for a soon-to-be 7-year-old! Then plan my July vacation - with intense periods of output, we also need to plan our times of rest, and rest assured (pun intended), that will be on the horizon, too.
With love, care, and in the spirit of service,
Stephanie
P.S. I will be sending out another piece of writing later today about dreams and longing on my other co-created Substack,
, so if you don’t already follow me over there, please do!