Dates: Feb 7, 21 & March 7

TIME: 4:30-6:00 CST. 

WHERE: ONLINE

COST: $200 USD

Overview: 

There’s so much to tell you! Here’s a snippet– and for all the details come to my post at https://bit.ly/FeministBusinessHistory

Feminists have created many successful businesses, businesses that were explicitly feminist.

Few people know that these businesses ever existed, and even fewer remember what they were about, what practices and strategies worked for them, and what led to their closures— or their longevity.

Without knowing feminist businesses’ history, we can’t learn from their mistakes. Worse, we can’t build on their achievements.

Starting in February 2023, we will reconnect with the legacy of feminist business, and draw from their experiences some shared principles and guidance for current and future feminist businesses.

Initial Schedule (to be revised with participants’ input):

• Class Session #1, Tuesday, Feb 7, 4:30-6 pm ET: Welcome and Introductions. What’s a Feminist Business and what do we know about them?

• Office hour: Friday Feb, 10, 11 am -12 pm ET

• Tuesday, Feb 14: Contribute your Reflection #1

• Class Session #2, Tuesday, Feb 21, 4:30-6 pm ET: Feminist Businesses’ customers, products, services, community connections

• Office hour: Friday, Feb 24, 11 am -12 pm ET

• Tuesday, Feb 28: Contribute your Reflection #2

• Class Session #3, Tuesday, March 7, 4:30-6 pm ET: Getting stuff done: organizing themselves, understanding power, authority, and coordination, conflicts and feminist challenges

• Office hour: Friday, March 10, 11 am -12 pm ET

• Tuesday, March 14: Contribute Reflection #3

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Overview

In this class, we will collaborate to create a shared understanding of feminist business history, and to draw lessons and unanswered questions from the stories we gather. We will produce a file/living repository of resources on the businesses we consider. We will create a document that identifies feminist business practices and challenges from history, along with citations, that we can all use as a resource. We will decide together how to share this document with other feminist business folks.

At the end of this course, we will have created a cohort of feminist business advocates who can teach others about and continue to develop knowledge of our shared feminist business history. This cohorts’ knowledge will support feminist business coaches, mentors, and practitioners who want to build on rather than repeat the lessons of feminist business.

At the end of this course, you will be well-versed in the history of a particular feminist business or sector, able to explain this history to another interested feminist business person. You will have developed some wisdom from the experience of earlier feminists that you can use in designing your future business activities.

As a facilitator and active participant myself, I expect that our shared work will help me lock in what I’ve learned from my independent reading in feminist business history. Our work together will also help me examine and expand my definitions of feminist business and help me develop better criteria and tools for guiding feminist businesses.

This class will prototype a collaborative format that we can use as we build a learning program for feminist business practitioners, mentors, coaches, and teachers.

Date/Time: Thursday, Feb 2nd, 12:00 PST (3:00 PM EDT)

Where: ONLINE

Cost: Free.

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drienne maree brown in conversation with dream hampton

celebrating adrienne maree brown’s new novel

Maroons: A Grievers Novel

Published by AK Press

A tale of survival, of moving beyond seemingly insurmountable devastation toward, if not hope itself, then the road to hope. 

In the second installment of the Grievers trilogy, adrienne maree brown brings to bear her background as an activist rooted in Detroit. The pandemic of Syndrome H-8 continues to ravage the city of Detroit and everyone in Dune’s life. In Maroons, she must learn what community and connection mean in the lonely wake of a fatal virus. Emerging from grief to follow a subtle path of small pleasures through an abandoned urban landscape, she begins finding other unlikely survivors with little in common but the will to live. Together they begin to piece together the puzzle of their survival, and that of the city itself.

adrienne maree brown grows healing ideas in public through her multi-genre writing, her music and her podcasts. Informed by 25 years of movement facilitation, somatics, Octavia E Butler scholarship and her work as a doula, adrienne has nurtured Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, Radical Imagination and Transformative Justice as ideas and practices for transformation. She is the author/editor of  seven published texts and the founder of the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute, where she is now the writer-in-residence. Her published work includes Fables and Spells Collected and New Short Fiction and Poetry, Octavia’s Brood, Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, and We Will Not Cancel Us. Maroons is her second novel. Her visionary fiction has appeared in The Funambulist, Harvard Design Review, and Dark Mountain.

dream hampton is a filmmaker, producer, and writer. Her work includes the 2019 Lifetime documentary series Surviving R. Kelly, which she executive produced, and the 2012 An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, on which she served as co-executive producer. She co-wrote Jay-Z’s 2011 memoir Decoded. Her writing has appeared in Vibe, Essence, Harper’s Bazaar, The Village Voice, Detroit News, The Source, and Spin.

Praise for the work of adrienne maree brown

“Brown’s sensational second contribution to AK Press’s Black Dawn series, which highlights works of radical speculative fiction, picks up where Grievers left off. The H-8 epidemic, which sends the infected into comas, has ravaged a near-future Detroit, leaving the city a ghost town. Still, series protagonist Dune remains, scavenging for supplies and seeking the possibility of human connection with other survivors even as an intense winter rages. On her wanderings, Dune crosses paths with remaining Detroiters who help her to redefine community and learn more about the virus. Grief, loneliness, connection, and a little bit of magic all work together to create a powerful metaphor for grassroots activism. Equally thrilling and thought-provoking, this will put readers in mind of speculative greats like Octavia Butler and Samuel R. Delaney.” —Publishers Weekly (★ starred review) 

“Bestseller Brown (Pleasure Activism) makes her fiction debut with the powerful, emotional story of Dune, a young woman living in Detroit, Mich., in the midst of a bizarre epidemic … The first novel in AK Press’s new Black Dawn series, which will focus on speculative fiction that expresses the values of antiracism, feminism, anticolonialism, and anticapitalism, this hits the nail on the head with its deep, moving exploration of loss, family, community, gentrification, and rapidly changing urban landscapes. It’s a strong precedent that will leave readers eager for more.” —Publishers Weekly (★ starred review)

“In Maroons: A Grievers Novella, adrienne maree brown travels the question of Rootedness. Like the Maroon communities of Africatown in Mobile Alabama or the Saramacca Tribe in Suriname, redefining home is one that Africans in the new world all face. As the world crumbles all around, we find Dune wondering, ‘What does one do when everyone is gone and everything you love is abruptly taken away?’ adrienne reminds us in this breathtaking novella that ‘making home’ is all about what and who we choose to hold on to.” —Queen Mother Jessica Norwood, Founder of RUNWAY and Maroon Leader

“‘You can find us in the heart of the gentrified new old town, the corner of Cass and Selden, between one gate and another.’ adrienne maree brown took the time to really know our beloved, Black Detroit. She listened and she saw and that knowing and seeing unlocked worlds inside worlds. In all of her work adrienne stretches towards the matrix, the fractals and reflections, the ways our bodies and beings are in conversation with everything and everyone around us, all at once. The characters in Maroons have survived great grief and systemic failure. They carry forward ancestors and memory and magic. Dune and Dawud and all the Detroiters in Maroons are building connections and new worlds where ‘every single thing is both good and as it should be.'” —dream hampton, filmmaker and writer from Detroit

“If adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy and Pleasure Activism books had sci-fi novella niblings, they would be this Detroit trilogy. Maroons imaginatively superimposes Detroit’s political landscape and grassroots movement lessons onto an alternate timeline where pockets of the city are reclaimed as liberated autonomous zones. In Maroons, amb weaves a story world that reminds us that when we give ourselves space to grieve, we create more capacity to build power and connection across dimensions.” —Ill Weaver; lyricist, performance artist, activist

This event was made possible by support from the City Lights Foundation. To learn more visit: https://citylights.com/foundation/

Date: March 17

Time: 8:00-20:00 GMT (3:00 AM to 3:00 PM EDT)

There are four roundtables during this time period. 

Where: ONLINE

Cost: Free

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