Thank you for coming to
CROSSPOLLINATION 2024
A We Rise Production Activate Oakland event series sponsored by the City of Oakland & Radically Fit
We Rise Production hosted our first-ever series of free, family friendly, and open to the public, seasonal block parties & community dialogues. Each block party focused on one theme and included a speakers panel & community dialogue, tabling from local businesses and organizations, a community art project, local food, and a raffle with offerings from local QTBIPOC (queer trans Black, Indigenous, & people of color) small businesses & wellness workers.
Our themes deepened and explored ways WE TAKE CARE OF US – a phrase that comes out of BIPOC-led community spaces dedicated to the practice of mutual aid & abolition as a strategy for long-term collective wellbeing. We use this phrase intentionally to lift up and carry forward this invitation in our own communities as we crosspollinate.
Conditions of Safety: Emergent Orgs for the People
Winter, March 23, 2024
Diasporic Care: We Show Up for Each Other
Spring, June 8, 2024
Roots of Justice: Protecting the Land, Protecting the People
Summer, August 3, 2024
These in-person events aims to strengthen and deepen existing connections and initiate new ones, after the changing culture and community landscape Oakland experienced in years of social distancing and pandemic.
We Rise Production is committed to offering free education and raising awareness on important community work and causes through live events and cultural production. Therefore, each speakers panel will be recorded and distributed on the We Rise podcast and media platforms. This series of seasonal intercommunity block parties will cultivate cross-pollination of intergenerational and intersectional identities coming together to learn about & support social justice, community safety, local businesses, & celebrate our artistic abundance.
Accessibility Information
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This is an outdoor event. We encourage folks to wear masks in crowded areas outdoors & masks are required on indoors.
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Two ADA accessible bathrooms are on the ground floor of Radically Fit.
Support our work!
If you are interested in sponsoring our Crosspollination series please review our Sponsor Crosspollination guidelines.
Roots of Justice: Protecting The Land, Protecting The People
Summer • Saturday August 3, 2024 • 12PM - 4PM
12:15PM Opening Circle
1PM - 2PM Speakers Panel
We would love to see you at our last Crosspollination block party of the year!
Nourishment for our community includes food from our neighbors Carrie Dove Catering - thank you for your support & sponsorship! Food is free for our attendees! There are many ways to support this work, learn how you can become a sponsor of Crosspollination.
Stay tuned for updates on special guests, organizations and vendors who will join us.
We are honored to have Dr. Rupa Marya of Deep Medicine Circle join us to moderate the panel. She’ll be joined by Layel Camargo of Shelterwood Collective, AniyaButler of Youth VS Apocalypse, & Andrew Yeung from Mycelium Youth Network.
Read more about our inspiring line up of guests...
Dr. Rupa Marya is a physician, activist, writer, mother, and a composer. She is a Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and a co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition. Her work sits at the nexus of climate, health and racial justice. She is the co-author with Raj Patel of the book Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice. She works to decolonize food and medicine in partnership with communities in Lakhota territory at the Mni Wiconi Health Circle and in Ohlone Territory through the Deep Medicine Circle. She has toured twenty-nine countries with her band, Rupa and the April Fishes, whose music was described by the legend Gil Scott-Heron as “Liberation Music.”
A women-of-color-led, collaborative 501(c)(3) tax-exempt nonprofit organization dedicated to repairing critical relationships that have been fractured through colonialism. Starting from a place of correcting relationships between Indigenous and Diasporic peoples, Deep Medicine Circle cultivates a culture of care to support the health & healing of people & communities of plants & animals which are critical for our survival & thriving.
A collective of farmers, elders, physicians, healers, herbalists, ecological designers, scholars, political ecologists, movement workers, educators, youth, storytellers and artists. We adhere to earth-based, ecofeminist principles of organizing, with participatory circles of decision-making. We understand the existential threat of climate change as the end-stage of colonial capitalist destruction, and we innovate structural solutions based in cosmologies that can heal ruptured relationships of people to one another and of people to the web of life. We support Indigenous communities in their processes of healing through facilitating land return, acknowledging their sovereignty and advancing practices that bring communities together in shared learning. We create opportunities for other groups marginalized through colonial structures to partner in this work while advancing structural solutions for health and vitality.
Aniya Butler is an 18 years old spoken word poet, environmental justice, and youth organizer. She organizes with Youth Vs Apocalypse as a cultural and relational strategist directing the Hip Hop & Climate Justice Initiative and coordinates the No One Is Disposable action planning team. Through poetry, hip hop, and organizing, Aniya aims to shift what environmental Justice means to frontline communities, engage youth in the movement for collective liberation, and rebuild a world with foundations of sustainability, equity, and love so that every living thing can truly thrive.
Co-Founder & Cultural Strategy Lead
of Shelterwood Collective
Layel (they/them) is Yaqui and Mayo of the Sonoran Desert born on the ancestral lands of the Kumayaay. As a transgender and gender non-conforming person, they've dedicated the last decade advancing climate justice through storytelling, cultural strategy and art making by creating campaigns like Climate Woke with The Center For Cultural Power and supporting media projects like The North Pole Show with Executive Producers Rosario Dawson and Movement Generation, Justice and Ecology Project. They are the producer and host of Did We Go Too Far?, a climate justice podcast with Movement Generation. Most recently, Layel was named on the Grist 2020 Fixers List, and co-awarded a Humanitarian Award by the international association of sufism. They graduated from UC Santa Cruz with degrees in Feminist Studies and Legal Studies.
Layel Camargo
Andrew Yeung (he/they) is a community-based educator and organizer learning and laboring at the intersections of gender, race, class; power, violence, hegemony; and education as freedom struggle. Andrew was born in San Gabriel, California – the unceded territories of Kizh and Tongva peoples – and raised by East Asian working class immigrant parents. They now work to be a good guest and neighbor on unceded Lisjan Ohlone land. For over ten years, Andrew has labored to de-center and dismantle the school-prison nexus; to co-create, mentor, and steward the agency and emancipatory spirit of Black, Indigenous, youth of color; and alongside youth leaders, reclaim the dignity of education as a practice of freedom. They are particularly engaged with youth power building as means of rupture against economies of violence and extraction. Andrew also labors as a core organizer with Teachers for Social Justice and co-leads a neighborhood mutual aid project. In previous capacities, Andrew has served as a writing mentor with the Asian Prisoner Support Committee, the board secretary of Richmond LAND, and as Economic Justice Program Manager at the RYSE Youth Center. He is also a retired punk (for now), polite anarchist, and wikipedia enthusiast.
Roots of Justice Cultural Performers
Nikbo
Third Culture Kid who makes Third Culture Pop
Nikbo (she/they) belongs to a diaspora of caregivers, meal sharers, plant whisperers, artists, and organizers. She makes music to reflect our collective wisdom and stories. Supporters and fans can find links to their work and receive invitations to community events at NikboMusic.com.
Sam
Cultural Worker & Member of GABRIELA OAKLAND
Sam is a member of GABRIELA Oakland. She is a daughter of Ilokano matriarchs. As a cultural worker for the National Democratic Movement, she strives to make and share music that inspires, consoles, and especially activates the propagandists in all of us.
Listen to
We Rise podcast episode 50: Crosspollination | Diasporic Care, Part One
We Rise podcast episode 51: Crosspollination | We Show Up For Each Other, Part Two
Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, & Spreaker • Transcripts coming soon!
Diasporic Care: We Show Up For Each Other
Spring • Saturday June 8, 2024 • 12PM - 4PM
12:15PM Opening Circle with Dr. Uzo Nwankpa
1:30PM - 2:30PM Speakers Panel
How do we take care of us? What practices sustain us in these challenging times?
What wisdoms are we drawing from to strengthen each other & our movements? How are we engaging in a diversity of tactics? For many of us, as we show up for each other here in Huchiun, we are also caring for our communities in our motherlands. We know all land is connected, all waters are connected. Like seeds, we know the power of diaspora, the potency of biodiversity to nourish & create liberatory ecosystems, never forgetting where we come from. From Huchiun to Palestine, from the Philippines to Mexico, we honor our interconnectedness across borders.
Nourishment for our community includes food from Reems, Cafe Gabriela, and Arizmendi - thank you for your support & sponsorship! Food is free for our attendees!
Artists & organizations tabling offered mutual aid opportunities to directly support Palestinian families in Gaza as well as uplift calls to action & support the indigenous Lumad in the islands known as the Philippines.
Photos of this event were taken by Stephen Flynn Photography, thank you so much!
Community came out to witness live artwork for the people by Melanie Cervantez and Jesus Barraza Dignidad Rebelde and a speakers panel featuring local leaders...
Ant Lorenzo is an artist and organizer from Los Angeles, California (unceded Tongva Land) and is currently based in Oakland, California (Ohlone Land). Since 2021, they have acted as the Chair of the US-based chapter of Liyang Network, after helping to cofound the Southern California regional committee in 2020. Ant completed a MFA in Environmental Art and Social Practice at UCSC in June 2024, before moving to the Oakland. In the inexorably interconnected spaces of our globalized contemporary, their practice begins and ends in contemporary grassroots movements and internationalist struggles.
Liyang Network s a local to global advocacy network that amplifies the calls to action of grassroots communities in the Philippines. Liyang started in the Philippines at the request of Lumad indigenous communities in Mindanao who wanted a network to bring together their allies from the Philippines and beyond to help promote their calls to action. In 2020, Liyang expanded their advocacy work to include land & environmental defenders & other grassroots communities throughout the country.
Lubna Morrar was born and raised in the Bay Area, has been organizing since forever for a free Palestine. Born to parents from Palestine via Venezuela, she organized with GUPS at San Francisco State University, Palestinian Youth Movement, and now the Palestinian Feminist Collective. She has trained new generation of Palestinian youth to take the helm towards a new awakening of the movement to free the lands. She is a poet, artist, and business owner.
Organizer & Core Member
of ASATA - Alliance of South Asians Taking Action
Mansi has worked across social movements for the last decade, working as an organizer across political, labor, and community organizations. They’re committed to global justice, anti-war, and anti-facsist organizing, including fighting Hindutva. Mansi is founder of Chicago South Asians for Justice and a core member of ASATA - the Alliance of South Asians Taking Action.They currently work as a field strategy and research analyst at the Othering and Belonging Institute.
After nearly a decade in Chicago, Mansi moved to Oakland in 2020 to pursue a masters in public policy at Berkeley. You can find them reading by the lake, at a queer dance party, or cooking up something new in their kitchen.
Mansi
Jesse Strauss is an abolitionist and anti-zionist Jewish organizer with the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN) in the Bay Area. He works as a journalist at the country's longest running-free speech radio station, KPFA, where he co-created the first-ever daily abolitionist radio program called Law & Disorder. He is the grandchild of survivors of the Nazi holocaust in Poland. Jesse was born and raised in Oakland, and graduated from The Evergreen State College and then the University of Amsterdam before working at Al Jazeera English in Qatar during the so-called 'Arab Spring'. Jesse is also a professional musician as well as a parent to a loving dog named Bamboo.
Jesse Strauss
Abolitionist & Anti-Zionist Jewish Organizer with the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN)
Mira Stern
Educator & Advocate for Justice with
Jewish Voice For Peace
Mira Stern is a queer white Jew born and raised in San Francisco, and currently living in Oakland as a settler on Chochenyo Ohlone land with her partner and daughter. She is an educator and advocate for justice, focusing on developing white antiracist consciousness and capacity for change. Mira consults with tech companies, organizations, and school systems to develop equity strategies for long-term impact, rooted in racial justice and community building. Her work in the Jewish community is centered on anti-Zionist organizing and rerooting in ancestral values pre-whiteness. Mira is also a longtime theater actor who made a recent transition to build a screen career, where she aims to fuse her social justice politics with content that pushes humanity forward. Mira recently co-founded a women and femme-run creative collective, focusing on comedic social justice content production.
Sarah O’Neal is a queer Moroccan, Black, and Muslim artist and writer born and raised in the Bay Area. Sarah’s work grapples with the impact of colonial violence on familial memory and the way systems of oppression shape the most intimate detail of our lives. Sarah’s debut collection, Even Two Hands Pressed Together Are Split, brought together poetry, photography, and ephemera to create an immersive experience for readers to explore the way embodied trauma shapes all of our relationships. Her writing has been featured in the Institute for Palestine Studies, The Nation, and Teen Vogue. When she is not writing, you can find her scheming on the end of empire, swimming laps, or on IG and Twitter @atayqueen.
Sarah O'Neal
Artist & Writer
Diasporic Care Cultural Artists
Melanie Cervantes is a Xicanx cultural worker whose work attempts to translate the hopes and dreams of social justice movements into images that agitate and inspire. Jesus Barraza is an interdisciplinary artist, lecturer in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley, and member of Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative and the Consejo Gráfico de Talleres (Graphics Council of Workshops), a network of artist run print shops dedicated to advancing Latinx printmaking in the United States.Together Cervantes and Barraza founded the San Leandro based collaborative Dignidad Rebelde (Est. 2007). Following principles of Xicanisma and Zapatismo, they create work that amplifies people’s stories and to create art that can be put back into the hands of the communities who inspire it. In this spirit of collaboration among artists, they are also members of the Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative, and the Consejo Gráfico.
Listen to We Rise podcast episode 48: Crosspollination | Emergent Orgs for the People
Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, & Spreaker • Transcript coming soon!
Conditions of Safety: Emergent Orgs for the People
Winter • Saturday March 23, 2024 • 12PM - 4PM
We use the word “emergent” – in part drawing on adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy – to signify that these organizations’ work reflects a vision they are each stewarding of collective liberation. Community came out and received acupuncture & wellness offerings from Devon M. Burton, L.Ac., supported artist YaoxochtlI, and witnessed live artwork for the people with Melanie Cervantez and Jesus Barraza of Dignidad Rebelde.
All photos seen here of this event were taken by Ashley Salaz.
We are so grateful for this beautiful documentation of this day.
Our speakers panel featured local leaders & organizations...
The People's Programs is a Black-led organization, founded by Black youth in 2017, dedicated to empowering the community of Oakland through grassroots community programs. Instead of relying on top-down solutions, we champion bottom-up approaches to address the core issues affecting our community. Our mission is clear: To serve the people, build autonomy, and directly impact Black lives.
Delency Parham is an organizer, journalist, film director, producer, and scholar from Oakland, CA. He is a graduate of the University of Idaho, where he attended on a football scholarship and majored in journalism. In 2017, he co-founded People's Programs, a grassroots Black-youth-led organization born out of the history of the Black Panther Party and the Republic of New Afrika. People's Programs run a multitude of Decolonization Programs striving to meet the material needs of poor and working-class people in Oakland. Their programs include, but are not limited to, free breakfast, free groceries, a free mobile health clinic, and a community farm in collaboration with UC Berkeley's Fannie Lou Hamer Black Resource Center. People's Programs has distributed over 9,600 boxes of groceries, 80,000 hot meals, yielded over 2300 pounds of fresh produce, and provided free medical services to hundreds of community members.
From marching 76-straight miles, to hunger striking for 26 days,
Dr. César A. Cruz has dedicated his life to justice. Born in México, he migrated to the U.S. with a single mother. Dr. Cruz is from Jalisco, México of Huichol/Mexica roots. César grew up in South Central L.A. and moved to study at UC Berkeley earning a B.A.-History. He has now been a resident of East Oakland for 33 years. A 30-year vet in education, César is the co-founder the Homies Empowerment Program now in its 15th year. The grassroots organization is evolving to become a community-based independent high school for youth who have been given up on. They just launched the FREEdom School as a new independent high school. Their mission is to help youth channel the healer, warrior, scholar and hustler within on their journey towards individual and community emancipation. Homies Empowerment also operates a FREEdom Store, Care Center, Learning Center, and FREEdom Farm. Dr. Cruz is also the author of “Revenge of The Illegal Alien,” and “Bang for Freedom.” He received his Doctorate in Ed. Leadership (Ed.L.D.) at Harvard University. Dr. Cruz is considered one of America’s 30 education thought leaders by the Christian Science Monitor. However, he is proudest to be a husband, and father of three children: Olin, Amaru and Quetzali. You can reach him at Cesar_Cruz@mail.harvard.edu.
Dr. César A. Cruz
Co-Founder of Homies Empowerment Program
& Founding Principal of the Freedom School
Homies Empowerment is an independent, grassroots community-based organization out of East Oakland. We started as a volunteer-run, Jefferson Award winning, after-school program taking on an approach and a way of seeing gang-impacted youth through an asset-based lens. To provide spaces where youth can heal, thrive and self-actualize, we mirror the positive assets that attract young people to gangs: a sense of belonging, protection, rites of passage, and meeting basic needs. Our after-school program evolved to full-fledged Ethnic Studies and Leadership courses offered throughout Oakland schools.
The Anti Police-Terror Project is a Black-led, multi-racial, intergenerational coalition that seeks to build a replicable and sustainable model to eradicate police terror in communities of color. We support families surviving police terror in their fight for justice, documenting police abuses and connecting impacted families and community members with resources, legal referrals, and opportunities for healing. APTP began as a project of the ONYX Organizing Committee.
Conditions Of Safety Cultural Performer
Darius Simpson is a New Afrikan poet and skilled living room dancer from Akron, Ohio. He aims to inspire those chills that make you twist up ya face in approval. Darius believes in the dissolution of empire and the total liberation of Africans and all oppressed people by any means available. Free The People. Free The Land.
We are proud to have our Crosspollination events sponsored by Radically Fit, beloved community and long-time collaborators, who have opened their doors to host us in their beautiful space!
Radically Fit is the Bay Area's radical community gym rooted in fat liberation & joyful movement for all queer, trans, Black and brown folks and their allies, regardless of experience, size or ability.
Thank you to our Crosspollination Sponsors!
We Rise Production's Crosspollination series is sponsored by
Delicious nourishment sponsored by
Reems, Carrie Dove Catering, Mohka House, Cafe Gabriela, & Arizmendi
Deep appreciation to our Rise Sponsors:
Christine & Doug C.
Gratitude to our Pollinator Sponsors:
Sally & Anthony P. • Karina & Tom S. • Adoria E.
Special thanks to our Community Sponsors
Najat Collective • Sara B. • Inbal S. • Cianna V.
Thank you to Oakstop & Sports Basement for sponsoring our Crosspollination event series!
Our Crosspollination series received partial funding by the city of Oakland.
Make a contribution to support this free event open to the public and donate to We Rise
with the label "crosspollination".
Learn how to become an official sponsor of Crosspollination, read our Sponsorship Guidelines.
Thank you to all the artists, leaders, organizations, vendors, and all who joined us!
May we continue to crosspollinate, create, inspire, and nurture each other...