Beautiful Solutions: Toolbox for Liberation, Rachel Plattus and Elandria Williams
Agents of Change: Communities Collaborating to Solve Complex Problems
Monday April 23, 11:15am-12:30pm, Monona Terrace Community and Convention Center (see below for additional information)
What Happens When We Know About Each Other – Stories from Beautiful Solutions
Tuesday, April 24, 4-5:30pm, 6191 Helen C. White
Mapping Our Futures – A Full-Day Popular Education Workshop with Beautiful Solutions (a Highlander Research & Education Center Curriculum)
Wednesday, April 25, 9am-5pm, Art In, 1444 E. Washington Ave. (see below for additional information)
Mapping Our Futures – A Popular Education Workshop with Beautiful Solutions (a Highlander Research & Education Center Curriculum)
Thursday April 26th, 1-4pm, Nancy Nicholas Hall, Plenary Hall (see below for additional information)
Co-sponsored by the Evjue Foundation, the UW School of Human Ecology, and the 4W Initiative.
Seeds of solutions to humanity’s intersecting crises of climate, economy and democracy are all around us. If they are nurtured and spread, they will form the foundation of a more democratic, just, and sustainable system. This is precisely what Beautiful Solutions seeks to do: spread the seeds that will help us imagine, and create, a future that supports people and the planet—and develop the resources to help them flourish.
Beautiful Solutions pairs systemic critique with real solutions that point the way toward a new system. It lifts up creativity and innovation in communities that are fighting back against the root causes of injustice and working to build something better. Rather than prescribing one way of doing things, Beautiful Solutions works with practitioners to spotlight the strategies that are working and replicable. These strategies—delivered online, in an upcoming book, and through grassroots popular education and training—can build democratic leadership in communities, strengthen our resistance, transform public policy and help shift the broader culture from extraction and dependence to creativity and interdependence. Beautiful Solutions is a collaboration of the Highlander Research and Education Center, the New Economy Coalition, and Beautiful Trouble.
“Agents of Change: Communities Collaborating to Solve Complex Problems” is a breakout session with Elandria Williams as part of the Nelson Institute Earth Day Conference 2018.
“Mapping Our Futures – A Full-Day Popular Education Workshop with Beautiful Solutions” is primarily for Madison community participants, and attendance will be capped. Extra spots will be made available to University registrants. Curriculum developed by the Highlander Research and Education Center.
“Mapping Our Futures – A Half-Day Popular Education Workshop with Beautiful Solutions” is open to all participants, without a cap on attendance. Curriculum developed by the Highlander Research and Education Center.
RACHEL PLATTUS was born and raised in New Haven, CT, and has been living in the Boston area since 2010. She is a co-creator of Beautiful Solutions, a storytelling and popular education project that supports people to imagine and create community-controlled solutions to the problems they face. Rachel is also a street medic and a 2017-2018 JOIN for Justice Jewish Organizing Fellow. She likes to explore how to make meaning and support healing on big paper, in the dance studio, in the kitchen, in wild places, and in spaces that bring us into conversation, connection, and collective action with one another. She loves words, and the ways that we can connect without them. She loves to move and make noise, and also the magic that comes from stillness and silence.
ELANDRIA WILLIAMS is the Director of Training at PeoplesHub. She also provides development support to cooperatives, mostly in the Southern United States, and is a co-editor of Beautiful Solutions. For the last eleven years Elandria worked at the Highlander Research and Education Center, first as the youth/intergenerational programs director and then helping co-coordinate Economics and Governance programs such as the Mapping Our Futures Curriculum and the Southern Grassroots Economies Project. Elandria also serves on the boards of the Southern Reparations Loan Fund (SRLF), US Solidarity Economy Network, Appalachian Studies Association and the Movement for Black Lives Policy Table, and is one of the Co-Moderators or Chief Governance Officers of the Unitarian Universalist Association.