Announcing Collaborative Organizer Lena K. Gardner

Side With Love

We are thrilled to let you know that prominent leader in both Black Lives of UU (BLUU) and Black Lives Matter Minneapolis, Lena K. Gardner, will be joining our Standing on the Side of Love organizing team part-time in 2016 and 2017 as our 'Collaborative Organizer'. This work is part of deepening our collaborative work with Church of the Larger Fellowship and BLUU. Lena brings a great deal of commitment, heart, humility, and integrity to this work. 

As many of you know, I am deeply committed to the supporting of key organizers as they develop, collaborative practice between groups in justice work, and organizing with (and alongside) people directly affected by oppression and injustice. In a moment where many forces of power would work to turn people of faith against the Movement for Black Lives, our steadfast and steady commitment to accompany, support and fortify the Black Lives Matter movement must be stronger than ever. That sounds like big work. It is.

Spiritual Solace After the Pulse Orlando Shooting

Spiritual Solace After the Pulse Orlando Shooting

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We are sending you much love and grace at this tough time. So many of your reached out to us about the Orlando Massacre that we wanted to make sure you did not miss the invitation to join this incredible and moving online event that we are planning with a large set of social justice partners.

LGBTQ faith leaders (ordained and unordained) of Color will be offering prayers and blessings for the LGBTQ community and all who love us. Their voices will be leading us, but ALL who are in need of this are welcome to join and listen. Sending resiliency and comfort in this time. Sign-up here.

On Sanctuary, Security and Solidarity

On Sanctuary, Security and Solidarity

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There are a lot of articles out there about #Pulse. There is a lot of media. A lot of statistics. Some of us are in anguish because we are LGBTQ and we grieve for our people, we rage for our people, we fear for ourselves and our people. Some of us are in anguish because we love LGBTQ people and LGBTQ people of Color deeply and we want to be there for them in this moment. Most of us are also deeply concerned and mourning because we see the media using this tragedy to attack our Muslim family around the country.

We know that there are deep spiritual issues at play for LGBTQ people in this moment. Live wires of cultural pain and history. A few of them that we see:

A love letter from Standing on the Side of Love

A love letter from Standing on the Side of Love

Side With Love

An Open Letter to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer-identified Unitarian Universalists,

Today, we are a people in mourning – mourning not from natural causes but from an unnatural act of hatred directed against us. We hear the horrors of what happened at Pulse in Orlando and it cuts into us like a hot blade. Suddenly our world, which, with the tremendous gains we have made in recent years, had begun to feel a little safer, is ripped open, bleeding and raw, once again. 

We hear the words of US Attorney General Loretta Lynch, just last month, when she addressed the transgender community by saying, “no matter how isolated or scared you may feel today, the Department of Justice and the entire Obama Administration wants you to know that we see you; we stand with you; and we will do everything we can to protect you going forward,” and those words ring hollow today.  “You can’t protect us,” we scream! Not when hatred and division are the order of the day. 

You're Invited to Organizing on the Side of Love: the Online Course

You're Invited to Organizing on the Side of Love: the Online Course

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Social movements have cycles: they bloom, grow, and struggle. Like people.  As remarkable numbers of people of faith and conscience flood into movement at this time - where and how we can and will show up of use matters.

This summer, we’re thrilled to be collaborating with the UU Leadership Institute to offer Organizing on the Side of Love: Tools and Tips for Interconnection and Impact. Over the course of eight modules, we will together explore movement building and organizing 101 with spiritual reflections and tools. The course aspires to be an accessible and affordable tool for people who want knowledge on the subject, and a forum to spark conversations. Newcomers to this stuff, seasoned organizers, and those who have left movement work and are looking for places to come back are all welcome. We’re launching the course on next Wednesday - June 1 - and hope you’ll consider joining us. 

Mamahood is not one size fits all

Mamahood is not one size fits all

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Years ago, in response to Mother’s Day, Strong Families launched something called Mama’s Day- an opportunity to honor all those who mother, especially those most impacted by systemic injustice or who are weighed down by stigma in our culture. On Mamas Day we celebrate Trans and Gender Non-Conforming mamas, immigrant mamas, single mamas, lesbian mamas, young mamas, poor mamas, and others. All mamas deserve to be seen and honored in cards that reflect all the ways our families look. This year, Strong Families is collaborating with love with Presente.org & CultureStrike to send beautiful notes to fortify the spirits of mamas who are in immigrant detention centers on Mother’s Day. 

Send a message of hope to mamas in detention this Mamas Day.

In a world where we had achieved racial justice, reproductive justice, fair immigration policies, and an end to mass incarceration, no mama would spend Mamas Day--or any other day--in an immigrant detention center or prison. Immigration detention centers and incarceration tear families apart and prevent us from raising children in safe and healthy environments clearly making this a reproductive justice issue.

Showing Out for North Carolina

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North Carolina’s leadership moved forward to effectively legalize discrimination of LGBTQ communities- including particularly heinous policing of Trans and Gender Non-Conforming folks- with the passage of House Bill 2 (HB2).

We know HB2, and its similar bills across the US, are not actually about bathrooms or safety. These bills are about controlling peoples’ movement, spaces and communities. When people cannot use bathrooms it is almost impossible to be in public. 

Such policing makes sense because these bills are about a fight for who can be in public with safety and dignity. Bills such as HB2 are also about scapegoating Trans and Gender Non-Conforming people to attack workers rights and organizing wins. May we be emboldened to come out against closets, against shadows, against the controlling and rolling back of organizing wins across the country.

Where Will You Be When Democracy Awakens?

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As Standing on the Side of Love continues to build our work around #FortificationFridays, we are responding to the asks of many in the SSL constituency who want more emails with inspiration, tools, and specific invites and calls to action. We are continuing to discern deeper into the questions of how do we fortify movements at this time? How do we align with them and answer their calls when watershed moments are happening? This week we are featuring a special call out message from Aquene Freechild, Campaign Co-Director of Democracy is for People at Public Citizen.  Aquene is an active young adult leader at All Souls Unitarian Church, Washington, DC, and a member of the congregation’s James Reeb Voting Rights Project. She is a lead organizer for Democracy Awakening.

The momentum is unstoppable. Two broad coalitions representing hundreds of faith, labor, democracy and social justice organizations - Democracy Spring and Democracy Awakening - have come together to launch the biggest effort ever for voting rights and for getting big money out of politics.

All of us working for climate, racial, economic and LGBTQ justice know that we must work together to stop voter suppression and to challenge a public policy process that is dominated by big money. With the U.S. Supreme Court eviscerating voting rights and corporate spending limits in elections, we’re calling on Congress to act.

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