Shifting The Narrative: Empowering Our Organizing Beyond Survival
Briar Rose Penney & Eric Kobesak,
Inner Space KC
Kansas City, Missouri, USA
Dive into the power of story at the intersection of political organizing, spirituality and embodiment. With facilitated discussions and group exercises, we’ll explore the ways that a clear north star can help shape narratives and craft effective strategy, even, and especially, in the face of challenges and loss.
Full Description
All empowered movement work contains the inherent opportunity to shift popular narratives and create embodied knowledge through experience. Unfortunately, a lack of clear goals and strong relationships often dissipates this potential before it can manifest.
Partners and collaborators Briar and Eric share lessons learned through their distinct paths through various kinds of movement work, including how to find the wins no matter how bleak the score board may look.
Win, Build, Shape is a powerful framework used to reframe collective action beyond materialist binaries. In this session, Briar & Eric will guide participants in applying this framework to their own work. Participants will identify tangible goals and examine the context and quality of relationships necessary to achieve them.
Through a series of simple movement, journaling and reflection exercises, participants will discover their own North Stars, define their big wins and clarify their spheres of influence. In connecting the threads of true story from past to present, we’ll plant the seeds of what’s yet to come. They’ll also explore the constructive tension in doing political and spiritual work in partnership.
No experience necessary, bring some paper/pencil or a word processing app and your beautiful self.
Presenter Bios
Briar Rose Penny & Eric Kobesak are partners and collaborators based in Kansas City, MO and co-owners of Community Movement, an experiment in mission-driven, regenerative business practice.
Briar (they/them) is an artist, teacher and entrepreneur and the lead steward of Inner Space, a community movement and healing arts studio. They have been teaching embodiment practices and care-taking sacred spaces for over a decade and draw from experience in wicca, yoga, drag and ritual performance and the Taoist martial arts. Briar is an active leader in the Cycle Community, a non-local collective endeavoring to live by authentic shamanic principles, and has been a student of these teachings since 2018.
Eric (he/him) is a leader with the Kansas City Tenants Union and KC Tenants Power and is involved in building a politics of solidarity and anti-authoritarianism through community organizing, activism, and electoral campaign work. Born and raised in Chicago, Eric has been active in anti-war, global justice movements, and theory building for over two decades, originally sparked by the WTO protests in Seattle while a senior in high school in 1999.
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