Upcoming Events
For all upcoming events, check out our Eventbrite page
Learning Resistance through Global Solidarity: What It Means to Be in Solidarity with Iranians & Venezuelans
January 30: 1:00 PM, Online. RSVP here.
Can’t make Jan 30? Sign up here to be notified of next month’s event.
Join us monthly for virtual conversations with activists on the front lines who are resisting authoritarianism in their own countries. Each month, we connect directly with organizers from around the world—learning their tactics, sharing strategies, and building solidarity networks across borders.
This month we'll have a discussion with Venezuelan and Iranian activists about what is happening in these countries during this moment of crisis and uncertainty, and what it actually means to stand in solidarity with people in Iran and Venezuela.
Both nations are caught between authoritarian governments and the threat of foreign intervention, and this conversation will dig into the middle ground that solidarity requires. We'll explore how to stay genuinely informed when media coverage is sporadic and often flattened into simple narratives. We'll talk about holding two truths at once: that a regime can be oppressive and corrupt while foreign "solutions" can be equally dangerous. Being anti-imperialist doesn't mean excusing state violence against citizens. And opposing intervention doesn't require defending governments that have tortured, detained, and disappeared their own people. For those in the Iranian and Venezuelan diasporas, watching from afar while family and friends face repression is its own particular anguish. We'll discuss practical, grounded ways to show up for your neighbors and colleagues navigating this reality, and why centering their voices matters.
RSVP here.
The Joy & Creativity Collective: Feb meeting
Feb 1: 3:00 PM, Dew Drop Inn. RSVP here.
A creative collective for play, joy and art as resistance
Join us monthly to make art, find humor in darkness, and remember that creativity is resistance.
Everything feels heavy. The news is a lot. It's hard to permit ourselves to be joyous and even more difficult to motivate ourselves to be creative. But joy and art aren't frivolous when the world is breaking. They're how we survive it.
The Joy & Creativity Collective is a monthly gathering for anyone feeling the weight of the current political moment and who refuses to let despair win. We believe that making something beautiful, meaningful, or weird with our own hands is itself an act of resistance against forces that want us isolated, paralyzed, and hopeless. This is for the doodlers, DJs, poets, comedians, and makers. For people who used to create and miss it, who want to reconnect with the part of themselves that imagines and dreams and plays.
This Month's Theme: VOICE
This month we're sharing work inspired by our "Voice" prompt: Write a poem about something that matters to you right now and how you're processing the new year and everything going on in the world. Or, if you'd rather not write your own, pick a poem that speaks to you. Then illustrate it however you'd like: as a poster that could be wheatpasted on walls, a sticker, a journal entry, an audio recording. Use hand lettering, drawings, mixed media, digital collage, or whatever feels right.
Bring what you've made (or started, or are still thinking about) and we'll share our work together.
Featured Speaker: Samuel Miranda
We'll hear from Samuel Miranda on how poetry can be used to build community and personal resilience and resistance. Samuel (Sami) Miranda is a Puerto Rican poet, visual artist, and educator whose work has been exhibited at the Smithsonian and performed at The Kennedy Center. He manages programming at the American Poetry Museum, a Brookland-based institution founded in 2004 that celebrates poetry, promotes literacy, and fosters community dialogue through exhibitions, workshops, and readings.
Create Together
After the discussion, we'll have collage materials available to continue working on creative projects together, with snacks and drinks to fuel the making.
New to the group? You're welcome here. You don't need to have attended previous events or completed the prompt to join us. Come make something with us.
RSVP here.
Can’t make Feb 1 or don’t live near DC? Submit your poem or art responding to the prompt here. Sign up here to be notified of upcoming online & in-person events.
When Disaster Strikes, Community Rises
Feb 5 12:00 EST, online. RSVP here.
A lot of people right now feel like the political situation is too big, too broken, too out of their control to do anything about. This panel is a counterargument. We want to push back against the paralysis a lot of people are feeling by showing what's actually generative about these moments.
This month we'll be discussing how emergencies (including natural disasters, pandemics, and political crises), while difficult, also create conditions for community formation that don't exist in ordinary life. People who never talked before share resources, coordinate response, figure out who needs what. And sometimes those emergency responses turn into something permanent. People build relationships while doing recovery work together, and those relationships don't dissolve when the crisis passes. They learn what their neighbors actually need. They get activated during the response and often stay engaged in new issues and political causes.
The panel will include mutual aid organizers, artists, activists, and researchers who were activated by different types of emergencies and stayed engaged afterward, from hurricane response in Florida and Appalachia to community response to immigration crackdowns in DC to COVID-era mutual aid networks. We'll hear how they got involved, what surprised them, what structures emerged, and what advice they have for people who want to do similar work in their own communities. You'll leave with small, manageable ways to get more connected to your neighbors and initiatives you can plug into.
This event is part of the Prepared but not a Prepper: Smart community-based preparations & Mutual Aid Practices Learning Group.
RSVP for this event here or sign up to participate in future discussions here.
Raising Resilient Children: A Reading & Support Group
Feb 13 12:00 EST, online. RSVP here.
Do you lie awake worrying about the world your children will inherit? You're not alone. Between climate uncertainty, political polarization, rising authoritarianism, and rapid technological change, it's hard not to feel afraid for our kids. But fear alone doesn't protect them and it can paralyze us from giving them what they actually need.
This 12-month reading group (convened by the Big Hope Project) is an act of defiance against despair. It brings together parents who refuse to let anxiety be the defining feature of our children's childhoods, who want to raise kids who are both emotionally secure and equipped to work for positive change. We believe that raising resilient, justice-oriented children is itself a form of resistance and that we do this work better together than alone.
We'll explore the science of resilience, learn how children process difficult emotions and world events, and discover practical strategies for creating the stability kids need to thrive even in uncertain times. We'll also read about trauma-informed parenting, learn how to talk honestly with children about racism and climate change without overwhelming them, understand the difference between empathy and action, and build the community connections that protect children's mental health.
This isn't about retreating into our homes or pretending everything is fine. It's about equipping ourselves and our children to face what's coming with courage, compassion, and agency. It's about deliberately finding and building communities committed to raising kids who can help build a better world.
Because our children are watching how we respond to hard times. Let's show them that when things get scary, we come together, we learn, we support each other, and we act.
During this first event in the series, we will be discussing the book Hello, Cruel World! Science-Based Strategies for Raising Terrific Kids in Terrifying Times. The author, Melinda Wenner Moyer, will join us for a Q&A discussion about the book.
In the book, Moyer, a science journalist, synthesizes extensive research to provide evidence-based advice on managing parenting anxieties and cultivating self-compassion, resilience, and empathy in our children.
RSVP for this event here or sign up to participate in future discussions here.
Past Events
Learning Resistance through Global Solidarity
Dec 4: 12:00 PM, Online. RSVP here.
Can’t make Dec 4? Sign up here to be notified of next month’s event.
Join us monthly for virtual conversations with activists on the front lines who are resisting authoritarianism in their own countries. Each month, we connect directly with organizers from around the world—learning their tactics, sharing strategies, and building solidarity networks across borders.
We'll explore how movements survive censorship in closed states, what happened after Brazil voted out their authoritarian, how youth in Bangladesh and Nepal toppled corrupt governments, and why Nigeria's #EndSARS and Kenya's Gen-Z uprisings changed everything. From military coups to economic collapse, humor as weapons, and how to sustain action along with street protests, speakers will share what actually works and how to keep fighting when everything feels impossible.
This month we'll have a discussion with activists from Zimbabwe and Venezuela, talking about how they use humor to survive the absurdity of authoritarianism and to keep on fighting. This first event isn't about specific tactics but instead about how we build individual and community resilience so that we can endure together for the long-term. We'll discuss how you stay sane in the midst of rapid change and uncertainty, the importance of creative expression and humor, how to build trusting and resilient communities, and the threats of surveillance & censorship. We'll also talk about how we can support each other across borders and actually build global movements. We'll end with a conversation on the importance of digital security and talk about practices that our speakers have been using (and teaching) for years.
Our speakers:
Tawanda Mugari is the co-founder of Digital Society of Zimbabwe, a voluntary network of technologists and trainers that specializes in building the digital resilience of human rights defender communities at risk.
Marianne Díaz Hernández is a Venezuelan lawyer, activist, and fiction writer.
The Joy & Creativity Collective: Art & Celebration As Resistance
Dec 7: 3:00 PM, Dew Drop Inn. RSVP here.
Can’t make Dec 7 or don’t live near DC? Sign up here to be notified of next month’s online & in-person events.
A creative collective for play, joy and art as resistance
Join us monthly to make art, find humor in darkness, and remember that creativity is resistance. Each month you'll create something with your hands—creative projects you work on at home and bring to share. We'll explore different creative mediums (poetry, painting, music, games, cooking, comedy) and read books that inspire joyful resistance. Some months we'll read novels that find humor in darkness. Other months we'll study how festivals, music, or play build community power and how oppressed communities have always used creativity to survive.
Each month, we gather around a new, playful creative ‘brief.’ We provide inspiration and the community; you bring your curious self.
During this first meeting on December 7, we'll be exploring how art and self expression can help ground us during this moment of political upheaval and trauma. How we can channel our emotions and not lose ourselves, and how we can use art to overcome fear when the world feels overwhelming. For those of us whose professional and personal identities have been impacted significantly, we will discuss how we re-establish our sense of self and our values.
This month is about grounding in yourself—not who you were before, not who you think you should be, but who you are right now, in this moment of chaos.
We'll hear from A DC-based artist who began painting again after being forced her to flee her home country. This artist uses her art practice to process complicated feelings of loss, betrayal, change, and hope- and to reflect on what it means to be an immigrant and a refugee in this country right now.
We'll then ask you to create a self-portrait using materials you find around your house or neighborhood. Bring magazine clippings, fabric scraps, old photos, natural materials... whatever speaks to you. You can draw or paint as well, but this is not required. Focus on representing who you are now, in the end of 2025, with all your contradictions, fears, and stubborn hope. Include images that represent both your grief and your joy.
Things to bring:
Your personal collage materials as well as paper, scissors, glue. Bring extras if you can for your neighbors!
Any paints, pencils, or other art materials you want to use
Optional reading:
Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear by Elizabeth Gilbert (Chapters 1-3: Courage, Enchantment, Permission)
RSVP here.
Prepared but not a Prepper: Smart emergency planning & mutual aid practice
Jan 9: Online . RSVP here.
Can’t make Jan 9? Sign up here to be notified of next month’s event.
How to realistically plan for emergency scenarios & integrate practical, community-centered preparedness into your life
Join us monthly to learn practical emergency preparedness while building the community networks that actually keep people safe. We’re organizing this group to meet monthly to read about mutual aid best practices and make plans to organize our neighborhoods towards better connection and resilience. We will bring guest speakers from mutual aid networks, community organizers, urban farmers, tool library coordinators, and climate justice groups. We’ll encourage hands-on projects in your own neighborhood.
Over twelve months, we'll learn practical skills for emergency preparedness while building the relationships and systems that make everyone safer. We'll read books that describe how communities actually respond to crisis. We'll hear from guest speakers who run mutual aid organizations, coordinate emergency response, and organize neighborhood-level resilience projects.
But more importantly, we'll actually do things. Not just talk about preparedness—we'll create scenario plans for our specific neighborhoods. We'll map our community assets and vulnerabilities. We'll set up neighborhood Signal groups so we can actually communicate when the power's out. We'll organize skill shares so you know which neighbor can fix a furnace and which one knows first aid. We'll create the systems and relationships that turn a collection of strangers into a neighborhood that can weather a storm together.