The Joy & Creativity Collective: March meet up “Light & Dark”

Mar 15: 3:00 PM, Dew Drop Inn.

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.

This Month's Theme: LIGHT

Creating light is a practice of hope when darkness feels overwhelming. Make something that plays with light and darkness. This prompt is intentionally open for interpretation. You could work with photography (long exposures, shadows, silhouettes). You could build something (lampshades, lanterns, light boxes, string lights, projection pieces). Collage using reflective materials. Small installations. Shadow puppets. Window decorations. Write another poem. Paint or draw something that considers illumination and obscurity as the subject.

Raising Resilient Children: A Reading Group

February 26, 2026 | 8:00 PM EST | Online

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 their 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 explored the science of resilience, how children process difficult emotions and world events, and practical strategies for creating the stability kids need to thrive even in uncertain times. We also read about trauma-informed parenting, how to talk honestly with children about racism and climate change without overwhelming them, the difference between empathy and action, and how to build the community connections that protect children's mental health.

During this event we discussed Hello, Cruel World! Science-Based Strategies for Raising Terrific Kids in Terrifying Times by Melinda Wenner Moyer, who joined us for a Q&A. 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.

When Disaster Strikes, Community Rises

February 5, 2026 | 12:00 PM EST | Online

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.

Our panelists include:

Rachel Kinbar (they/zey/all) is actively engaged in building a new commons while exploring what it means to be human, heal lineage, and honor ancestors. Zey are working for collective liberation as a local community and mutual aid organizer with Central Florida Mutual Aid, director of operations for Beautiful Trouble, and as a ceramics and textile artist.

Dylan (he/they) is a local Organizer in DC who has been organizing with theFree DC project -- a renewed campaign for DC statehood -- since January 2025. Prior to Free DC, Dylan organized with the DC Center for the LGBTQIA+ Community, St. Johns County Dems (FL), Ward 5 Mutual Aid (DC), and Rising Organizers (DC). Dylan joins the movement with a desire to highlight how hyperlocal organizing can inform national and international movements. In their spare time, Dylan enjoys making art, learning/ practicing other languages, and running. Dylan has been in DC for 7 years and currently lives in Ward 5. They hold a Bachelor's in French Language Studies & International Relations and a Master's in Global Development & Education.

Elisabetta (Betty) Ferrari (she/her) is an AIAS-AUFF Fellow at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies at Aarhus University in Denmark. For the past 15 years, she has been doing research on how and why activists use digital technologies. She is currently writing a book on mutual aid activism in the Covid-19 pandemic, based on interviews with activists in the United States, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Her first book was published in 2024 by the University of California Press; it focuses on how social justice activists in different countries understand and respond to the ideas about technology that are coming from Silicon Valley. She has a PhD in Communication from the University of Pennsylvania. Long before she became interested in academic research, she was a student activist and political campaigner in Italy.

Kendall "Dollie" Wilson (she/her) is the Communications Fellow and Social Media Manager at Big Hope. She recently graduated from Appalachian State University Summa Cum Laude with dual degrees in Theater and Sustainable Development. In the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, which devastated Boone, North Carolina in September 2024, she co-founded Boone Community Table alongside five other students to create community feasts and storytelling spaces for displaced residents. The initiative distributed multilingual resource pamphlets, connected survivors to local mutual aid networks, and created a community zine transcribing survivor stories into tactile art. Kendall also served as Vice President of the Women's Inclusive Theatre Troupe at App, which emphasized equity and accessibility in the arts. She works as an actor and model and is currently competing in the American College Theatre Festival as an Irene Ryan Nominee.

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 was part of the Prepared but not a Prepper: Smart Community-Based Preparations & Mutual Aid Practices Learning Group.

The Joy & Creativity Collective: February meet up “Voice”

Feb 1 3:00 PM, Dew Drop Inn.

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.

This Month's Theme: VOICE

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 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.

Featured Speaker: Samuel Miranda

We heard 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.

Learning Resistance through Global Solidarity: January meeting

January 30, 2026 | 1:00 PM | Online

A monthly virtual conversation series with activists on the front lines 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 featured 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. We dug into the middle ground that solidarity requires: how to stay genuinely informed when media coverage is sporadic and often flattened into simple narratives, and how to hold 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 discussed practical, grounded ways to show up for neighbors and colleagues navigating this reality, and why centering their voices matters.

Prepared but not a Prepper: Smart Emergency Planning & Mutual Aid Practice 

January 9, 2026 | Online

This was our first meeting for an ongoing series on 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.

The Joy & Creativity Collective: December meet up

Dec 7: 3:00 PM, Dew Drop Inn.

This group is for anyone feeling the weight of the current political moment—the grief, the fear, the exhaustion. For those who refuse 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, especially now when finding joy can sometimes feel impossible. But joy isn't the absence of grief. Joy is what we practice alongside grief to stay human, to stay connected, to keep going.

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.

This first meeting, 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)

Learning Resistance through Global Solidarity: December meeting

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 Internet I Carry: A Storytelling Confessional

September 25–28, 2025 | FIFAfrica | Windhoek, Namibia

This was an interactive art exhibit and live performance at FIFAfrica designed to make it clear that behind every policy proposal and legal framework are real people living with the daily realities of digital connection and disconnection.

We worked with Namibian artist Elisia Nghidishange to design an internet storytelling hut, a man-made space draped in old technology and e-waster (wires, satellites, cell phones, laptops). In this space, we invited visitors to tell their internet story, to reflect on their relationship with technology. What has the internet meant to you? When have you felt free or imprisoned by your connection? What are your hopes and fears for the future of digital life?

Outside the hut, we hosted a small art exhibition. African artists produced the photographs, paintings, and sculptures installed throughout the space. Visitors walked through, looked at the objects, found inspiration, then stepped inside the booth and told a story. Stories could be personal truth or imagined fiction, a poem or a series of jokes, a love story or a ghost story, connected to the digital rights issues discussed at FIFAfrica: surveillance, internet shutdowns, data privacy, AI, access, and inequality.

We closed with a performance by two spoken word artists on their experiences of internet shutdowns and gender-based violence and a musical and dance performance.

This installation brought activists, lawyers, and technologists into conversation not about laws or protocols, but about memory, emotion, and imagination. Each story was recorded, archived, and honored. On the final day, a performance brought selected stories to life.

Sponsored by UPROAR. Produced by Curious Shapes.

Producer: Laura Schwartz-Henderson Lead Artist: Elisia Nghidishange Production Assistant: Emmet Wilder Contributing Artists and Performers: Racheal Ncube, Toufic Beyhum, Abigail Nyasha Hunda, ShakesKings, Lorraine Ndlovu

Cultura Contra Censura

June 5–8, 2023 | RightsCon | Costa Rica

Imagine it's the day before National elections. The air is electric with anticipation, the race is too close to call, and you reach for your phone to remind your mother to vote and stay safe. But WhatsApp has stopped working. Other messaging apps aren't working either. You can't access the news sites you rely on. Could they really be cutting off internet access?

This is the reality for millions of people in countries where governments shut down the internet as a mechanism for control. In 2022 alone, Access Now recorded 187 internet shutdowns in 35 countries, targeting entire countries, specific regions, or particular platforms, and sometimes simply throttling speeds so it just looks like a bad connection.

Cultura vs Censura brought together creative works from four countries that have each experienced very different kinds of internet shutdowns: India, Tanzania, Bangladesh, and Senegal. The show featured paintings, illustrations, comics, music videos, street performances, and guerrilla art-activism campaigns produced in collaboration with civil society organizations working to prepare for, prevent, and resist shutdowns.

Works included:

• Mtandao (Barua Ya Wazi Part. 2) by Wakazi ft. Mukiza & Frankie Maston (Tanzania) — a music video addressed to Tanzania's new president, revisiting the 2020 election internet blackout that also censored the artist's previous protest song

• Cabledown by Earki (Bangladesh) — a live installation of protest posters hung on the overground cables that snake through Dhaka's streets, photographed by night after police repeatedly intervened

• Dakar Internet Rights Roadshow by Jonction & Computech with Kaddu Yarakh Théâtre Forum (Senegal) — a month-long street theatre and awareness campaign across ten Dakar neighborhoods, paired with hip hop freestyle videos distributed to radio stations

• Let There Be Internet by M & The Bachchao Project (India) — a traveling projection mural examining how internet shutdowns disproportionately affect women and LGBTQIA people across five dimensions of rights

• Life in a Blackout by Thobias Marco Minzi (Tanzania) — a 3D lenticular painting depicting a businesswoman's life before, during, and after the 2020 blackout, a work the artist cannot safely display in Tanzania itself

• The Netaji by Girik (India) — a satirical illustrated campaign using the stock figure of the self-serving Indian politician to highlight the absurdity and hypocrisy of internet shutdowns

To see images documenting the show, please see here.

Curated by: Laura Schwartz-Henderson (Curious Shapes) Sponsored by: Internews' OPTIMA Project In-person production in Costa Rica: Laura Schwartz-Henderson, Fernando Chaves Espinach, Pedro Dobles García Assistant Produced by: Francis Quesada Oses, Skyler Sallick, Ben Whitehead