Open Mic Share
Social impact leaders who are BIPOC and vegan are invited to a space to be honest, vulnerable, and compassionate towards each other. Not everything is glamorous or easy in what we do. We as Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC*), Multiracial, and Asian /Asian American vegan activists and facilitators can be honest with each other and ourselves.
It's storytime for BIPOC-centered activists who are vegan.
Tell us about a major problem you faced.
How did you fix it?
What did you learn?
"Listening to our stories is part of the decolonization process," writes Edgar Villanueva in Decolonizing Wealth, 2nd Edition.
Join Unity Collective for 1.5 hours of listening and telling our stories.
Storytellers will go in order of registration sign-up: first come, first serve! Each storyteller will have a limited amount of time to speak. Moderators will play a sound to suggest when a storyteller should wrap up their talk to share the mic with others.
The event will not be recorded. We ask that participants ask permission of storytellers prior to sharing those stories elsewhere.
Suggested donation of $5 to $50 (USD).
Scholarships available upon request.
About Us
Unity Collective's mission is to elevate the voices of BIPOC*-led groups and individuals working toward a just food system. Learn more about at unity-collective.org
Unity Collective is a vehicle for new groups and individuals who want to start something but are challenged by the bureaucracy of getting access to resources. Unity Collective offers support to a certain degree so they can do that, specifically for folks who are not the priority in these processes. As Unity Collective forms into a nonprofit organization, we will learn from that experience and offer our insights to others. We are not seeking to tell people how to do things in a better way: we are doing what we need, and what we think others may need, to honor our lived experiences as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) in the vegan and animal protection movement.
Following the Two Loops framework conceptualized by Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze at the Berkana Institute, we hope to nurture growth and healing in individuals and organizations as we shift our vegan, animal protection, and food justice movements' operational standards away from dominant systems and towards emergent ones.
Unity Collective affirms that there is enough for all of us. Our work can make the movement stronger, outside of individuals and organizations. We’re here to provide support and structure for BIPOC-centered projects and to ask how funders can fund our projects in different ways. Unity Collective can help change funding practices and bring in others who do that as well.
*BIPOC is a common acronym in the United States that refers to Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC). As a BIPOC-led organization, Unity Collective uses this term to be recognizable to peers with respect to our political analysis of race as a social construct. We contend with this term even as we use it to describe the racialized aspect of our bodies, as members of anti-racist movements seeking to undo the continuing harms of white supremacy, colonialism, and capitalism. The term People of the Global Majority (PGM) is another term that is often used instead of BIPOC.