EMANCIPATE: NOLA 08!

This evening, the New York Times covered the topic of homelessness in New Orleans, partially, I would assume, in response to Mayor Ray C. Nagin's recent suggestion that a way to reduce the New Orleans post-Katrina homeless population is to give them one-way bus tickets out of town. It is heartbreaking, infuriating, and most of all a reminder that EMANCIPATE: The New Orleans Project is sorely needed to remind people of the desperate situation in New Orleans, Louisiana. You can see the full story from the New York Times here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/28/us/28tent.html?ex=1369627200&en=33d3f4c64abb3dd1&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

or to learn how to get involved in helping to repair the vital communities of New Orleans by emailing ojgreer@emancipationinitiative.net or jrd@emancipationinitiative.net.

EMANCIPATE met with an extraordinary group of talented and committed activists working to make real change in New Orleans. Please visit their websites and learn more about their work:

Louisiana ACORN
Working on affordable and public housing issues.

Friends and Family of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children
Fighting for Louisiana's children, and working to stop the school-to-prison pipeline.

New Orleans Outreach
Putting afterschool programs in public schools.

Renew Our Music
Helping New Orleans' musicians stay afloat.

Silence Is Violence
Teaching kids alternatives to violence through music education.

INCITE New Orleans
Working on women's health through women of color-led initiatives.

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When we returned yesterday I was overwhelmed with so many emotions: sadness, rage, devastation, hopelessness, to name a few. But today, what I feel is great respect and hope. Respect for the many individuals who are rebuilding the amazing city of New Orleans, brick by brick, person by person. And hope because it is the strength of the New Orleans communities that are repairing and restoring homes and hearts. Post-Katrina New Orleans is a microcosm of every social justice issue there is. I see this as presenting us with an incredible opportunity-- if we can heal and repair New Orleans together, I believe that together we can heal and repair the world. In peace, love, and solidarity,
Julia Rhodes Davis

We've had an incredible few days that I know we'll all be processing and figuring out how to articulate for some time to come. Luckily, we've had our friend Krissy Nordella filming every step of the way, so we can show you some of the incredible places we've been...

On our first night here, the miraculous Charmaine Neville invited us to her home for a fish fry that quickly turned into a jam session. In this clip, she teaches a harmony to Vicki Randle and Sunni Patterson.



We visited with Diana Hill, and activist with Louisiana ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), working in the Lower 9th Ward.



Longtime public housing resident and activist Sam Jackson gave us a tour of BW Cooper, a housing project that is slated for demolition, with no plan for re-housing its residents.



And in a conversation that left everyone shaken, we met with Damekia Morgan at Friends and Family of Louisiana's Incarcerated Children (FFLIC).



We've been hopeful as well as shaken though, and we were excited to celebrate with the VIP Ladies and Kids Social Aid & Pleasure Club at their Second Line Parade.



in solidarity, olivia

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Hi there, Vicki Randle here, checking in on day two of our mind blowing tour of the state of New Orleans rebuilding (or not rebuilding) efforts. We have seen much that has taken our breath away, more than two years later. Complete devastation in the lower 9th ward: gutted houses and scraped slabs, evoking the bleak landscape after carpet bombing. But the resilience and tenacity, the amazing goodwill, friendliness and openness of the people who have opened their hearts and homes to our group has been just as memorable.
Today Sam Jackson took us into his home in the BW Cooper housing project, and showed us the place he raised 5 children, working two jobs. If people could only see what i have been able to see here, put faces to the statistics about numbers of people displaced and home building figures, perhaps they'd have a deeper understanding of what really happened to the heart of New Orleans. The people here love this place like a child, like a mother. I heard a woman today tell how she put her children on a box spring and floated them to the SuperDome, then returned to her flooded apartment, only to be trapped there for 7 days, waiting to be rescued from the roof. She was sent to Colorado, and even though she had nothing but praise for the care and treatment there, she returned to her home in NOLA, to the same housing project, telling us proudly that she was working and going to school. "I want my degree to come from Louisiana, from New Orleans," she said. It was so beautiful and simple and typical of the litany i've been hearing from everyone here. We want to restore the heart of our hearts, our beautiful people, our deep roots, our culture. We don't want to be "improved" or "cleaned up" at the expense of our dignity and history. I want to, somehow, in any way i can, be a part of helping that to happen.

Greetings from the Big Easy!

After flights from New York, Seattle, LA, and Albany, all the EMANCIPATE artists are together in New Orleans.

We kicked off our time together with a fish fry at the home of the miraculous Charmaine Neville, who cooked up red beans and rice, a gorgeous salmon, and a green gumbo for the vegetarians in the crowd.

We all sat outside in her garden, behind the house that Katrina blew the roof off of 2 and a half years ago, and she told us about the 7 days she spent on the roof of a nearby school with her neighbors, the bus she stole to try to drive the sick and elderly to safer ground, and the members of the National Guard who turned them back at gunpoint.

These stories are not new, but they're not being told loudly enough around the country, and it's these stories we have come to find and to help give voice to.

This morning our first stop is with Davida Finger at Loyola Law School, and we'll be reporting more tonight.

in solidarity, olivia

I am so excited to bring our musicians to New Orleans next week, to have them meet the extraordinary people I’ve met on my trips there, and to begin to understand what is happening (and not happening) in Louisiana. I’m proud that we’re doing this work, and I’m also immensely humbled by the people I’ve met and the work I’ve witnessed. To see people fighting to bring their communities back, to make them whole, in the face of a government (local, state, and federal) that has invented and deployed every imaginable obstacle to their success.

As a big city kid, I have had the privilege of beginning to understand a very different kind of life that takes crucial sustenance from neighbors and neighborhoods, two words that cannot convey in writing the meaning they are imbued with in New Orleans.

The struggles that the citizens of New Orleans face are in many ways no different than those of any small- or mid-size American city, where corporate interests have plundered all the natural resources, including the people, and are proceeding to suck out the bone marrow. Problems of housing and healthcare, education and employment, existed before Katrina, and they are exacerbated a hundred times over after Katrina.

New Orleans and the Gulf Coast region are canaries in a coal mine for us as Americans. They are letting us know that it is time to pay attention.

And if we venture much farther without tending to that canary, we will be walking into very precipitous territory. New Orleans cries out for us to wake up – to pay attention to the people in this country who are too often invisible. It’s an age-old story that the poor and the vulnerable are most quickly left to swim on their own. But if we don’t respond in this moment of all moments (a moment that has now lasted for more than two and a half years), we may have brought ourselves too far into the toxic mine to find our way out safely again.

In solidarity, olivia

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This spring we're going to New Orleans! And we'll be blogging about it here the whole time...

EMANCIPATE will connect women musicians living and working in New Orleans and women musicians in other parts of the country from our EMANCIPATE network, to promote solidarity and carry the call for justice in the wake of hurricane Katrina to other communities.

Our goals in New Orleans are twofold:

1. Stand in solidarity with the people of New Orleans. We will bring committed women musicians from around the country to stand with women musicians in New Orleans, witnessing and participating in rebuilding efforts.

2. Insist that the rest of the country engage in the rebuilding of New Orleans. The Gulf Coast’s struggles must be placed squarely on the national agenda, and EMANCIPATE’S traveling musicians are well poised to take the call for action powerfully back to their own communities and audiences.

Confirmed participating artists include Pamela Means, Alix Olson, Vicki Randle, and Cris Williamson, and New Orleans artists including Charmaine Neville, Asia Rainey, Gabrilla Ballard.

We will spend time with activist and cultural organizations, including Louisiana ACORN, Ashe Cultural Arts Center, New Orleans Outreach, and Renew Our Music.

Many efforts to support the musicians of New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina describe the musicians of New Orleans as an endangered national treasure, and so they are – hit hard by Katrina in part because many were struggling to stay afloat even before the storm. Perhaps the most endangered of this species are the women musicians of New Orleans, who have consistently lacked a prominent public face, though they have been instrumental in creating the music of the area for decades.

March 2008
We will spend 5 days in New Orleans, traveling the area, meeting with community organizations and activists, and spending time in an after school arts program with students.

April 2008
Following the March 2008 convening in New Orleans, the eight musicians on the trip will have a month to work on new songs inspired by bearing witness to life on the ground in New Orleans. In April 2008, all eight performers will come together once again in New York City to perform as part of Culture Project’s Women Center Stage festival. EMANCIPATE and Women Center Stage will collaborate with the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative in New York, and other organizations doing work around Hurricane Katrina, to present an evening that engages and inspires audiences to keep New Orleans in their everyday consciousness and to take action on behalf of its struggling residents.

Summer 2008
Following April’s performance in New York, in the late spring and/or early summer we will convene the eight exchange artists once again in Larchmont, NY to record their songs about New Orleans. We will produce a CD, the proceeds of which will be tithed directly to service on the ground in New Orleans. This organization will be identified by the artists collaboratively, after their March trip.

The objectives of EMANCIPATE’s New Orleans exchange is to lift up the artists and stories of the region to a large audience, celebrating their work and the achievements of the people in the region; to amplify stories from the region to people outside of the region, galvanizing continuing attention to and support for the area; and building community amongst artists from different regions so that they will continue to bring one another’s stories to their own audiences.




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EMANCIPATE's good friend Adrienne Nightingale has founded a new project called Community Empowerment and Education Through the Arts Project (CEETA). She's been doing a lot of work over the last year in Kenya, working on empowering communities towards eradication of HIV/AIDS and enhancement of access to human development opportunities for women and children, through education and the arts.

visit Adrienne here: www.ceetaproject.org

So Tuesday July 10th, Women Center Stage had it's third EMANCIPATE concert at the knitting factory and it proved to be a tremendous success. The evening began with the introduction of a new project entitled Myth of the Motherland: a film about young artists' travels to 12 African nations over three months. The film is an attempt to bring awareness and clarity to the issues in Africa of which people in this country know very little. The evening began with 10 poets expressing their insights on Africa in Volume 1 in a series of compilations on the issue. The first volume is an expression of insights before the artists actually go to Africa. The performances were absolutely outstanding! Directly following the poets was the Mahina Movement: a band consisting of three women who express themselves through a mixture of spoken word and song. Their performance was incredible setting the bar high for Queen GodIs who followed the Mahina Movement. Her performance proved to be a success among the crowd that couldn't help but join her in her in keeping the beat of every song. Each performance was not only impressive but extremely inspiring.

But have no fear if you missed this performance because Women Center Stage is hosting one more EMANCIPATE concert on the 17th of July. The concert will feature performances by Chantal Kreviazuk, Marta Gomez, Imani Uzuri, and Aguafuego. The concert starts at 7:30 pm at the knitting factory. Be sure not to miss this final concert: it's going to be great!

This past Tuesday night, we held our second Emancipate concert at the Knitting Factory. The concert featured performances by Pistolera, Christina Courtin, Vicki Randle, and Cris Williamson. The night was fabulous and even featured some video clips from the breakfast we had with the artists and some inspiring activists.

And it's happening again next Tuesday! An evening of music, spoken word and film to launch Myth of the Motherland, a film that asks what you get when you take 10 young artists and a film crew to twelve African nations in three months. Featuring Queen God-Is and Mahina Movement.

Tuesday night at the Knitting Factory, Emancipate brought together a lively and diverse crowd for rocking performances from Taina Asili, Alix Olson, Pamela Means, and Eisa Davis, fresh from her performance in the Public Theater's Passing Strange. The night was a blast, with video from the morning's art and activism breakfast between each set.

The best part? It's happening again next Tuesday with Cris Williamson, Vicki Randle, Christina Courtin, and Pistolera!

Take a look at Britt Bravo's piece here:

http://blogher.org/node/15152

and here:

http://havefundogood.blogspot.com/2007/02/art-and-activism-olivia-greer-and.html

This is my first WSF. Given my work with EMANCIPATE and with Women Center Stage at Culture Project, I’m very interested in what’s happening here, and particularly interested in the conversations here about women.

Growing up a young white woman in New York City, my world was comfortable, it was integrated, and my feminism was without a name and assumed. I say with not a small amount of shame that it was only very recently that I understood acutely enough that only for white and privileged women is feminism about reproductive rights, glass ceilings and the stiletto-or-not debate. And I am looking for deeper connections, for wider, meaningful work.

In 2007, there is a palpable paradox: women take leadership positions from Chile to Germany, as women from Ukraine to the Dominican Republic are trafficked into prostitution and the right of women in the United States to sovereignty over their bodies is carefully dismantled. Countries like Mexico and South Africa allow employers to keep women from work due to pregnancy; in Morocco, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, women’s legal rights belong to male family members. Each day, in every part of the world, women are beaten in their own homes.

The World Social Forum has made this co-existent diversity and commonality of experience palpable.

I find myself enraged (at myself? at my schooling?) by how little I know about the world, and even about my own country. I can chat about articles in the New York Times, and shake my head, but I have so little real information, know so little about real people and their experiences. And so I understand that my job here is to learn about Kenyan women in Parliament and listen to the young feminists from countries like India, Ghana and Peru.

So I’ve tried to pull out themes that emerged in the sessions I’ve been to:

The first is a call from women in all parts of the world to shake off the limitations implied by our attachment to the language of patriarchy. That, in re-visioning the world, we continue to use and accept assumptions asserted by an old standard. It is within our rights – perhaps our responsibility – to re-work the vocabulary and the assumptions as we work to make change. As a young woman said at a Young Feminists meeting, “we are not just a women’s movement, we are women in movement.”

The second point follows closely: as women in movement, generational disconnects seem to come up again and again. In a youth circle, an older woman thanks younger women for carrying the torch in a long speech, but leaves the room as soon as younger women begin speaking; in a session on women elected leaders, young women lament a lack of mentorship and beg for more guidance and support; older women observe that younger women don’t seem to have a sense of their history or a tie to a coherent movement. And these things are being expressed across barriers of country and ethnicity. The good news is that all of these women were talking with one another this week.

A third, related, point is that as women we can tend to fight to be in the space we have, rather than fighting to expand the space. Women have talked a great deal about competition between one another, and a barrier between generations and classes of women, and call for more solidarity. They raise up, in every session, the importance of “knowing each other better,” learning from each other, and supporting each other – and expanding the space so as to be able to stand together.

Finally, women globally are calling the world’s attention to a wide range of social justice issues in their regions and homes. Women fight side by side with men, and with a unique worldview, in the labor movement, in the environmental movement, in the immigration movement and in countless other struggles of countless other people and communities. The global women’s movement is a call to action for equality and safety for all people, everywhere.

At the closing of the World Social Forum, I feel all the beauty and contradictions of the event. I walked through the most diverse throngs of people I’ve ever seen – people from African countries in tribal dress, people from African countries who would blend in anywhere in the U.S., women in saris, endless types of headdress. Yesterday I saw a woman in a full burkha, but openly holding hands with the man she was with – no gloves even!

What if the world really looked like this! And of course, it’s a small oasis and not without its problems and complications. There are Kenyans protesting the Forum because even the reduced price for them is a day’s wages and not at all affordable.

Yesterday, as I was admiring the number of men wearing t-shirts that read “women are not property,” I was approached by a young man from Sierra Leone who wanted to chat. He told me that he works as an activist around mining issues and we talked about Sierra Leone and the Appalachian coal-mining region in the U.S. And then he said, “I would like to bring you to my country,” to which I replied, “I’d be very interested to see it.” He said, “Yes, you will marry me and come to live in my country.” When I explained that wouldn’t be possible he thought for a moment and then asked if I have a sister. I told him that she is sixteen. “Ah,” he said, dead serious, “the perfect age for marrying. Very obedient. You will give her my picture when you go home.”

But what an extraordinary event this is! I’ve come to relish being in the minority for a period (I’m sure tempered by the fact that it’s temporary), reminding myself to listen and not to hold tight to my own views and experience. I love seeing so many different colored people engaged in real conversations, and to see that there is work going on constantly, at the most local, grassroots level, as well as in global partnerships.

As a woman said in today’s final Women’s Forum, the World Social Forum gives us a moment to take the world we’ve done and put it on the world table. And in the end – to sum up the parts of the whole as best as I can – as we meet and grow in our work, we make another world possible.

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for information about Women Center Stage, visit cultureproject.org
for information about the World Social Forum, visit wsf2007.org

A big thanks to everyone who attended EMANCIPATE's friendraiser on September 18th. It was a great party, and so exciting to get a chance to introduce EMANCIPATE to the world.

The following is an excerpt from founder & director Olivia Greer's speech introducing EMANCIPATE:

I’ve known I was a singer from before I was two years old.
I’ve known I was an activist approximately from the womb. Nature, nurture – I’m not sure.

My whole life, these two forces in me have informed one another, competed for attention, and begun to work together. My drive to create and to perform, is deeply intertwined with my conviction that the world is in need of great help and that I have a responsibility – as an artist and as a woman – to be of some use.

And I have women to learn from, and women to join.

There are women all over the world who are musicians, and using their art as a platform for action around women’s issues in the regions they are in and from. They are writing songs that document injustice, showing up at rallies to lend support to current struggles, they’re speaking out to the media and they’re singing out to their audiences.

These women are part a long and profound tradition of music, manifesting women’s resistance to the conditions that enslave them, imprison them, and restrict their ability to function as equal citizens. This is the tradition of Fanny Lou Hamer and Joan Baez, Miriam Makeba and Odetta, Celia Cruz and Holly Near. And it includes the women who have always made music locally, in their own communities, in order to communicate their struggles and inspire their fights.

Today, look at Mali’s Oumou Sangare, who has said: "I will fight until my dying day for the rights of African women and of women throughout the world." Musicians like Ani DiFranco, Lila Downs, the Indigo Girls and so many others, show us that the tradition of women’s protest music is relevant and vibrant today – and it remains deeply needed. Issues are never only local, and it takes global action to truly, structurally resolve them. Too often, even local victories remain only locally known. We need a global voice, and we need the songs that impassion local activism to become the rhyme and the reason for global activism.

The mission of EMANCIPATE is to carry the voices of local women’s activism to a global movement for change, through the music of women songwriters and performers. Our goal is to put that mission in the service of women’s international struggle for safe bodies and for safe communities.

In that struggle, there are enormous barriers, and there are people fighting across a wide range of fronts. Issues may look separate, but they’re all tied together in a circle of interdependence. And interdependence is something that women know very well. Women know that there can be no reproductive rights without the right to clean water; and we know that we can have no control over our own bodies if we’re unemployed and starving.

EMANCIPATE will take up these circles of interdependent barriers, and this year we will begin with violence, which itself cuts across an extremely wide range of issues and is a critical focus of women’s protest all over the world. This June, we will produce a concert featuring women performers who will use song to illustrate the issue, tell stories, celebrate victories and call for further action. We will work with songwriters and performers in countries from around the world – identifying and reaching out to musicians, and learning about their work and their communities.

We’re not reinventing the wheel here, but we are greasing it. This year we’ll take part in the World Social Forum in Kenya, as well as the inaugural United States Social Forum in Atlanta, Georgia – both of which exist to build global movements for change that directly take their meaning and momentum from local movements for change.

There are, and there always have been, artists who bring their talent to a global perspective. Now EMANCIPATE aims to provide an organized, coherent and sustainable place from which to build on and significantly expand a base of solidarity and action.

It’s clear that when movements grow in size and in energy, and enter the public imagination in a significant way, song plays a very important role. Just think about the Civil Rights Movement - in most of our minds, it’s forever coupled with “We Shall Overcome.” Songs – and the artists who write and sing them – raise up voices calling for justice, for change, and they carry messages far and wide.

We here, now, are committed to amplifying voices of the global women’s movement, to sing the call for the emancipation of all people, all around the world. It won’t happen overnight, but we’ll look for relationships, we’ll look for solidarity, we’ll look for victories to win and stories to tell, and we will always and continuously look for songs and their singers.

A few nights ago, at the opening of the IMPACT festival, Culture Project’s founder and director Allan Buchman reminded us that a very small group of people has changed our world profoundly. Could it not be true, he asked, that a small group of people could change it again? I believe it is true, and I sincerely hope you will join us.