Learn, To Do: A Training Series for This Moment

As we face down midterms (in the wake of the VRA's gutting and more) and so many of the crises swirling around us now, it's time to expand our collective arsenal with some of the most brilliant thinkers and doers out there—those who can offer us concrete skills, strategic thinking, community-building tools, and the visionary imagination we need now.

This is for everyone who wants to expand their capacity to have an impact, whether you’re a movement veteran or just showing up for the first time. We all have new things to learn in order to more effectively do.

That is to say: This is for you. Register. Join us.

Please register for each session separately.

And please spread the word.

Because the world we need won't build itself.

We're thrilled that this program is co-sponsored by EducateUS, which builds power on the state and local level to advance sex education across the country.

🌱 ❤️ 🌱

Finding your Role in the Work
with Mariame Kaba

July 8, 7pm ET/ 4pm PT

Photo of a Black woman in glasses looking knowingly at the camera, with one hand on her head. She is wearing a brown scarf on her head and a blue patterned shirt, and the photo has dramatic lighting, with a strong source of light coming from the left. Photo by Gion Carlo.

This session with visionary, legendary organizer and activist Mariame Kaba, author of We Do This ‘Till We Free Us and other books, helps participants identify their most sustainable and effective role in social change—not based on what feels most urgent or visible, but on what actually fits their skills, capacities, relationships, and lived realities. This will involve an overview of the various roles that people play in movements; looking at the ways in which our identities, skills; capacities; and contexts shape each of our possibilities; discerning between urgency-driven action and sustainable contribution; looking at shifting roles over time so as to prevent burnout.

Collective Care Better: Disability Justice Lessons for the World We Need
with Elsa Sjunneson

August 5, 8pm ET / 5pm PT

A white woman with short hair and an occluded cataract on her right eye wearing purple hearing aids and a pearl necklace, looking with raised eyebrows at camera between trees. Photo credit: Lis Mitchell, 2021.

The Disability Justice movement’s visionary ways of approaching community care, sustainability, and leadership offer transformative lessons for everyone. In this practical and inspiring session, Hugo Award–winning author and activist Elsa Sjunneson shares the ideas and strategies that help groups weather challenges, support one another, and have long-term impact. For leaders, educators, and anyone invested in healthy communities and helping groups thrive.

Conflict As a Democratic Skill
with Priya Parker

September 2, 8 ET / 5 PT

Photo of a woman with light brown skin and long black hair looking at the camera with a half-smile on her face, with one hand propping up her head. She wears a black turtleneck. Photo credit: Fernando Palafox

Priya Parker, author of The Art of Fighting, helps us learn how to fight with the people we want to belong to, and to hold the space that happens even before repair. How do we stay in relationship while confronting real differences, harm, fear, urgency, and power? We can only enter the work around issues that matter– to say nothing of building solidarity across lines of difference– if we have the skills to navigate productive disagreement, set clear boundaries, hold strategic tension, and stay human inside the political struggle. This conversation with Priya Parker will help us learn healthier conflict practices to create stronger organizations, coalitions, and communities.

How To Grow a Movement
with Graie Hagans

October – Date TBA

A Black man with a trimmed beard and mustache stands outside in a white hoodie with the hood pulled up with a calm expression, looking at something off-camera. Photo courtesy of Graie HagansL

Longtime organizer, political educator, and casual midrashist Graie Hagans offers a grounded, accessible introduction to moving from a participant to a leader in this time when we need more people to step up and show up, teaching the backbone of organizing work like power mapping, base-building, 1:1s, the “nothing about us without us” principle, coalitions, strategy, and more.

In Hebrew and English: *“...The question was posed: Which is greater, learning or doing?… All the rest agreed with Rabbi Akiva that learning is greater than doing because it leads to doing.” (Talmud Kiddushin 40b)*

ABOUT THE TEACHERS:

MARIAME KABA is an organizer, educator and librarian/archivist and prison industrial complex (PIC) abolitionist who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. Kaba co-leads Interrupting Criminalization, an organization she co-founded with Andrea Ritchie in 2018. She has co-founded multiple organizations and projects over the years including Project NIA, the Chicago Freedom School, the Chicago Taskforce on Violence against Girls and Young Women, Love & Protect, Just Practice Collaborative, Survived & Punished and more. Kaba is the author of the New York Times Bestseller We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice & most recently Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care with Kelly Hayes, among several other books.

ELSA SJUNNESON is a Hugo, Aurora, and BFA-award winning Deafblind author and editor living in Seattle, Washington. Her fiction and nonfiction writing has been praised as “eloquence and activism in lockstep” and has been published in dozens of venues around the world, including Marvel Comics. When she isn’t writing, Sjunneson works to dismantle structural ableism and rebuild community support for disabled people everywhere and serves as a lay leader at her synagogue, which helps to fortify her passion for repairing the world. You can find her memoir/culture critique, Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman’s Fight to End Ableism, now, and preorder Dear Blind Lady: Disability Advice You Didn’t Know You Needed, due in October 2026.

PRIYA PARKER is a facilitator, strategic advisor, and acclaimed author of The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters. (You can preorder The Art of Fighting: The Transformative Power of Conflict, due out in September, now.) Trained in the field of conflict resolution, Parker has spent 20 years guiding leaders and groups through complicated conversations about community, identity, and vision at moments of transition. She lives in Brooklyn, NY, with her husband and two children.

GRAIE HAGANS is an organizer, political educator and casual midrashist who helps people discover their own capacity to build a better and more beautiful world. He holds a MPP from Rutgers University, is a founding member of the Black Jewish Liberation Collective, and serves on the board of Jews in All Hues. He is a native of St. Louis and has a deep love for the midwest. In previous iterations, Graie served as Chief Vision Officer at Bend the Arc and was an interfaith organizer with the PICO National Network. He is a transmasculine Black Jewish G*d fearing justice lover.

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Learn, To Do is presented by Life is a Sacred Text & cosponsored by EducateUS

FAQ

Does this cost anything?

When you register, there's a place where you can make a donation as well. Your financial contribution towards this project will enable us to pay speakers and support other backend costs. Access, as always, is a priority, and we will not turn away anyone because kicking in is a burden.

What is this series' political orientation in regards to [_{insert specific thing here}]?

Learn, To Do is about specific skills and broad frameworks, with an aim of strengthening the movements fighting back against the authoritarian regime in the U.S., and its interrelated harms. Many of these learnings can be applied to other situations and contexts, but the political core over here at Life is a Sacred Text is that we strive to build a world in which every human being's rights and dignity are honored, and in which they can thrive, and we know that all of our fates are intertwined. Collective liberation or bust. Everything else is commentary.

Anything else I need to know?

When you register for events, you'll also get biweekly infusions of liberatory fortification from Life is a Sacred Text and regular updates on the power building work that EducateUS does. Like a swag bag for your mind and heart.