Join SURJ’s Spring 2025 Redistributing White Wealth Circle

Spring 2025 • April-June

While reparations from the government may take a long time, individuals and groups across the country are innovating ways to make repairs and redistribute/return resources from White folks to Black (and Indigenous) communities as an essential step on the path of dismantling white supremacy culture and its wide-reaching repercussions while building a new culture of community care, shared healing, collective liberation, and kinship.

Here in Santa Cruz County we are launching SURJ’s Redistributing White Wealth Santa Cruz County (formerly known as Reparations Santa Cruz). RWW will be hosting its fourth giving circle in Spring 2025 (April  – June).

To sign up: Giving Circle Participant Registration or for questions contact: redistwhitewealth@gmail.com

Our Freedom Can’t Wait!

The Struggle for Black Liberation: Past & Present
February 27 – April 3 • Tues and Thurs • 3:30 – 5:30 PT • ONLINE
FREE (donations accepted)

Our Freedom Can’t Wait! The Struggle for Black Liberation: Past & Present is a course for organizers and revolutionaries that is focused on the history and global struggle for Black liberation, its central role in the fight against capitalism and imperialism, and the key lessons that we can apply for our movement today.

Through bi-weekly classroom sessions, discussion, and developing a practice of revolutionary study, participants will strengthen their methodology to analyze the past and present, build capacity for organized struggle by studying examples of revolutionary processes around the world, and clarify a collective vision for the future. This program is based on the methodology of popular and political education, and on the politics of working-class internationalism. It’s a chance to meet new friends and comrades, exchange, study, discuss, and put theory into practice! 

More Info and registration HERE

SURJ Santa Cruz County Study and Action series 

Study & Action – Spring 2025
April 17 – May 29 • Every other week • 6 – 8 PM • ONLINE

A free training for white people ready to unlearn white supremacy and take action.

The Spring 2025 Study and Action series is a virtual, live program on Zoom starting on April 17, 2025. This is a learning/unlearning space on the history of white supremacy, race and racism in this country. Join a supportive cohort of people who want to share their experiences and learn from each other. By the end, you’ll have better tools to talk about these topics with friends and family, a deeper understanding of your own personal stake in the fight for racial justice, and more confidence to take action. This series also offers a great foundation to be well-equipped to dive in with our Care Not Cages work with MILPA and other chapter campaigns. The more we know and understand our history, the more we are able to make sense of the present. Through Study & Action, you can find purpose, joy, community, and power in learning our history and fighting for collective liberation. 

For more details and updates about these events, please visit our registration page:
tinyurl.com/surjsccstudy

UCSC African American Theater Arts Troupe

Six Performances • Feb 21-23 & Feb 28-March 2 • 6:30 PM
Wheelchair accessible • Free for students
UCSC Theater Arts Center Mainstage • Santa Cruz

The UCSC African American Theater Arts Troupe presents the musical “Paradise Blue” written by Dominique Morisseau and directed by Don Williams. It’s 1949 in Detroit and trumpet-playing club owner Blue has a tough decision to make. Should he sell his jazz joint as gentrification is banging on the door? Attend this dynamic and musically-infused drama to find out what Blue decides.

Click here for more information
 

Musical Soulmates: “You’re My Everything”

Friday • Feb 14 • 8 PM • Wheelchair accessible • Ticketed event 
Museum of Art and History  • 704 Front St • Santa Cruz

n addition to a delightful evening of soulful music and small delicacies, this performance of Musical Soulmates is amplifying awareness about Santa Cruz Black, a local organization dedicated to Black initiatives through community engagement. Their focus is on closing the racial wealth gap, developing affordable housing opportunities, empowering youth, and creating community events for Black residents in Santa Cruz County. This is also a chance to support Spontaneous Confections, a Black & Veteran owned pastry shop, operating here in Santa Cruz. Performers include Gina René, Ariel Thiermann, Anthony Jones, Michelle Nash, and introducing, direct from the East Bay, Candace Y. Johnson.

Advance tickets available here.  No one turned away for lack of funds.

Dystopian Tropes from an Indigenous Perspective with author Waubgeshig Rice

Tuesday • Feb 11 • 4 PM • ONLINE
Sponsored by the Santa Cruz Public Libraries

You’re invited to a riveting online conversation with journalist and bestselling author Waubgeshig Rice to chat about his newest book Moon of the Turning Leaves, the hotly anticipated sequel to the bestselling novel Moon of the Crusted Snow. His new book is a return to Moon of the Turning Leaves is Rice’s exhilarating return to the world first explored in the phenomenal breakout bestseller Moon of the Crusted Snow. Both are brooding stories of survival, resilience, Indigenous identity, and rebirth following a mysterious cataclysmic blackout that toppled infrastructure and thrust the world into anarchy as experience on an Ontario reservation.

Register now for a thrilling conversation!

SIGN THE PLEDGE TO RESIST

Here • Now • FREE • Online

Together, we hold the real power.

The long history of nonviolent resistance shows us that when community institutions, leaders, and individuals have banded together and actively resisted to defend each other and our rights, people have wielded the power to undermine authoritarian agendas and grow the power of movements for change.

Individuals can sign the Pledge HERE

We are also calling on our leaders, groups, faith communities, institutions and organizations to officially sign onto the Pledge to Protect and Resist.

By signing this petition, I commit to upholding the pledge in my personal life and to showing up in support of the courageous leaders and organizations who make the necessary, moral and strategic choice to publicly sign onto this pledge.

Online: Black History Month

Feb 1 – 28 • Daily Newsletter  •  FREE

Celebrate Black history and the future through a short daily newsletter series in February.
The theme for 2025 is African Americans and Labor, focusing on the various and profound ways that work and working of all kinds – free and unfree– have shaped our country. We’ll be highlighting incredible organizers, activists, entrepreneurs and influencers who shaped Black liberation through work. Produced by Anti-Racism Daily it includes pictures, discussion questions, and an archive. Great for students, workplaces, and passionate learners.

Learn more or sign up here