Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music 

Sunday • August 9 • 7-9 PM • doors 6:30 PM • Ticketed Event

Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium  • 307 Church St • wheelchair accessible

Rita Dove is an American poet and writer who was the first African American to serve as poet laureate of the United States (1993–95). A trained cellist, Dove often incorporates music themes into her poems, which are noted for their lyricism. Other themes in her work include family life, history, politics, and race. Her poetry has revisited historical events and the lives of famous figures and imagined the everyday experiences of unsung Americans. 

Dove will join the Cabrillo Festival for Contemporary Music on Aug 9 for a special closing reflection, performing original poetry honoring the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. alongside Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. This will be the poem’s West Coast premiere, offering a profound coda to a season of remembering, reckoning, and imagining what comes next.


Tickets

Hiroshima Peace Memorial Film Screening and Commemoration

Saturday • August 8 • 1:00 PM • Free • wheelchair accessible

Resource Center for Nonviolence  • 612 Ocean St • Santa Cruz

On the 81st anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing the Resource Center for Nonviolence will be showing Collateral Damage, a 35-minute RCNV documentary about our local Hiroshima Peace Memorial located at the Clocktower. This will be followed by paper crane folding and a march to the memorial.

Watsonville resident Victor Kimura will also be sharing stories about his family who were in Hiroshima when the atomic bomb dropped. His mother and father, born in Watsonville and Petaluma, respectively, were imprisoned in Arizona’s Poston Camp during World War II. Victor was 6 months old when his family moved back to Freedom in 1945.

Please RSVP here

Redistribute Wealth: African Roots Social Club

Each month SURJ Santa Cruz County suggests a local organization that is doing excellent work strengthening racial and economic justice in our county. If you’re able, please consider making a donation– healthy for you, healthy for our community. Thank you!

African Roots Social Club is a mostly-volunteer mutual aid membership community spearheaded and run by Yasmina Porter, MA, a longtime Santa Cruz resident, artist and cultural leader, Fulbright scholar, meditation teacher and former college instructor in dance and culture. The project has been prioritizing the needs of families and individuals of African descent, documented and undocumented, in our community since 2021. The aid model and offerings (regular meditation gatherings, art and cultural events, support circles, etc) are open and inclusive to all. Folks have received temporary and respite housing, clothing and necessary household and personal items, transportation costs, healthy and culturally appropriate food, financial support and most importantly, loving care that restores dignity. Their high-impact work responds to human needs on a human scale.

Please consider becoming a member of this community or boosting your contribution to support this fundraising effort to meet emergency needs and program infrastructure. A local family has made a challenge donation of $10K – overall goal is $20K.

Ways to donate:
Patreon (Patreon.com/Africanroots), Venmo (@africanrootssocialclub), Zelle to Yasmina Porter (831) 201-8218 or if you want a tax deduction send a check made out to United Services Agency (their fiscal sponsor), c/o Yasmina Porter, 1030 River St. Apt 122, Santa Cruz, CA 95060.

Cultivating Care

4th Monday of the Month • Next Meeting July 27 • 5:30-7:30 PM • Free •
Ocean View Park • 102 Ocean View Ave • Santa Cruz • wheelchair accessible

Our Purpose
In the spirit of collective, interconnected liberation, the intention of Cultivating Care is to actively build anti-racist culture by understanding and dismantling white supremacy as it exists in ourselves and our culture. While we are clear that we must also work in relationship with Black and BIPOC humans to create new systems where all people are valued and thriving, this group is for being in compassionate relationship with each other to address our whiteness. This container is for all of us, wherever we are on our racial justice journey, to have courageous, vulnerable conversations that foster belonging, healing, calling in and showing up.

This space is for:

  • White people who are new to anti-racism work and want a place to begin learning responsibly
  • White people who have been engaged in this work and want to continue deepening their practice
  • People who are willing to be challenged, reflect on their impact, and take accountability for harm
  • Participants who understand that this space is about learning, not perfection
  • People who understand this is ongoing work, not a one-time learning experience

Why is this space centered on white people? Are you centering whiteness?
For decades—and longer—Black and BIPOC leaders have called on white people to “get your people”: to take responsibility for organizing within white communities and addressing racism there. Because of racism, white people often have greater access to and influence with other white people, and therefore, have a responsibility to engage their people and communities in this work. This space is one response to that call.

Is this space only for white people?
No. Everyone is welcome to attend. However, the content, focus, and structure of the group are designed primarily to support white people in their anti-racism learning and organizing. 

Register here for Cultivating Care (not required but helpful for planning purposes)

Ocean Vuong – The Emperor of Gladnessin conversation with UCSC Professor Ronoldo V. Wilson

Tuesday • July 21 • 7:00 PM • Ticketed Event
Rio Theater • 1205 Soquel Ave • Santa Cruz • w/c accessible

<Note: Event is sold out! There is a waitlist to join at the link below.>

Bookshop Santa Cruz and The Humanities Institute are pleased to welcome critically acclaimed author and staff favorite Ocean Vuong (Time Is a Mother, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous) for an event celebrating the paperback release of The Emperor of Gladness, Vuong’s bighearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive. Vuong will be in conversation with UC Santa Cruz Professor Ronaldo V. Wilson.

Following the cycles of history, memory, and time, The Emperor of Gladness shows the profound ways in which love, labor, and loneliness form the bedrock of American life. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul. Hallmarks of Ocean Vuong’s writing—formal innovation, syntactic dexterity, and the ability to twin grit with grace through tenderness—are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: a second chance.

Event is sold out – Get on waitlist here.

Farmworker Reality Tour

Sunday • July 19 • 3:00-7:00 PM • Free
40 Zils Rd • Watsonville 

Farmworker Reality Tours offer a unique opportunity to bridge the gap between the farmworker community and those who enjoy the fruits of their hard labor.

Farmworker housing is often located in remote areas, making these essential workers nearly invisible to the general public. These tours aim to change that by bringing you face-to-face with the people who make our food possible. On this immersive tour, you’ll have the chance to meet and engage in meaningful conversations with farmworkers, listen to their powerful testimonials, and experience their daily lives firsthand.

You’ll share their food, visit their living quarters, and gain a deeper understanding of the challenges they face. Join in building connections, fostering empathy, and creating a more informed and compassionate community. Be part of an eye-opening experience that will leave you with a profound appreciation for the hardworking individuals who sustain our food supply. Don’t miss this opportunity to make a difference—reserve your spot on a Farmworker Reality Tour today!

Sign up and more info here.

Virtual Author Talk with Reyna Grande, author of Migrant Heart -Essays about Things I Can’t Forget

Thursday • July 16 • 11-12 AM • ONLINE

With her signature blend of sophistication and raw honesty, Grande interrogates how living between two nations, two languages, and two identities has shaped the woman, mother, and writer she has become. Moving from the legacy of violence in her hometown of Iguala, Mexico, to a bittersweet family vacation in Europe spent reconciling her own impoverished past with her children’s world of abundance, she uncovers startling truths about the nature of survival.

Whether being racially profiled in the Arizona borderlands or finding unexpected wisdom from the slugs in her garden, Grande unflinchingly asks: How do we bridge the gap between who we were and who we have become? How do we turn pain into power? When memory threatens to define us, how can we use story to heal while still honoring our boundaries?

Register today for this virtual talk if you identify as a seeker, a dreamer, or “anyone who believes in the enduring, transformative power of finding one’s voice.”
Register here for this Santa Cruz Public Library sponsored event.

SILA — Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland)

Thursday • July 16 • 6:00-8:30 PM • Doors open at 5:30 • by donation
Resource Center for Nonviolence (RCNV) • 612 Ocean Street • Santa Cruz

In Greenland, the word Sila holds everything at once — the weather, the breath, the consciousness connecting all living things. This tender, nonlinear documentary follows Inuit women moving through three hundred years of Danish colonialism: forced baptisms, children sent abroad to be remade, and a systematic medical programme that inserted contraceptive devices into girls as young as thirteen, without consent, without warning, without asking. Their bodies became a site of colonial administration. Their wombs, silenced.

The film journeys into ceremony — the shaman’s call home, the heartbeat of the drum, the slow needle-drawn return of ancestral body markings erased within a century of missionary arrival. Visually luminous and spiritually attuned, Sila holds grief and remembering in the same breath: a remembering that travels through bone and nerve and the long line of mothers, all the way back to the first conscious human being. Still there. Still listening.

Ticket sales support both RCNV and SAND’s vital work, and 50% of proceeds after film production costs directly fund Indigenous-led initiatives in the featured communities. Complimentary tickets are available to ensure no one is turned away for lack of funds. Click here to secure your complimentary ticket. Everyone is welcome!

Details and sliding scale tickets

Redistribute Wealth: Raíces y Cariño | Roots and Love

Each month SURJ Santa Cruz County suggests a local organization that is doing excellent work strengthening racial and economic justice in our county. If you’re able, please consider making a donation– healthy for you, healthy for our community. Thank you!

A Community Collective for Families

Raíces y Cariño is an equitable, inclusive, and safe space for the community to gather and raise their children together. They are a hub connecting diverse families, educators, and organizations to create cross-cultural connections and wellbeing for the whole family including classes for kids and their caregivers such as yoga, artistic expression, gymnastics, free playtime, and bilingual sensory play.  They also provide low cost meeting space for many other groups and organizations in the area including SURJ’s own Rainbow Defense Coalition!  Please support this awesome group that supports so many others. 

Ways to donate:
Via fiscal sponsor the 418 Project
PayPal
Venmo

Come Phonebank with SURJ National

Several shifts starting July 16 • ONLINE

We are now in a decisive phase of the fight against authoritarianism, the threat is real and the stakes are high. And people are fighting back. Millions have protested, and we’ve watched powerful organizing coming out of Minneapolis, Chicago, and other cities that have borne the brunt of ICE’s assaults on our communities. Mass anger exists, but mass organization does not yet exist at the scale needed to win. Movements become real when they reach millions: organized, trained, and acting together.

Come take action with SURJ National! We’ll be calling voters about primary races working to elect progressive champions in key states and districts to ultimately take back BOTH the House and Senate this November.

Come as you are! No experience needed! Full training & lots of support included!

Feeling Unsure?

  • Our model works – learn from the best! Our phonebanks have one of the highest rates of success in the country. No matter whether you’re brand new caller or a seasoned organizer, if you join our banks, you can trust that you are putting your effort into a method that works. And you’ll get to learn powerful organizing skills from seasoned leaders!
  • Our conversations are based on open-ended questions and deep listening. You do not need to be an expert on the issues or a candidate – our phone banks are successful because we deeply connect with voters and make them feel heard.
  • Want to hear what a phonebank is like? Check out this video interviewing SURJ phonebankers.

Many shifts to choose from! More info and sign up HERE.