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

Institute of the Arts and Sciences: Levester Williams – Our Bedrock

January 31 – April 20, 2025 • Tues – Sun • 12 – 5 • FREE
100 Panetta Ave • Santa Cruz • Wheelchair accessible 


First West Coast Solo Exhibit 

Our Bedrock includes sculpture, installation, performance and video, as well as photographs by legendary jazz bassist and photographer Milt Hinton, the exhibition traces the foundational nature of Black struggles in the United States.

The exhibition centers on the histories that emerge through William’s research into Cockeysville Marble, mined in Baltimore County, Maryland. In William’s work, this history is poetically woven together with the history of struggles for Black Liberation through reference to Billie Holiday. In the musician’s autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, Holiday references her job cleaning these marble stoops of white families in Baltimore. In William’s practice, the creative assembly of reworked marble, Hinton’s photographs, Holiday’s autobiography, Blues music, and Black performance reveals Black Struggle– and Black creativity– to be the bedrock of the nation. 

Institute of the Arts and Sciences: Mia Eve Rollow and Caleb Duarte – EDELO

January 31 – April 20, 2025 • Tues – Sun • 12 – 5 • FREE
100 Panetta Ave • Santa Cruz • Wheelchair accessible 


First Survey Exhibition of these artists 

EDELO brings together new and existing works emerging from their collaborative and individual 15-year explorations into the roles art can play in radical modes of community building and social, political, and economic change.

EDELO features video, sculpture, installation, and performance works, many of which have never before seen in an art institutional context, which together show the trajectory of  the artists’ collaborative practice since 2009. That year, Rollow and Duarte repurposed the abandoned United Nations building in San Cristóbal de las Casa, Chiapas, Mexico, renaming it EDELO (En Donde Era La ONU/ Where the United Nations Used to Be). The building had been abandoned by the UN after displaced indigenous community members occupied its offices. 

SURJ Santa Cruz County Sync Up!

January 23, 2025 • Thurs • 7-8 PM • Online

SURJ Santa Cruz County invites you to join us on Thursday, January 23
from 7-8pm for an online Sync Up meeting.

This Zoom gathering will introduce our local organizing to start off 2025 in resistance and community. We’ll discuss how SURJ, along with other allied organizations in Santa Cruz County, will be working together to defend our neighbors currently being targeted by the new administration. We’ll hold space to get to know each other, and we encourage all Gear Up participants to join to meet others outside your circle. There will be time at the end for questions and discussion about the local campaigns and activities.  

Curious or committed, join us by registering online: http://bit.ly/jan23SURJ 

Organizing White Men for Collective Liberation (OWMCL) Community Connection

Tuesday, December 10th at 8pm ET/5 PT

OWMCL’s monthly Community Connection gatherings are a chance for the OWMCL community to connect and commit to action. OWMCL will share what it has to offer, focus on relationship building, and share ways to move your anti-racist energy into action. For some, this is a chance to reconnect. For others, it’s a chance to connect for the first time. Invite a friend, bring a loved one, and help OWMCL sustain this beloved community well into the future.

Register here.

Organizing White Men for Collective Liberation (OWMCL) Reading Circle

Monday, December 9th at 8:30pm ET/5:30 PT

Join us to discuss the second half of Imagination by Ruha Benjamin. We’ll read chapter four through to the end of the book. Here’s more about the book:

In this revelatory work, Ruha Benjamin calls on us to take imagination seriously as a site of struggle and a place of possibility for reshaping the future.

A world without prisons? Ridiculous. Schools that foster the genius of every child? Impossible. Work that doesn’t strangle the life out of people? Naïve. A society where everyone has food, shelter, love? In your dreams. Exactly. Ruha Benjamin, Princeton University professor, insists that imagination isn’t a luxury. It is a vital resource and powerful tool for collective liberation.

As always, feel free to join us no matter how much of the book you’ve read. We look forward to gathering and learning more together!

Register here.