2023 Webinars

Presented by Dean Spade

February 14th @ 5-7 PM PST / 8-10 PM EST

In a previous Fireweed Collective webinar, Dean Spade joined us to unpack the Romance Myth, what toxic lies it tells us, and how it impacts our lives, relationships, and social movements. This session will explore the common cycle of romance, which can occur in sexual relationships as well as friendships or relationships with organizations. How do the cycle of selection, positive projection, and growing attachment, disappointment, and conflict happen? What does it have to do with our early experiences in life and our drives to heal them as we grow? How can awareness of the common features of this cycle help us take care of ourselves and each other when it is playing out and find more capacity to align our actions with our values? Join us for a conversation about the cycle of romance and how we can navigate it with skill and care.

Dean Spade has been working to build queer and trans liberation based in racial and economic justice for the past two decades. He’s the author of Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law (Duke University Press 2015), and Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the Next) (Verso Press 2020) and the director of the documentary “Pinkwashing Exposed: Seattle Fights Back!”

2022 Webinars

Food, Access Intimacy, and Community Care. Click here to register

Presented by Lydia X. Z. Brown

May 24th 4-6 PM PST / 7-9 PM EST

Sick, mad, neurodivergent, and disabled people often struggle with food. Making good, safe food can be difficult or impossible with limited time, spoons, space, money, and knowledge. Many in our communities have precarious work and money, and many are impoverished. Grocery stores, delivery services, and meal kits are often expensive and inadequate for meeting disability-specific and culturally appropriate dietary needs. In this workshop, we’ll talk about making/sharing food as access intimacy and community care, and ways sick, mad, neurodivergent, and disabled people can share strategies and spoons for delicious food as care and resistance.

Lydia X. Z. Brown is an abolitionist advocate, organizer, attorney, strategist, and writer whose work focuses on interpersonal and state violence against disabled people at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality, faith, language, and nation. Their other interests include carcerality and institutional violence, asexuality as queerness, algorithmic harm as an accelerating force of systemic injustice, and the ableism-racism nexus of transracial and transnational adoption. Lydia is an adjunct lecturer in the Women’s and Gender Studies Program and the Disability Studies Program at Georgetown University. They are also an adjunct professorial lecturer in American Studies in the Department of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies at American University. Lydia founded the Fund for Community Reparations for Autistic People of Color’s Interdependence, Survival, and Empowerment, a project of collective care, redistributive justice, and mutual aid, and they are currently creating Disability Justice Wisdom Tarot. Often, their most important work has no title, job description, or funding, and probably never will.

Resourcing our (DJ) Movements

Presented by Kiyomi Fujikawa, Co-Director of Third Wave Fund

May 5th 5-7 PM PST / 8-10 PM EST

What would it look like to have our movements fully resourced? How much money is out there and how can we break down the barriers that prevent money from flowing to the places where it’s most needed and best positioned to make change? Join Kiyomi Fujikawa, Co-Director of Third Wave Fund, for an overview of philanthropy. Kiyomi will talk through the current landscape of philanthropy, discuss the state of Disability Justice funding, and offer some insights on what this funding may look like in the future. She will also share her perspective on some key questions when thinking about engaging with philanthropy. Please note: this will not be a space to prospect any individual funders, but more talk about the funding landscape.

Kiyomi Fujikawa (she/her) is a Seattle-based, mixed-race queer trans femme who has been involved with movements to end gender- and state-based violence since 2001. Her political home is with queer and trans communities of color and organizing to prevent and respond to intimate partner violence.

Kiyomi is currently on the board of Groundswell Fund and is a Grantmakers United for Trans Communities (GUTC) Leadership Development Fellow. She was most recently a Senior Program Associate at the Fund for Trans Generations at Borealis Philanthropy, and the Queer Network Program Coordinator at API Chaya.

She is also an avid lover of speculative fiction, noodles, astrology (Sag Sun, Cancer Rising, Libra Moon), feelings, and do-it-yourself scavenger hunts.

Click here to learn more about Kiyomi and Third Wave Fund

WEBINAR: Inside the Questions: The Purpose of Disability

Presented by Elena House-Hay and Dustin Gibson

March 24th / 7-8 PM EST

We come with more questions than answers. The questions are what animates the work we do inside and outside of institutions and prisons to create a world without either. What is the purpose of exacerbating, creating and manufacturing disability, and how is it carried out? How should we identify individually and collectively? What is the purpose and utility of the labels? What is the duty of disabled people… of disabled artists? How do we get free?

TF Is A Safety Team? Presented by Elliott Fukui

January 27th @ 5-7 PM PST / 8-10 PM EST

A safety team is a network of people that come together to support someone/each other in wellness and in crisis. Safety teams are a community-based creation of mad/neurodivergent/disabled/chronically ill folks that center people’s agency and self-determination and divest from police and psych wards. Through safety teams, we keep us safe and alive. Join Elliott Fukui to learn the basics and the logistics of assembling and running a safety team.

Elliott Fukui (He/Him) has been an organizer, trainer, and facilitator for almost 20 years. He has had the privilege of living and organizing across the country and is currently based in Ohlone Territory/The Bay Area. He comes to this work as a Mad Queer and Trans Nikkei Hafu Psych Survivor. He has primarily worked in Queer and Trans Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities working to support folks in community security strategies, emotional wellness and safety planning, and inclusive campaign and solidarity work. He loves building curricula, radical cartographies, and movement history. You can check his work out at www.madqueer.org .

Dismantling The Cycle Of Romance. Presented by Dean Spade

 February 16th @ 5-7 PM PST / 8-10 PM EST

In a previous Fireweed Collective webinar, Dean Spade joined us to unpack the Romance Myth, what toxic lies it tells us, and how it impacts our lives, relationships, and social movements. This session will explore the common cycle of romance, which can occur in sexual relationships as well as friendships or relationships with organizations. How do the cycle of selection, positive projection, and growing attachment, disappointment, and conflict happen? What does it have to do with our early experiences in life and our drives to heal them as we grow? How can awareness of the common features of this cycle help us take care of ourselves and each other when it is playing out and find more capacity to align our actions with our values? Join us for a conversation about the cycle of romance and how we can navigate it with skill and care.

Dean Spade has been working to build queer and trans liberation based in racial and economic justice for the past two decades. He works as an Associate Professor at Seattle University School of Law.

Dean’s book, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law was published by South End Press in 2011. A second edition with new writing was published in 2015 by Duke University Press. Bella Terra Press published a Spanish edition in 2016.