Our city is filled with strong, gifted people who are fighting for a better world. They labor in offices, streets, homes, and with their friends in ways that are often times unseen and unappreciated. These folks and their work are the dynamic components of our city’s movements for justice. They tirelessly create, think, build, and hope believing that another world is possible.
In recent years, The Festival Center has provided rich support to these movements for justice. We are honored to have provided space for the Poor People’s Campaign, Diverse City Fund, Black Lives Matter DC, Democratic Socialists of America, No Justice No Pride, and many more. Through Soteria Community School, we’ve offered courses that nurtured political education such as DC in 1968: Politics and Protest, Black and Liberation Theology, and Understanding Intersectionality. And through Discipleship Year, volunteers gained a formative experience working with local nonprofits as they address social and economic inequities. Through this mission of hospitality, education, and service, The Festival Center has supported various activists, artists, service providers, and change-makers. However, we need to do more.
At our recent Fall Festival, we invited our guests to join us in the call and the commitment to dream of how we can strengthen DC’s movements for justice in the coming years. We were honored and challenged by Rev. Graylan Hagler who called us to take courageous action. He begged us to shake off “liberal” comforts in favor of a radical commitment to liberation. A liberation that faces conflict, takes risks, and works alongside the black and brown communities fighting for justice. At the festival, each person received an autumn-colored leaf-shaped card on which to write how we can grow stronger movements for justice. People offered organizations, causes, materials, speakers, and inspiration for the work ahead. Using the leaves, our guests covered a bare, lifeless tree with their words until the tree was vibrant with colorful hopes for liberation. I invite all of you reading this to join us in the call and commitment to grow stronger movements for justice. Join us in understanding the needs and strengths of our communities, in taking new risks, and in being a voice for justice in our city.
-Jay Forth, Executive Director of the Festival Center
This article also appears in the Winter 2018 issue of Callings.
