Week of August 15th, 2021
"Mobilize! Creative Blocks, Collective Dreams" in Roseland
This summer, the Mobilize Creative Collaborative presents “Mobilize! Creative Blocks, Collective Dreams”: a series of weeklong community gatherings, happening outdoors in five neighborhoods on Chicago’s South and Southwest Sides, co-designed with a team of partner artists and partner organizers who are also rooted in these places. The Roseland gathering is offered with additional programming and support from Chicago Park District, Brave Space Alliance, Southsiders Organized for Unity and Liberation (SOUL), Defund CPD, ConTextos, and more.
Neighbors of ALL AGES are invited to FREE creative workshops, critical conversations, and playful explorations focused around justice and your dreams for your communities. With participatory music, art, and theater activities, live performances, skill-sharing, and more, we hope to amplify and connect existing local efforts, as well as to cultivate spaces that center imagination, joy, and people-led solutions.
Locations
Palmer Park (201 E. 111th St.)
Roseland Schedule
Events are drop-in (participants are welcomed to come and go throughout), unless noted otherwise (for starred* events, please try to be there for the beginning). All workshop materials are provided.
Sunday, August 15th, from 11am-5pm [updated time]
Theme: Healing Justice
Poetry/Writing Event
Artmaking Table
Writings on the Wall
Music Mediation
Community Altar
Monday, August 16th, from 1-6pm
Theme: Food Justice + Self Reliance
Seed Sharing and Starting
Pantry Box Giveaway with Brave Space Alliance
Building Workshop
Celebrate the Neighborhood through Button Making
Community Altar
Tuesday, August 17th, from 2-7pm
Theme: Storytelling
Collage Workshop
Poetry Workshop
Storytelling with ConTextos
Theater Activities
Family Portrait Project
Storytelling through Objects
Community Altar
Thursday, August 19th, from 2-7pm
Theme: Political Education + Resource Fair
4:30pm - Defund CPD Training
Community Resource Fair (multiple orgs)
Theater Activities
Reflective Journaling
Community Altar
Saturday, August 21st, from 1-7pm
Theme: Celebration of Joy
Art Kit Distribution
Artmaking Table
Screenprinting
Building Workshop
Theater Activities
Music and Dance
Community Altar
Accessibility
Most events will happen just south of the park’s field house on 111th Street. The park has paved paths and wheelchair-accessible bathrooms, as well as an all-gender bathroom. Events will take place on flat grass surfaces and/or concrete. Contact us through www.mobilizecreative.com with any questions or requests about access needs/accommodations.
Meet the Roseland Team
Simone Reynolds | Arts worker, actor, singer/songwriter, and poet
Simone G. Reynolds (she/her) is a Black queer Chicago-Southsider, arts worker, singer-songwriter, actor, and poet. She translates the complexities of navigating life, migration, and identity through transportive sound and imagery. Simone invites others to come home to themselves and their roots. As a student of abolition, Simone continues the tradition of community care by making space for marginalized folks to nurture and express their creativity through liberating arts experiences. Her work is ancestor veneration, an ode to community, and a celebration of memory.
Simone’s performance credits include: For Colored Girls, 9 to 5, In the Next Room, Re-Writing the Declaration, and Lollapalooza Music Festival. She is a recent Theatre Arts and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies graduate of Eastern Illinois University, a Black Arts Institute 2019 alumni, an Artist as Citizens 2017 fellow, and a member of Rebirth Poetry Ensemble. You can find her artwork here. Simone is a member of the Defund CPD campaign, where she co-leads the Art & Propaganda committee. She has worked with UChicago Arts’ Amplify, Sandbox Symphony, StoryArts Summer Camp, and the FrankenToyMobile.
IG | @mowithdaglo
Dhameera MJ | Organizer, Circle Keeper, Educator
Dhameera MJ is a Black queer organizer, educator, and student from over east. Their path in organizing began in 2014 with Chicago Freedom School’s Freedom Fellowship summer program which grounded Dhameera in a youth centered organizing lens, holistic wellness practices, and transformative justice/abolition frameworks. They carried these principles to central Illinois, where they continued to organize in Champaign and Urbana public high schools through their organization My Sister’s Keeper until 2019.
Dhameera returned to the Chicago Freedom School in 2020 to complete the Northstar Fellowship and continue their learning on reimagining schools through trauma informed perspective. Dhameera and their fellows collaborated to create a workshop curriculum and training manual for Chicago Public Schools teachers and students that included historical context for the prevalence of colonial violence within schools and alternative structures to redistribute power within the classroom.
They also love to garden and crochet.
IG | @Ameeracan , Website | https://chicagofreedomschool.org
