Online Workshops for Our Time
For Our Community Members
Community members can come once or twice, to tell a particular story that needs to be told. Or continue week after week to shape stories for readings, web publications, or book length projects.
For Our Community Members
For Our Students
Students can partake in these workshops for credit, as an internship, community service, or volunteer experience.
For Our Students
Herstory Writers Workshop and the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University are excited to join forces with our current online writing circle for environmental justice, climate action and hope, as we provide a wider umbrella for stories of that will give a new shape to the healing of our communities, spirits, and land.
Healing Our Communities, Spirits and Land
Regeneration, Resilience and Rebirth
Thursdays 6:30-8:30 pm via ZOOM
Paintings by Gwynne Duncan for Herstory's Paintings for Justice archive
From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter
This is Everybody’s Movement
Mondays 7:00-9:00 pm via ZOOM
Ongoing
This workshop offers a literary space for civil rights veterans of the 1960’s and young activists of today, to write and share their personal stories, lessons learned and visions and prescriptions for transformative social change. New writers are invited to join this ongoing workshop, founded to engage activist elders in writing side by side with young people coming up through Black Lives Matter. Join former sharecroppers, student activists, immigrant human rights and philanthropic leaders from Long Island, South Carolina, Arkansas, Washington DC, Maryland, New York City, Minnesota, California and more, to develop a story-based strategy around the work that transformed the nation, and our lives, that continues to redefine America today.
SPECIAL THANKS TO THE JACOB VOLKMAN HUMAN RIGHTS FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM
Health Justice and Healing
in a Time of Pandemic
Mondays 6:30-8:30 pm via ZOOM
Starting August 23rd
This workshop will bring together health care providers, first responders and those who are most impacted by healthcare disparities to raise their voices to illuminate the entrenched social determinants, injustices and inequities that have become even more pronounced in the wake of COVID-19.
SPECIAL THANKS TO THE MALKA FUND
Freedom to Love
and the Movements that Shape Us
Tuesdays 6:30-8:30 pm via ZOOM
Ongoing
This intergenerational workshop creates a safe, vibrant space for people of all ages to shape their stories of the many ways of loving in an ever-changing, ever-evolving landscape, with the goal of bringing their stories into the worldwide struggle for full human rights. It brings together LGBTQ, and Feminist activists to share the individual stories that make up their movements. Activists young and old, experienced and new, are welcome to join our growing writing circle exploring the changes in these movements over the decades, as they find a commonality and strength in their struggles and triumphs.
Making Our Voices Heard
Memoirs to (Re)Imagine Mental Healthcare
Thursdays 4:30-6:30 pm via ZOOM
Ongoing
This workshop invites people who have been affected by the mental healthcare system, who may identify as mad, psychiatric survivors, psychiatric consumers, or neurodivergent, to write their memoir in a mad-affirming, human rights-driven, supportive environment. In this workshop, we will combat stigma and discrimination through the power of storytelling to change hearts, minds, and policies. We invite you to join us to use the power of your voice to (re)shape our mental healthcare system and (re)imagine care.
SPECIAL THANKS TO THE MALKA FUND
Shaping Spaces
Disability Stories to Create a Movement
Saturdays 3:00-5:00 pm via ZOOM
Ongoing
This intergenerational workshop is building a space for disabled people and disabled activists to shape their stories in community with other people with disabilities. This group is open to anyone who identifies as having a disability, be it physical, cognitive, neurodiversity, madness, mental illness, chronic illness, or any other disability experience. Join us in crafting stories and pushing toward a more just world for disabled people.
SPECIAL THANKS TO THE MALKA FUND
Escucha nuestras voces
Immigrant Stories for Our Time
Todos los miércoles de 6:30 a 8:30 pm vía ZOOM
Se reandurán en enero
Este taller es ofrecido en español. El taller involucra, entre otros, a miembros de la comunidad de Rural & Migrant Ministry, Long Island Head Start, estudiantes de escuelas secundarias y de universidades, junto con estudiantes locales, participantes nacionales e internacionales quienes escriben en el idioma de sus sueños para construir puentes de acción y esperanza.
Immigrant Stories for Our Time
The Truth Fights Free
Refocusing Memoir/ Reclaiming Our Lives
Sundays 6:00-8:00 pm via ZOOM
Ongoing
While memoir is about the past, which cannot be undone, as much as we might wish this, the ways in which we are able to shift the jagged shards of our memories, in the need to redo and retell, can be startlingly beautiful, life changing and profound. Led by Chad Seader and Danielle Pappo, two of the 2021 Herstory/CCW fellows, this online drop-in workshop will be focused on untangling those moments when our entire narratives suddenly shift, either by an external event or an internal change within us, and affirming what takes shape as a result of these shifts.
Pandemic Narratives
Public Health and Human Rights in a Time of COVID
Tuesdays 7:00-9:00 pm via ZOOM
Ongoing
We invite you to join a new online writing circle for first responders who have been working on the front line, including medical personnel at all levels, doctors, nurses, nurses aids, home care workers, EMS and hospital workers on the ground, police, food pantry workers, counselors and teachers, and students who have risked their lives in order to continue in school or help their families, who are serving as essential workers in fast food, instacart delivery, group homes, cleaning houses, and more… In partnership with the Humanities Institute and the Pandemic Narratives Initiative at Stony Brook University.
OUR ONLINE COMMUNITY
As we approach a new season, we are so moved by the way our writers have been using the ZOOM platform to bridge the multitude of distances that have set us apart, as the act of passing along the dare to care-- the cornerstone of Herstory’s method and magic—creates connectedness, community across an ever-widening geographical landscape, while each new piece of writing adds to the movement for equity, inclusion and compassion, and the restoration of our most basic human rights, one story at a time.
As we continue to offer our workshops online, even as we open in person in the jails and schools, there is a silver lining in that we are no longer bound by the difficulties posed by the lack of accessibility to transportation and the endemic segregation of our neighborhoods, each in its own silo.