Tiny aka Lisa Gray-Garcia is the cofounder (with her late mama, Dee) of POOR Magazine, a grassroots arts and media-justice organization in San Francisco. Tiny and Dee were houseless for much of Tiny’s childhood, evading various systems that threatened to institutionalize, exploit, and incarcerate them. They survived and fought back by remaining fiercely dedicated to each other, creating independent microbusinesses to make ends meet, becoming underground avant-garde art celebrities, and creating POOR Magazine to make silenced voices of poor and indigenous people heard through media and art. Tiny tells their story in her 2006 memoir, Criminal of Poverty: Growing up Homeless in America (City Lights). Continue reading “Community Reparations Now! Tyrone Boucher and Tiny aka Lisa Gray-Garcia Talk Revolutionary Giving, Class, Privilege, and More”
Enough in a College Course
by Andrew Willis Garcés
This semester I had the privilege of teaching a course at Georgetown University through the Program on Justice and Peace called “Social Justice: Sustaining Activism.” It was conceived as a place for student activists to take a step back from their justice work and the stress of deadlines, graduation and impending debt service to reflect on their commitments to continuing that work beyond their lives as students. In addition to two and a half hours of classtime each week — designed to be experiential and with peer support time built-in — the students were each paired up with longtime local activists to interview, several of whom were invited to present as guest facilitators. Each day was focused on unpacking one topic related to sustaining social change work, like “How Does Social Change Happen?,” “Nurturing Radical Vision,” “Facing Unequal Privilege” and “Emotional/Spiritual Sustainability & Avoiding Burnout.”