LIVE BROADCAST 24 FEBRUARY 2022 @ 10A (EST)

BLACK HOPES + FUTURES 2022: PATHS TO ACTION FEATURING AN INTERNATIONAL ROUNDTABLE MODERATED BY REV. KARLENE GRIFFITHS SEKOU

PATHS TO ACTION is pleased to invite you back to our annual celebration of Black Hopes + Futures on MIDHEAVEN Network — centering on Black visions and voices, we purposefully rise beyond the maze of white supremacy to showcase stories of hope & action from activists worldwide.

Moderator Rev. Karlene Griffiths Sekou is an international human rights advocate, preacher, and scholar who has labored for over twenty-years in public health and grassroots organizing. Her experiences in the areas of health equity, HIV and AIDS prevention, women’s health, community-based participatory models, youth engagement, and maternal and child health informs her framework of cultural regeneration. Cultural regeneration privileges indigeneity and anticolonial ethics and modalities through re-education, training, and reimagined structures. Ms. Griffiths Sekou holds an B.A from Fisk University, an MPH from Boston University School of Public Health, an MTS from Vanderbilt Divinity School, an MDIV from Harvard Divinity School, and is currently a PhD student in Religion, Gender, and Culture at Harvard University. Her research intersects gender, ritual, performance aesthetics, and political identity formation within social movements. Ms. Griffiths Sekou is the founder and principal of The Dignity Project International, LLC and she serves as Director of Healing Justice and Global Village for Black Lives Matter Grassroots. Her passion is to nourish relationships, create structures, systems, and processes that affirm and support all human dignity across cultures, geographies, and movements, especially through ritual and the arts.

Panelist Shakeda Williams has been an Industrial Relations Officer of the Barbados Workers' Union for just over three years. She has been a youth advocate for over 15 years and women’s advocate her entire life. She lives by the quote of Mahatma Gandhi: Live as if you were to die tomorrow, learn as if you were to live forever. She has a Masters' degree in Labour and employment relations and her motivation for doing that was her parents who are both migrants from two different Caribbean countries other than where they live.

Panelist Mari Faines, MSc brings valuable experience to Physicians for Social Responsibility from her background as a corporate project manager, podcast host, and diversity & equity activist, building on her skills in business and client management, non-profit organizational development, policy, fundraising, communications and marketing. Faines holds a Master of Science in the Politics of Conflict, Rights, and Justice from SOAS University of London. Her Undergraduate research from Colgate University and Post-Graduate Academic research specialize in conflict resolution, transitional justice, and racial disparities in the US, sub-Saharan Africa, and throughout the diaspora. Faines serves on the Board of Women of Color Advancing Peace and Conflict, UK, and as UK Project Lead & Steering Committee Member for their global DEI initiative ‘Organisations in Solidarity’.  Faines also serves as the founder and host of the WCAPS-UK Podcast ‘Got Melanin’. Faines’ most recent political and advocacy activities include work with Democrats Abroad, African Development Forum, the London Conversations; Foreign Policy for America Next Gen fellow, and as a UNITE 2030 Youth Delegate Lead for the 2021 program focused on UN Global Goals. Faines has rooted her life’s work in her passionate belief that only through unselfish commitment, and authentic innovative collaboration, can we ever hope to achieve optimum health, equity, justice and peace, for all populations. Twitter: DiasporaDiva_

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CREATIVE DIRECTOR × EXECUTIVE PRODUCER GEORGE DEL BARRIO

art director AL-KHABIR RICHMAN

DIRECTOR OF AUDIO ADRIAN MARTINEZ

DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY BRIAN GONZALEZ

CAMERA OPERATOR IAN CHEN

COMPOSER + ASSOCIATE PRODUCER bandit lu

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