Search

Carrol Layfield manages a quilting group of older women from Ritchie County, West Virginia, who used to work in the area’s garment industry. Using techniques handed down over generations, the women piece together quilts from remnants of fabric from shuttered factories. Kayla Turk is a young mother of two children who returned home to Ritchie County to live with her parents when her husband was laid off. At a communal baby shower, Kayla receives a quilt from the older women, and discovers a network of support.

“Padam and Purna were forced from their homeland in Bhutan and trapped in camps in Nepal for decades before being resettled in an alien land: Clarkston, Georgia. The refugees have found some stability, but still feel frustrated and uprooted, which leads to domestic violence and suicide in the refugee community. Padam and Purna realized that familiar food is the first step to feeling at home. They have opened a food store and other refugee-run businesses, which offer safe spaces and sources of mutual support for all the Asian refugees in Clarkston, who are united by their experience of trauma.”

Although raised in a prosperous and prestigious African-American home in Tuskegee, Ala., Sammy Younge found himself drawn most to the civil rights movement. While the cause cost him his life, his actions and determination helped to transform this Southern city.

A Black radical feminist organization of the 1970s, the Combahee River Collective outline their political ideology in their organization’s statement. They argue that race, gender and class oppression intersect to form new levels of inequalities experienced by Black women.

“English Avenue, an historic African-American neighborhood with an illustrious past, sits at the bottom of Atlanta’s water runoff. Blighted by regular flooding, mass vacancies, unemployment, and impoverishment, English Avenue finds hope in a home-grown response from its youth. Longtime resident MacKenzie Bass — along with fellow members of Street Smart — helped construct a park that curbs the excess water, creates a gathering place, and seeks to reclaim English Avenue’s identity.”

Line dance leader Kit Cheung teaches her class of Chinese-American women in an unlikely place: the parking lot of a local library. No other public location offers both the outdoor space and sun cover the group requires for their twist on the traditional Chinese exercise of tai chi. The relationship that forms between the initially reluctant library and Kit’s dance group has created some unexpected opportunities.

“The Fort Peck Assiniboine & Sioux Tribes Reservation in Montana is home to tribes whose culture was defined by their relationship to their land and their horses. Generations of systemic oppression drained their culture of its traditional meaning, and they struggle with grief, shame, and loss. Their trauma has led to fractured families, substance abuse, and a high teen suicide rate. Charlie Four Bear gives troubled Fort Peck youth a chance to build relationships with horses, and through them, with tribal elders like himself, to reclaim their tribal family’s cultural pride.”

The text is a letter from J.H. Adams to the Bethlehem Baptist Association written in 1918.

“Nineteen-year-old Israel Moncado spent his childhood being shuffled from one foster care setting to the next. After years of untreated gender dysphoria, and the bouts of self-harm and social isolation that often result from stigma, Israel visits his first LGBT center and discovers he’s not alone. When he finds a safe space in a transgender community, Israel begins to embrace his identity.”