We are grateful for everyone who joined us in person and online for our 92nd Homecoming Sept. 7, 2024!
Homecoming is our favorite weekend of the year at Highlander – every September we bring together hundreds of movement family from around the globe who join for fellowship, learning and strategizing, singing and dancing, and deepening relationships over a meal, a beautiful view of the mountains, or in the quiet moments the Hill provides. This year we flipped the script and spent time at home, The Hill, as well as in our community in Knoxville, partnering with The Beck Cultural Exchange Center for porch talks, workshops, and more in Knoxville, TN.
Check out photos, resources and more from the event below! We’d also love to hear your Homecoming reflections and see your photos and videos! Email us to share your Homecoming memories here.
We are grateful to the Beck Center, all the workshop facilitators, our partner organizations, the folks who kept us well fed, the DJs and square dancers, the healers, and everyone who joined us. Thank you for making this an amazing experience for us all.
"Someone Sang for Me": Jane Sapp
Cultural worker, intergenerational organizer and educator Jane Sapp joined us for a film screening and discussion of the 2002 documentary by Julie Akeret sharing a glimpse into her life and work supporting young people through music education. We were also blessed with an impromtu performance!
A new southern strategy: Rising Majority
Highlander staff Denzel Caldwell and Maria Rincon and board member Loan Tran shared the Rising Majority’s 2050 Vision and the critical role Southern organizations, activists, and communities have in ensuring the vision becomes reality.
politickin' puppets: Children's Justice Camp
Highlander's Children's Justice Camp hosted youth aged 6-12 in a workshop creating sock puppets to star in an original play they wrote and directed sharing a new vision for community governance!
Drums up, guns down
Drums Up, Guns Down hosted a drum circle as the answer to "What's the recipe for culture in this time?" with Obayana Ajanaku. Participants learned about the organization’s ongoing work in Knoxville, and how to use sound as a tool against the tenets of fascism like fear and isolation.
intergenerational organizing 101: seeds of fire
The Seeds Of Fire Advisory Committee's cohort of 2024 hosted this engaging workshop sharing Highlander's methodologies and their practical applications. Participants deepened community connections and collaborations, leaving prepared to implement these methodologies in their communities.
becoming us: community safety
Highlander's Community Safety Team hosted this workshop exploring how the roots of any liberatory forms of transformation, autonomy, or safety all depend on the quality of our relationships and the trust we have with each other. With a transformative-justice informed approach to relationship mapping, participants explored what kinds of interventions might be helpful for building greater trust within the web of relationships in their networks as a whole. Facilitators also shared a tutorial on the tekmîl process that comes from the Kurdish liberation struggle in Turkey and Syria, a practice for surfacing critiques in a way that builds collective trust instead of tearing individuals down, even across power differences.
beautiful Solutions: A toolbox for liberation
Beautiful Solutions Co-authors Eli Feghali and Rachel Plattus joined us for a book talk and lifted up the brilliance of former Highlander educator and Beautiful Solutions co-author Elandria Williams who passed in 2020 during the editing of the book she helped envision and bring to life. Beautiful Solutions reminds us that our problems are global and interconnected, and our solutions must be too. Everything we need to transform our communities already exists. From food sovereignty to debt abolition, from folk schools to energy democracy — and from Argentina to Zimbabwe. If you long for a more beautiful, more just, and more livable world — and want to know how to get there — this book is for you.
how we win: Southern movement committee
Southern Movement Committee members joined us to share how their youth assembly members organized for a historic win this year. Their Varsity Spending Plan was successful at securing a $1 million budget allocation in the City of Nashville to increase programming at community centers, start a restorative justice pilot program at Napier Community Center, and start the country’s first Office of Youth Safety in Nashville. We learned how to bring these strategies to our community organizing and what's next for SMC.
book talks: Neesha Powell-Ingabire & Rae Garringer
Neesa Powell-Ingabire and Rae Garringer joined us for discussions of their respective books, "Come By Here: A Memoir in Essays from Georgia's Geechee Coast", chipping away at coastal Georgia's facade of beaches and golden marshes to recover undertold Black history alongside personal and family stories, and "Country Queers", sharing stories from the multimedia oral history project Rae founded, documenting rural and small town LGBTQIA2S+ experiences since 2013.
cultural organizing 101: Science fair
Participants of the Cultural Organizing 101 program set up science fair displays to show their answers/results to the hypothesis Cultural Organizing has been asking since 2019, “What is the recipe for culture in this time?”. Participants learned how Cultural Organizing is working in the field to build people power across the region, where we are going, and how to plug in.
christian zionism, nationalism & Fascism
This participatory workshop explored Christian Zionism, its dominance in the U.S., and its relation to Christian fascism, investigating how Christian leftists, and leftists of all kinds, can build potent and manifold power as part of the larger coalition fighting for a free, liberated Palestine.
the power of one: GET OUT THE VOTE
Knoxville playwrights Linda Parris Bailey and Drew Drake, with the collaboration of community members such as Theotis Robinson Jr and Rev. Maddox, have been on a journey to explore the issues people are facing around voting, both on a local and national level. They shared a staged reading of their one-act play to empower the audience around voting, question the barriers that disengage us from this form of civic engagement, and begin to plant the seeds for how we can allow the action of “voting” to become Intergenerational.
healing justice with harmony phoenix
Healing justice practitioner Harmony Phoenix held us all throughout Homecoming and supported our participants with one-on-one sessions, spirit engagement, and a meaningful acknowledgement of the land and ancestors on the Hill Friday to ground and root us before we embarked on the weekend's events. HP generously gifted everyone with healing bath salts to take home as part of Homecoming's rest and rejuvenation practice.
FRIDAY NIGHT SQUARE DANCE
We kicked off the weekend with a Family and Friends cookout on the Hill, featuring a square dance with local musicians - we had a blast learning new dances and connecting with new and old friends in the Carawan Cultural Pavilion!
Highlander's 91st Homecoming Sept. 16, 2023
Video by Down the Street Media
We are grateful for everyone who was able to join us at our 91st Homecoming celebration Sept. 16, 2023: “Foundations for the Future” and for everyone who has supported our work, strengthening Highlander’s foundation to help the radical visions of grassroots organizers become reality across our region and beyond.
We had a great day at Homecoming, full of meaningful discussions, amazing workshops, delicious food, healing practices, dancing, laughing, and building new connections and relationships. Many of our attendees at Homecoming this year were visiting Highlander for the first time and we were excited to welcome folks who were eager to share and join in the life-saving, movement-building work of our broader community. We were also grateful to rejoin and connect with old friends, comrades, partners, board members, and former staff members who have built with us and sustained us over many years. Thank you all.
We hope you will engage with these resources from the day’s workshops in you case you missed it or would like to revisit some of the excellent political education and organizing strategies shared at Homecoming. We will follow up with more resources and updates as we continue to reflect and move the lessons from the day into our work moving forward.
Highlander 101 and Methodologies
- Learn more about Highlander’s legacy with this introductory video sharing our history
- Dive into Highlander’s methodologies with these excellent graphics detailing the principles and practices we apply in our work
- Learn about our current work with our latest Program Update on Highlander’s home page
Bodily Autonomy as Praxis
We Outnumber Them: Practical Steps for Fighting Fascism
- Access the Powerpoint from the workshop with amazing facilitators Shawn Fischer and Hilary Moore
“King Coal” film screening and discussion
- Check out an upcoming screening near you
- Schedule a screening near you
Additional Resources from Homecoming
- Support and engage with the healing work of Wind and Warrior
- Support and engage with the cultural work and joy of Black in Space
- Support and engage with Black Power Rangers Comedy
- Check out the offerings from our Septima Clark Learning Center bookstore
Photos by Seed Lynn
Thank You for Joining Us at Highlander's 90th Homecoming!
Thank you for envisioning a new world with us at Highlander’s 90th Homecoming! We are so appreciative of everyone who joined us in person and online, across the globe and across generations, who made this amazing weekend possible. Thank you for being in community with us.
We’re still synthesizing and processing all the visionary wisdom that was shared over our three days together, but we want to invite you to contribute to our collective learning and action steps coming out of the weekend. Did you build new relationships, connect with badass organizers, have an aha moment, or gain new insights that will shift conditions for your community? We want to hear about it! Email us with your notes, stories, lessons, photos, videos, artwork and more to inform our collective future story!
In the meantime, check out some of the highlights from our time together below.
Homecoming is supported in part by grant funding from the Tennessee Arts Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Future Stories
Highlander’s 90th Homecoming celebration “There’s a New World Coming” encouraged us to engage our radical imagination to envision the future world we are building together.
Highlander program participants, staff, and movement family share their future stories in this powerful collection of possibilities.
Kate Morales created this beautiful visual of the weekend’s conversations through community collective storytelling. Fannie Lou Hamer is centered under a North Star, commemorating Regina Taylor’s play “A Seat at the Table” that was performed in a reading Friday night, part of an homage to the many Black women who made Highlander what it is and whose stories were lifted up throughout the weekend.
Kate shared with us that “the two trees anchor each side, with branches reaching out to acknowledge the ones we immediately touch and the ones who are farther away, recognizing we don’t have to be in direct community with everyone to be in community with everyone.”
Like the trees, we have branches in our lungs, torsos, arms, and hands, and we don’t belong in cages and boxes and jails.”
The kids on the hill saw the process and asked Kate to add a rainbow – an hour later, a real rainbow appeared in the sky, centering our manifestation skills. “Write it down, make it beautiful, speak it out, and look at it until it becomes true.” – Kate
Learn More About Our Theme: "There's A New World Coming"
Watch this video to hear the exciting conversation digging deeper into our theme and the song that inspired it. Highlander Co-Executive Director Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson joins the phenomenal Toshi Reagon, a cultural organizer, singer, composer, musician, and producer who is building her own legacy that carries forward and expands on her mother’s work and music, most recently in her opera adaptation of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower.
Homecoming is our favorite weekend of the year at Highlander – every September we bring together hundreds of movement family from around the globe who join for fellowship, learning and strategizing, singing and dancing, and deepening relationships over a meal, a beautiful view of the mountains, or in the quiet moments the Hill provides.
We all leave Homecoming reenergized and recommitted to our work back home, knowing that we are in solidarity and community with a global network of freedom fighters working on the frontlines for transformative social change.
