Ferguson and New Orleans: Black Lives Matter

Saturday, April 11, 2015

Featuring:

Ashana Bigard, Pam Nath and Toya Lewis

Community Organizers Ashana Bigard and Pam Nath will reflect on their trip to Ferguson this past Fall, and along with Toya Lewis from the local chapter of the Black Youth Project will make connections to organizing here in New Orleans.

Ashana Bigard is a life-long resident of New Orleans, mother of three, social justice organizer, and a long-time advocate for the health and wellness needs of children and families in Louisiana. Ashana currently advocates for the rights of students and parents in New Orleans’ complex, demoralizing, and rapidly privatizing public education systems through her leadership with the Community Education Project of New Orleans; and as an adult ally and advisor to United Students of New Orleans. In addition to education equity activism, Ashana organizes with the Women’s Health & Justice Initiative and for expended housing affordability opportunities for low-income families.
Ashana has worked with a diverse range of youth, education, and juvenile justice-based organizations including the New Orleans Parents Organizing Network, Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children, and Agenda For Children.

Pam Nath has been living in New Orleans and working as a Community Organizer for going on eight years. She works with many groups including European Dissent, a group of white people working together for racial justice; the Orleans Parish Prison Reform Coalition; and the Greater New Orleans Organizers Roundtable. The dismantling of imperialist white supremacist heteropatriarchy, affordable
housing, and prison abolition are just some of the issues about which she cares. She loves being surrounded by water (the Bayou, the Lake, the River), by massive Oak trees, pelicans, and egrets, and by people who work passionately for a better world and who strive to live in Beloved Community with one another.

Latoya "Lovevolution Ex" Lewis is an extremely proud New Orleans Native. After Katrina Toya graduated from Southern University of New Orleans with a bachelors in psychology. While in
college she became a member and soon an organizer of Stand with Dignity, where she organizes structurally under and unemployed workers from communities like B.W. Cooper ( formerly known as the Calliope projects where she was born and raised) to create a community voice that demands full and fair employment for Black un/under employed workers in the city. Toya is also a member of The Black youth project 100, a National organization focused on ending the criminalization of Blackness utilizing a queer feminist lense. Toya is deeply in love with her fiancee, and also a community parent of three children who enjoys spending time on the lake or at city park with her three dogs and experiencing the beauty of all forms of Black artistic expression. To sum it up Toya is an overall advocate for the liberation of all humanity.

Location:

First Unitarian Universalist Church

5212 South Claiborne Av. New Orleans 

(Enter via posted signs at Soniat and South Claiborne)

10am – Progressive, Social Justice Community Networking

with Coffee, Juice and Light Breakfast Pastries*

11am to Noon- Featured Presentation

*$3.00 suggested donation

For more information, contact us:  

info@thecommunitybreakfast.org

Held every second Saturday of each month, the Gillespie Memorial Community Breakfast has been a project of the First Unitarian Universalist Church Social Justice Committee 

since May 1983.