At the beginning of December the White Noise Collective core met to examine our experiences from 2015 and envision new intentions for the coming year.  How quickly yet another year has passed, full of new growing edges, community building, core transitions, and ever-deepening practices.  Reflecting on our intentions from our past retreat, it is powerful to witness how the past year was indeed full of manifestation of so much intention: direct action organizing, a new presence on twitter (that we are still co-evolving with), maintaining an action listserve, some beautifully juicy and complex community dialogues, a new dialogue space specifically for movement activists, and two newly developed workshops – one on the role of white women in upholding, maintaining, and subverting systems of violence and the other, that we offered twice this year on Difficult Conversations.

In 2016, we aspire to bring more creativity to our work with one another and in the collective.  To enact this, we each created a collage inspired by the prompt: “Looking back at the end of 2016, what will you have brought individually and collectively to our work?”  The results were delightful:

To spend more time with our creative energies in 2016, including engaging in creative destruction, the core will be meeting once a month to focus our energies specifically on creation (writing, developing new curriculum, envisioning creative actions, and engaging in art, poetry, storytelling and other creative modalities).  In addition, we’ll be reaching out to our collective and to individuals who are interested in partaking in this creative engagement with us, and hope that many of you will join us along the way!

With this new energy toward creation, we are excited to also provide the following offerings in 2016:

• Our ongoing and ever-loved monthly community dialogues, most often on the third Wednesday of the month from 6-9 (with a few exceptions!)
• Our first ever book group!  Twice a year we will host a dialogue focused on a more critical read at a longer text, with a chance to nerd out collectively and explore how academic and intellectual concepts can impact and transform our lives.  In May we’ll be discussing The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries by Kathi Weeks.  In October we’ll be discussing Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination.
• A few new workshops being developed and offered this year, including a workshop in collaboration with one of our collective members for their master’s thesis called “Developing White Resilience”

In the coming year the WNC core also hopes to continue to grapple with, formalize, and transform our accountability and advising structures.

If you would like to support us in reviewing 2015 and planning 2016, please fill out our Annual Year-End Survey.

We are excited to bring this energy into the new year and see how we can grow in 2016.