Running February - April 2024, Living Futures Saturdays is a monthly event series featuring climate-engaged presenters from a variety of disciplines. Join us as we listen, learn, and create community and new knowledge.
Our April 6 event will feature presentations from cultural organizer and performer Dasan Ahanu and writer Kate Schapira, followed by community conversation and connection. Individual tickets are now available for in-person attendance at American Underground in Durham, NC, or via livestream.
Presentation Topics
Kate Schapira: "‘The World Belongs to Everybody’: Finding Our Community Abundance and Climate Potential”
Kate Schapira will lead participants in reflective and imaginative exercises to draw on their own sources of strength and identity their collective ability to meet climate change and the forces that cause it. You'll walk away with a plan and companions in your next climate commitment.
Dasan Ahanu: "ARTiculating Change : Art as tool for Climate Justice”
Art is a valuable tool. It allows for personal exploration, provides catharsis, fosters collective understanding, and can deliver powerful and necessary messages. What does it mean to envision and develop art based initiatives that can address critical climate issues, assist those impacted, build collaboration, and provide greater efficacy in community engagement?
About the Presenters
Christopher Massenburg, better known as Dasan Ahanu, is a public speaker, organizer, curator, educator, poet, spoken word artist, songwriter, emcee, and loyal Hip Hop head born and raised in Raleigh, North Carolina. He is co-founder and managing director of Black Poetry Theatre, a Durham based theatre company that creates and produces original poetry and spoken word based productions. As an active participant in poetry slam, Dasan has competed regionally and nationally as a founding member and coach of Durham, NC’s own Bull City Slam Team. In 2010 and 2014, Ahanu led the Bull City Slam Team in winning the Southern Fried Southeastern Regional Poetry Slam, the largest regional poetry slam in the country. He also led the team to a 3rd place finish at the 2010 National Poetry Slam and a 2nd place finish in Group Piece Finals at the 2012 National Poetry Slam. He serves as the Cultural Organizing Director for the NC Climate Justice Collective.
Kate Schapira has been listening to people about climate change for ten years, at the Climate Anxiety Counseling booth and elsewhere. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, where she teaches nonfiction writing at Brown University and is involved with local efforts toward environmental justice, climate justice and peer mental health support. The exercises in her first work of nonfiction, Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth, offer actionable steps for connecting with others, identifying and activating community abundance, matching your skills with organized climate activism, and imagining a radically more livable future in order to bring it into being. She partners with community health initiatives, museums, schools and universities, career development offices and community organizations to implement and adapt these exercises to further and deepen their missions and visions. In addition to Lessons from the Climate Anxiety Counseling Booth. Kate is also the author of six books of poetry, and her prose has appeared in Catapult, The Rumpus, The Toast, and as a chapbook from Essay Press called Time to Be Something Other Than Human. She never met a tidepool she didn’t like.