our origin

The People’s Saturday School was founded in June 2020 as a grassroots collective dedicated to co-creating liberatory educational spaces by and for Black, Indigenous and People of Color to deepen our analysis and skill in the struggle for abolition.

Our 2020 team emerged from Black, queer, feminist, and migrant movements across the East Coast.

In our early stages of development, we hosted weekly member meetings with rotating co-facilitators where we engaged in relationship building, political education, committee updates, and consensus-based decision making.

We co-designed a digital library and the curriculum for a 6-week course that covered the following topics:

    • global working class solidarity
    • abolition feminism
    • disability justice & care work
    • transformative justice & community accountability

We offered 5 sections of the course between July 18 and August 22, 2020. Each course ran virtually with 1 or 2 facilitators and a peer support guide.

75 people ages 16-44 registered for our pilot course!

Participants included:

    • organizers & activists
    • high school and college students
    • higher ed professionals
    • k-12 educators

Courses were exclusively for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color and were free of charge.

Our first season was intense and imperfect.

We do not romanticize community or movement work. We honor our rage, grief, and sadness. We’ve learned there are no shortcuts in building healthy relationships, organizations, schools, and movements.

After a two year hiatus, we applied for and received seed funding and capacity building support for our Spring 2023 Praxis Group through Seeding Conscious Co-Creation (SCC), a program of Co-Creating Effective & Inclusive Organizations (CEIO) to hold a six-month community of practice for facilitators entitled Praxis Group.

In this new season, we (re)commited to slowing down and taking care of ourselves and each other in order to stay the course as facilitators, organizers, and people.

Thank you to our summer 2020 core organizers, facilitators, guides, and additional members and supporters:

Britni Louise, danilo machado, Jae Aviles, Julian Rose, José Figueroa, Katia Ruesta Daley, Kiara Ruesta, Mick Powell, Nanee Sajeev, varun khattar sharma, Kiana Clark, Jerie Choi Ortiz, Laura Veira Ramirez, Rachel Wada, Yenimar Cortes, Angel Cotto, Lindaluz Carrillo, Nishelli Ahmed, Sarana Carter, Kristianna Smith, Yanitza Cubilette, Gabbie Barnes, Cristher Estrada-Perez, Ingrid Semaan, JaQuan Beachem, Patrick Rico Williams, Amanda Naimie, Rinne-Julie Früster

Thank you to the constellation of abolitionists, past and present, who illuminated the path for us.