Sunday, May 16th, 3:00pm-5:00pm~Report Back from the 50 Year Anniversary of the Student Nonviolent Coordination Committee (SNCC) Conference to commemorate the April, 1960 founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at Shaw University, Raleigh, N.C. The conference was held on April 15-18, 2010 in Raleigh, North Carolina. Our local activists/organizers who attended the conference will provide their insights, expections and hopes inspired by the SNCC 50th Anniversary. Sister Dorie Ladner, Brother Lawerence Guyot, Sister Gail Dixon, Brother Acie Byrd, Lois Wiley, Kamau Benjamin, and many others will give a full report to our community. Location: SSB
Saturdays, May 21st-June 26th, 3:30pm-5:00pm~A Women’s Support Group – Are you a woman of color looking for a safe and supportive environment in which to share and grow? Do you wish you had opportunities to discuss issues of concern with other women? Are you tired of going it alone? If the answer is yes, you are invited to join us for an interactive, enjoyable, and transformative experience. Location: 276 Carroll Street, N.W. (Seeker’s Church), near the Takoma Metro. Parking is available in the rear of the building.Cost: $250.00 for six sessions. Led by: Dr. Theresa Ford, a skilled and sensitive psychotherapist with over 30 years of experience in conducting individual, group, and family therapy. For more information, please contact Theresa Ford at 240-354-3854.
Fester: Lilies that fester stink worse than weeds by Shantella Sherman. An affair built on an un-kept promise… A marriage that defines one sister, while diminishing the other… A remedy of inconvenient convenience…A sisterly loyalty that both festers and thrives in guilt. Sisters, Lillian and Lindersyl Gottlieb are fifty-something-year-old Black women with everything: Prestige, wealth, men and a family legacy held globally in high esteem. The “stuff” that makes for Essence and Time magazine articles about beautiful, powerful women, the “Gottlieb girls” are perfect – provided they are kept as far from one another as possible. But when an innocent business trip brings Lindersyl back to her family estate after a forced 17-year exodus, secrets, lies, and not so neatly packaged family ties begin to unravel. With her niece Grier in tow, Lindersyl treads back to Gottlieb Grove to face Lillian and her brother-in-law Johnathan Holland, whose mal-union of thirty-four years ignites in animosity at the mere mention of her name. As the Gottlieb-Holland offspring (Grier, Eisendorff, and Chasen) attempt to marry their family’s surreptitious past with the dissonant melodrama playing out before them, their lives spin out of control. Will blood prove thicker than water? Or will the besotted love of a once-forbidden union blindly push the sisters to a breaking point? Shantella Sherman is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in The Washington Informer newspaper and The Philadelphia Tribune and NAACP’s Crisis magazines. Ms. Sherman is a native of Washington, D.C. and is currently working on her doctoral degree in African-American History and Popular Culture.
Lady Bug: Spectacular Stories by Melanie Marshall. If you love fantastic stories, and don’t mind a bit of squirming, Melanie Marshall has them for you right here. Find out what it’s like to fly in the Himalayas and have a bee as a pet. When’s the last time you hunted termites or came face-to-face with mad dogs? Ever get caught with your hand in the till and have to take some bitter medicine? (Don’t do it.) Read about it instead. Meet a mouse that negotiates a truce between enemies! These are just a few of the stories that will steamroller you into disbelief. Pick any story. Be glad it never happened to you. Or, wish it had. Laugh and cringe in the same sentence. Go ahead, don’t believe a single one. So what if they are true? Journey from Kathmandu, Nepal to Kensington, Maryland; Bobo Dioulasso Burkina Faso to the Swiss Alps and then; to the ancient town of Carthage in Tunisia. Ladybug’s perspective may be different, but the sentiment, faith and lessons from the school of hard knocks are not only touching, they are hard earned and remembered. And, best of all, hilarious. Melanie Marshall was born in Washington, D.C. The youngest of five, at three months of age she moved with her family to Kathmandu, Nepal, and lived there for seven years. After returning to the United States for a year of home leave, she moved with her family to Upper Volta, now known as Burkina Faso, where her father, a career foreign service officer, had been newly assigned. While in West Africa, Ms. Marshall traveled extensively throughout the region with her parents in Bertha, the family’s trusted Ford station wagon. Soon, boarding school in Switzerland intervened and the family subsequently moved to Chad. Their next post was Tunisia where she went to school and lived for several years. Although raised primarily overseas, Ms. Marshall now lives in Washington, D.C., and considers herself a faithful Washingtonian. She would be the first to say that writing about her experiences has taken her by surprise and she hopes you enjoy these stories. As they are all true, please be mindful when reading them to children, and caution them not to attempt to replicate these outstanding adventures. Location: SSB
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Shireen Mitchell: Digital Sisters, Founder
Saturday, May 22nd, 11:00am-1:00pm~ Discussion on Social MediaLocation: SSB
As a teenager growing up in the New York City Projects in the 1980s, Shireen Mitchell ventured where no young black girl had ventured before: the local video arcade. “The store owners tried to kick me out because I could beat anyone there with a quarter, so they weren’t making any money,” Mitchell says. “I couldn’t imagine anyone who didn’t like tech — that was my world. But in 1984, I was the only female there.” Today the company Mitchell keeps outside the arcade is not that different. A social-media consultant, diversity advocate, and tech nonprofit founder, she still often finds herself the only African-American female on IT teams and at conferences. Only about a fifth of science and engineering managers are female, and even fewer make it to the board level of prominent high-tech firms.“Even if the door is wide open and unlocked,” she says, “if someone walks past the room and peeks in and sees a bunch of white men, they’ll wonder if they’re welcome. Until everyone understands what it’s like to walk through a door when the people inside don’t look like you and wonder why you’re there, we still have work to do.”For Mitchell, this work comes in the form of Digital Sisters, an organization she founded to provide young girls early exposure to technology and, even more important, an environment that encourages their passion. Mitchell remembers her own youth: “In high school I had all the tech savvy, but I had counselors that would try to gear me toward something other than tech.” Without creating silos, she says we need to close the gap between the support women and men receive when interested in technology. “We encourage boys more in these spaces because we anticipate their success, even if we don’t see it yet. Whereas with girls, we wait to see their success before we believe it.”Today, plenty of people have become believers in Mitchell and are starting to practice what she’s preaching. Jon Pincus, former general manager of strategy development in online services at Microsoft, has recruited Mitchell to work closely with him on his new Seattle-based startup, Qworky. “Most software is written by guys for people like themselves. Even if it’s unconscious, it seeps into everything,” Pincus says. For this reason, he’s tapping Mitchell to help him design Qworky’s technology, culture, and Internet presence to be more inviting to a diversity of users from the get-go. “One of her real strengths is that she balances the tech aspect, the social aspect, and the political aspect. You can usually find someone who can do two of those,” Pincus says. “It’s very rare to find someone who can balance all three.”As Mitchell looks out over the technology horizon, she sees more and more opportunities for women, particularly in social media. They take as a starting point the way people organize information and think socially, and design technology around those interactions — which Mitchell thinks is perfect for drumming up greater female involvement. “It will not only attract more girls,” she says, “but it will speak more to the things they’re good at.”Among those things, according to Mitchell, are patience, meticulousness, and an instinct to make sure something works perfectly before handing it off — traits, she points out, that were part of the reason why many of the early programmers in the 1940s and 1950s were female. “When it comes to tech, especially design, I can tell you without question that girls are better at it,” Mitchell says. “We wouldn’t have a version 6 with bugs still in it. Women wouldn’t allow that.” –Lillian Cunningham
Digital Sisters1701 K. Street N.W. Suite 400Washington, DC 20036Voice: 202-722-6881Fax: 202-722-8604
The National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) has opened registration for The Summer Engineering Experience for Kids (SEEK) camp. SEEK is a free three-week program targeting students in grades 3-8. This program will introduce students to the science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields. The program is facilitated primarily by collegiate members of NSBE. Teams of SEEK students will work with NSBE mentors in classroom settings to research and design hands-on activities that they will use to compete on a weekly basis during the camp. The curriculum is provided mainly by the Society of Automotive Engineers. Registrations will be received until April 30, 2010 or until all classes are filled to capacity. The camp runs from July 12 to July 30 at the following locations:
Grades 3-5:Friendship Public Charter School ,Woodridge Campus
2959 Carlton Avenue, N.E.Grades 6-8:Friendship Public Charter School, Blow Pierce Campus
725 19th Street, N.E.
To register online visit the SEEK website, or call 703-549-2207
