Current Bay Area Black Folks Dinner Series: The FreeFolk Fly! 

(Every 3rd Sunday at a FreeFolk House)

Following the opening performance rituals of The People Could Fly: A#DignityInProcess Black Dreaming Exodus, newly initiated FreeFolk take flight, collectively hosting this series of Bay Area Black Folks Dinners the third Sunday of every month. Break bread and build community as we bring back Sunday dinners and kitchen table organizing FreeFolk style! This series is also the launch of the #DignityInProcess Wisdom Councils. Every dinner will feature an Afro-Indigenous Wisdom Keeper who will pass down a liberatory practice to the next generation, infusing our grassroots movements with ancestral tools for healing and sustainability. If you are interested in becoming a Wisdom Keeper and joining a Bay Area Wisdom Council this is a great way to jump into the process! You can also reach out to che.art.life@gmail.com to request more information. 

ENTERING THE SPACE: We are in the collective practice of creating safe sacred space for ALL Black bodies to be wholly nourished. We enter the home of our community kin with reverence. We bring food lovingly prepared to share in our potluck-stlye Black Folks Dinner with a label naming ingredients. We come as Fragrance-free as possible to support the accessibility of the space. We bring an offering for our Radical Black Dreaming altar. Deep gratitude in advance! 

*PLEASE NOTE: This event is exclusively for people who identify within the Black/ African/ Creole/ Indigenous/ Afro-Latinx/ Afro-Indigenous Diaspora. We are intentionally centering QTGNC 2-S magik.

More about the origins of Black Folks Dinners:

Co-founders: ChE & Eb Brown

A safe space for people of African descent to gather once a month over a shared meal and stories of resiliency, while building community solidarity, leveraging collective resource, and strategically addressing needs of the Black community. With a collective presence reaching the thousands across multiple cities, dinners are attended by a wide range of Black-identified individuals differing in sexual orientation, gender identity, ability, lineage, and economic background. Black Folks Dinners chapters include: Seattle, Brooklyn, Bay Area, Charlotte, Las Vegas, and it keeps growing!

Former dinners have included themes of Black Evolution: Arts & Activism, When Spirit Moves, Community is HEALING, and many more. Former hosts have included Omi Gallery/ Impact Hub Oakland, The LivingRoom Project, Black Folks House, and the homes of Black Lives Matter activists. 

Black Folks Dinners and #DignityInProcess..

Beginning in the Spring of 2014, ChE curated a series of Black Folks Dinners that centralized art practice, performance, and ritual as a means of discussing queerness, mixed race identity, and activism in the Black community. Beginning with questions as a central part of their process, ChE led the group through a series of interactive activities that gave shape conversations of embodied Liberation. Many of these interactive art dinners were recorded and documented. These rich acrhival conversations challenging one dimensional definitions of identity continue to be woven into the performances and installations of #DignityInProcess.