How can communities ensure that their voices genuinely shape the policies and decisions that impact their lives, their neighborhoods, their cities?

While participation is central to democratic ideals, meaningful influence in government, education, nonprofit, and especially corporate decision-making remains rare. Too often, “community engagement” is reduced to public relations—accessible primarily to those with time, access, and insider fluency.

This talk introduces Creative Instigation: an approach to authentic engagement that blends the field methods of documentarians and ethnographers, the strategic rigor of community organizers, the contextual depth of qualitative research and journalism, and the grounded imagination of socially engaged artists. The goal is not performative participation—but durable institutional and social change.

Drawing on complex, multi-year projects spanning rural Maui County, metropolitan Phoenix, activist communities in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the corporate landscape of a global biotech firm, Fern Tiger will describe creative efforts to rebalance power and confront social, economic, and political inequities.

At its strongest, Creative Instigation does more than inform decision-makers. It elevates historically marginalized voices, reshapes narratives, and catalyzes solutions rooted in lived experience. In a time of eroding trust in institutions and widening inequality, authentic engagement is not optional—it is foundational to democracy itself.

About Fern Tiger

Fern Tiger is the founder and creative director of Fern Tiger Associates (FTA), based in Oakland, California. The firm is grounded in the belief that “with reflective strategy and innovative design, positive and constructive social change is not only possible—it is inevitable.” 

Trained in art and media, with advanced study in human–environment relations, and art and cognition, Fern Tiger built a transdisciplinary approach to strategy and research—one that bridges creative inquiry with policy and systems thinking. Her work has led to professorships in diverse departments from art to public policy and urban studies; she has served on the faculties of Pennsylvania State University, Washington University in St. Louis, Arizona State University, and the University of Washington Tacoma. Fern has published and lectured broadly on topics related to the nonprofit sector, authentic community engagement, and the dynamic intersections of the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. www.ferntiger.com

This event is offered by GWI in partnership with Radio Kingston & Rough Draft Bar & Books

Join us as we welcome Báyò Akómoláfé to the GWI Greenhouse for an author talk. A posthumanist polymath and “trans-public” intellectual, Báyò Akómoláfé has produced a vast body of work that presents a startling picture of the world in perpetual process and radical relation. Through an ever-growing archive of books, articles, interviews, social media posts, workshops, and rituals, Akómoláfé seeks to interrogate the fundamental assumptions and epistemological gaps in our current culture in crisis. 

You can experience more by visiting Dancing With Mountains where Bayo offers an invitation to inhabit the cracks where the world is still being made.

Listen to The Good Work Hour episode from July 2024, Rethinking Our Relationship to Reality with Bayo Akomolafe

Báyò’s new book Selah: A Báyò Akómoláfé Reader presents a poetically arranged selection of Akómoláfé’s short-form writings, which draw inspiration from Édouard Glissant; Gilles Deleuze; Gregory Bateson; Octavia Butler; Fernand Deligny; Chinua Achebe; the adventures of Esu, the Yoruba monster-trickster and crossroads figure; and more. A tightly curated composition of aphorisms, anti-epiphanies, prose poems, and philosophical fragments, Selah invites readers into the thicket of Akómoláfé’s thought, weaving together threads of his most critically creative concepts—such as ontofugitivity, ecocognitive assemblage theory, parapolitics, and postactivism. Taking its title from an enigmatic Hebrew word that appears throughout the Book of Psalms—one that suggests a moment of ecstatic exclamation or musical notation—Selah is a book that can be read in an hour or studied for years, kept by your bedside or passed among friends like an open secret. For those already swimming in the depths of Akómoláfé’s language, as well as those encountering his dynamic body of work for the first time, Selah offers an accessible and ecstatic entry into a visionary thinker’s signature thought and poetics.

GWI is excited to welcome author & journalist Osita Nwanevu to Kingston for a talk highlighting his book, The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding. Join us at the GWI Greenhouse for an afternoon of conversation with Osita, followed by an audience Q&A. 

In this urgent and visionary work, Nwanevu—a contributing editor for The New Republic and columnist for The Guardian—tackles questions that resonate deeply in our current moment: Are our democratic institutions fundamentally broken? How can a divided nation govern itself? Does democracy still work as we believe it should?

Drawing on democratic theory, American history, and contemporary politics, Nwanevu argues that genuine democracy requires transformation not only of our political institutions but of our economic systems as well. His work offers a bold roadmap for creating what he calls a “New American Founding”—one committed to government of, by, and for all people, not just the privileged few

Event Overview:

• 2:45 – 3:15pm Check-in, pick up your book, grab a drink/snack, and settle in! (coffee/snacks provided by Kingston Bread & Bar)
• 3:15-4:45pm Osita, in conversation with Micah, will discuss The Right of the People. They will then open it up to the audience for a Q&A
• 4:45- 5:00pm Book-signing + mingling!

About Osita Nwanevu:

Osita Nwanevu is a contributing editor at The New Republic, a columnist at The Guardian, and the Democratic Institutions fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. He is a former staff writer at The New Republic, The New Yorker, and Slate, and his work has also appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, Harper’s Magazine, the Columbia Journalism Review, In These Times, Flaming Hydra, and Gawker. His first book, The Right of the People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding, was published by Random House in August 2025.

 

About the book:

Frustrated with our political dysfunction, wearied by the thinness of contemporary political discourse, and troubled by the rise of anti-democratic attitudes across the political spectrum, journalist Osita Nwanevu has spent the Trump era examining the very meaning of democracy in search of answers to questions many have asked in the wake of the 2024 election: Are our institutions fundamentally broken? How can a country so divided govern itself? Does democracy even work as well as we believe?

The Right of the People offers us challenging answers: while democracy remains vital, American democracy is an illusion we must make real by transforming not only our political institutions but the American economy. In a text that spans democratic theory, the American Founding, our aging political system, and the dizzying inequalities of our new Gilded Age, Nwanevu makes a visionary case for a political and economic agenda to fulfill the promise of American democracy and revive faith in the American project.

GWI is thrilled to welcome New York Times bestselling author of My Grandmother’s Hands Dr. Resmaa Menakem to Kingston for a talk about his new book The Stories From My Grandmother’s Hands. He will be joined by co-author T. Mychael Rambo. Copies of their new book will be available for sale. The talk will be followed by a Q&A.

“In today’s America, we tend to think of healing as something binary: either we’re broken or we’re healed from that brokenness. But that’s not how healing operates, and it’s almost never how human growth works. More often, healing and growth take place on a continuum, with innumerable points between utter brokenness and total health.” ― Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies

This free, public event is sponsored by GWI, and supported by Rough Draft Bar & Books with support from the Radio Kingston Community Tech Team.

Event Overview:

• 5:45 – 6:00pm : Check-in, pick up your book, grab a drink/snack, and settle in!
• 6:00 – 7:15pm : Resmaa Menakem and T. Mychael Rambo, in conversation with Micah (GWI), discussing The Stories From My Grandmother’s Hands.
• 7:15 – 8:00pm : Book-signing + mingling!

About Resmaa Menakem:

Embodied provocateur, multiple-levels thinker, and structural paradigm-shifter Resmaa Menakem (MSW, LICSW, SEP), is an author, agent of change, therapist, and licensed clinical worker specializing in racialized trauma, communal healing, and cultural first aid based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. As the originator and leading proponent of Somatic Abolitionism, an embodied antiracist practice for living and culture building, Resmaa is the founder of Justice Leadership Solutions and the Cultural Somatics Institute and is an educator and coach. Working at the intersections of anti-racism, communal healing, and embodied purpose, Resmaa Menakem is the challenging yet compassionate coach we all need in this time of racial reckoning and near-global dysregulation.

About T. Mychael Rambo:

T. Mychael Rambo is a three-time Mid-West Emmy Award winning actor, vocalist, author, arts educator, and community organizer/healer; whose talents have made an indelible mark on stages across the twin cities. nationally and internationally. He has appeared in local and national television commercials, feature films, HBO mini-series and other television programming. Nationally and internationally his credits include Carnegie Hall and performances abroad in Africa, Europe, and South America. T. Mychael is an accomplished recording artist, highly sought-after public speaker, and affiliate professor in the College of ‪Liberal Arts, Theatre Arts and Dance at the University of Minnesota; where he has taught in excess of 20 years.