Dear Friend,

Thanks to your financial, volunteer and spiritual support, Roadwork’s 40th anniversary-year has been pivotal.  What started out as a celebration of Roadwork’s legacy transformed into a commitment to rekindle Roadwork’s mission: building multiracial coalitions through cultural work that centers women’s experiences.

At the heart of Roadwork’s mission is the idea that culture is a strategy of resistance and transformation.  We have produced concerts, tours, marches, rallies, Sisterfire festivals, workshops, and scores of other meetings and events to advance social change.  We supported the organizers of the Women’s March in 2017 as they produced the rally. And just this year, we brought Roadwork’s unique cultural-political message to the National Mall for thousands to hear as we produced Sisterfire at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival.

We have been able to do this because of your support.  And we are writing today to ask you to consider making a year-end contribution to Roadwork’s coming year of work.

We are inspired by a new generation of artists, volunteers, and audience members who are committed to Roadwork’s mission.  Propelled by this support, in 2019 Roadwork will:

• Serve as an incubator for cultural initiatives aimed at advancing social justice and curated by women and queer artists/activists.
• Partner with others to produce cultural arts events to drive 2020 voter registration and voter participation.
• Continue to collect and document the oral histories of the women and men who, years ago, defined the power of intersectional activism and helped invent Roadwork.

With your continued support we will reignite our capacity to produce cultural events, sponsor emerging artists, and partner with sister organizations to promote social, racial and gender justice.

Roadwork is moving forward. We hope you agree that Roadwork is relevant, vibrant and worthy of your support. Please make a contribution today.

With Gratitude,

Your Roadwork Board:

Jessie Washington, Chair
Urvashi Vaid, Immediate Past Chair
Nicole Barden, Secretary
Alexis De Veaux
Michelle Lanchester
Toshi Reagon
Amy Horowitz, Co-founder/Producer

In the finale Sisterfire concert of the 2018 Folklife Festival, Martha Redbone joined Toshi Reagon, BIGLovely, and the Bernice Johnson Reagon Songbook singers in a performance of “Drums.”

Written by folk musician Peter La Farge in 1964, the song describes the U.S. government’s mandate to remove Native American children from reservations for the purpose of education and assimilation into Western culture. It tells the story from the perspective of the thousands of families whose children were forcibly removed from their homelands. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Bureau of Indian Affairs founded additional boarding schools based on the assimilation model of the off-reservation Carlisle Indian Industrial School.

Poetry, whose definition and form has evolved throughout time, has continuously proved to be an expression of strength and revolution from within. Roadwork, a D.C.-based multiracial coalition that puts women artists on the road globally, advocates for the expressive power of poetry. Roadwork attended the 2018 Folklife Festival in the form of the Sisterfire concert as well as poetry, spoken word, and activist reflections on women’s cultures past and future.