May 2026 Issue 1
- Cultures Connecting
- May 1
- 8 min read
Transforming White Women's Leadership Lunch & Learn Series
White women in management and supervisory roles are uniquely positioned to make a meaningful difference in advancing racial equity. Many of us are motivated by a genuine commitment to racial justice and a desire to grow our cross-cultural skills to better provide all employees, and especially employees of color, the guidance and opportunities they deserve.
This three-part Lunch and Learn series will support participants to deepen awareness of the presence and impact of institutional power, privilege, and stereotypes that white women leaders both navigate and perpetuate.
May 29th: A Power Analysis: Understanding White Women and Institutional Access.
This session invites us to examine how white women’s position in the hierarchy of institutional access lies between white men and People of Color.
June 5th: Naming our Patterns: Exploring White Women Leadership Personas.
This session invites participants in supervisory and management roles to engage in honest, constructive self-reflection about how their leadership patterns affect colleagues and staff of color.
June 12th: Compassion at Work: Cultivating Belonging Beyond Listening.
This session explores what compassionate leadership looks like when navigating the realities of racial difference, power, and trust in the workplace.
Facilitated by Ilsa Govan and Tilman Smith, co-authors of What's Up With White Women: Unpacking Sexism and Privilege in Pursuit of Racial Justice
All sessions are on Fridays from 12:00-1:00pm PT / 3:00-4:00pm ET
Each session is $25. Take 1, 2, or all!
Optional: $100 follow-up 50-minute coaching session (a $250 savings!)
Click the button below for more details and to register.
Equity Leaders Workshop in One Week!
Equity leadership is evolving and in this moment, clarity, strategy, and community matter.
Leading Equity in Shifting Times brings together equity leaders, formal and informal, who are committed to sustaining belonging-centered organizational change even in shifting political and institutional climates. Participants will learn directly from Cultures Connecting’s seventeen-plus years of experience supporting hundreds of organizations through multicultural organizational development, resistance, and long-term culture change.
Leading Equity is facilitated by Dr. Caprice Hollins and Ilsa Govan and will take place on May 7th & 8th at 8:30-12:00pm PT /11:30-3:00pm ET on Zoom. There is only one week left to register for this workshop so click the button below to register today!
Our New Book Reveal and Special Offer
Our upcoming book, Facilitating Conversations on Race, is set to be released this July! This is the 2nd edition of our book that we use for our Train the Trainer workshops, originally titled, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. What do you think about our cover? We decided to go with a more personable design and are are excited to offer you new strategies!
To celebrate our new release, we are giving away free Cultures Connecting journals with the first 25 pre-orders. We will make the pre-order link available, as well as instructions for claiming the journal, to our Brave Space Builders (BSB) mailing list. BSB is a great way to preview content and get sneak peeks of our 2nd edition. Signing up will also give you access to the BSB archive so you can read up on what you missed.
Sign up for the BSB mailing list by clicking the link below!
May is Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander Heritage Month
Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Heritage Month is celebrated every May in the United States, honoring the rich cultures, histories, and contributions of AANHPIs to American society. The month of May was chosen for two significant reasons: May 7th marks the anniversary of the arrival of the first Japanese immigrants to the United States in 1843, and May 10th commemorates the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869, a monumental achievement built largely by Chinese immigrant laborers whose contributions had long gone unrecognized.
Today, AANHPI Heritage Month serves as both a celebration and a call to reflection. It's an opportunity to recognize the enormous cultural, scientific, artistic, and civic contributions of AANHPI communities while also acknowledging the discrimination and hardship these communities have faced throughout U.S. history, from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the Japanese American internment during World War II to today.
The following are just a few of the many AANHPI advocacy organizations in Washington state. Consider learning more about the ones near you and supporting them!
A statewide coalition dedicated to advancing civil and human rights and racial and economic justice for Asians and Pacific Islanders, in solidarity with Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities.
A social justice-focused organization providing multilingual, multicultural community-based services to empower Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, immigrants, and refugees in the Pacific Northwest.
Founded by the community in 1975, SCIDpda preserves and develops Seattle's CID through affordable housing, small business support, and social justice and anti-racism programming.
A state agency that advocates for APA communities across Washington and maintains a robust AANHPI Heritage Month resource hub.
Make Us Visible's "Written In: Our Stories, Our Schools, Our Movement" Event
Make Us Visible (MUV) is a national nonprofit working to get bills passed throughout the country to make AANHPI history part of school curricula. In Washington state, MUV-WA has been advocating to pass SB 5574 for the past few years. Last year, MUV-WA expanded its efforts to include Latine and Black American history in the bill.
Cultures Connecting is a proud supporter of MUV and has been sharing updates and calls to action with all of you to help get this bill passed. We are also one of the sponsors of their upcoming event, Written In: Our Stories, Our Schools, Our Movement, on Saturday, May 30th from 4:00–6:30pm at ACRS. Senator T'wina Nobles, the bill's sponsor, will serve as the keynote speaker. This event is free and open to the public.
MUV-WA is also holding a free professional development event on AA&NH/PI Representation in the Arts: Building Culturally Responsive Arts Education on May 6th at 4-6pm PT. Visit the MUV workshop schedule to register for this and other workshops. Many of them offer Clock Hours. You can also follow them on Instagram @makeusvisiblewa to get updates.
To learn more how MUV-WA got started, visit our blog from last year for an interview with Director Angelie Chong. If your organization would like to support SB 5574 or you have questions, please reach out to Angelie at makeusvisiblewa@gmail.com.
Telling Stories from the Inside Out: A Conversation with Kade Kricho
Kade Kricho is the founder of Ori, a travel magazine with what he calls "a conscience," and the executive director of Ori Artists Collective, the nonprofit Ori lives under.
For nearly a decade, Kade traveled as a journalist to vulnerable communities all over the world on the edge of crisis or undergoing massive change. This led to publications in the New York Times, ESPN, Outside, and more. Covid and the racial reckoning from George Floyd's murder eventually shifted his life trajectory by giving him space to sit with a question that had been building for years: why was he the one telling the stories of these communities rather than the people who lived there?
The answer led to Kade's founding of Ori. Instead of parachuting into places to extract stories, Ori centers and elevates the voices and lived experiences of the people rooted there. "We have local journalists and local storytellers get their knowledge through their words and amplify it on a global stage," he explains. "A slight pivot, but we felt like a very important one in order to create a bit of equity in the storytelling space."
This spring, Ori Artist Collective launched a pilot journalism program at Garfield High School in Seattle's Central District, working with 12 students to report and write original stories about Seattle. The program culminates this spring with a zine, in which each student will contribute an original feature story. There'll be a gallery showing at Common Objects in Belltown on June 26th, and the students will be woven into Ori's end-of-June magazine release party.
Read the full interview on our blog to learn more about how travel impacted Kade's life, how his career in journalism lead to Ori, and the impact he's making now through this nonprofit. You can follow Ori on instagram at @ori_magazine to see some of their incredible photos or visit the website to learn more about their memberships to support locally sourced journalism.
Ways to Take Action for Change
Rallying Resistance through Song Concert The Seattle Labor Chorus is be holding a concert to celebrate and fundraise. Inspired by the Minneapolis singing resistance groups, this event aims to "celebrate the power of collective resistance and support their mission in giving voice to song to the cause of economic, social, and racial justice."
Starbucks Workers United, TRACTION, and Seattle Gaza Mutual Aid will all be tabling at the event. Rallying Resistance will be held on May 3rd at 3-5pm and is available to attend both in-person, at the beautiful Labor Temple, and virtually on Zoom. Visit their event page to learn more and get tickets.
Attend Collective Courage for Authoritarian Times: Strategies for Noncooperation and Resilience
This free, interactive training will leave you with a clearer sense of strategy, a stronger community, and practical ways to take action. The training will cover topics such as how to disrupt the authoritarian playbook, lessons from movements won, next steps, and more. They will be meeting on May 12th at 5:30-8:30pm in downtown Seattle. Visit the registration page for more details.
Join the Riff Raff League Weekly Community Gathering
Push/Pull, an underground artist and comics space in Ballard, is holding a weekly Sunday gathering of people interested in banding together for mutual aid, community building, and political action. Their aim is to talk through what's happening locally and nationally and to brainstorm actions to take.
The gatherings are free and recommended for people ages 14 and up. They meet every Sunday at 7:15-8:15 at Push/Pull in Ballard. Visit their calendar page to RSVP. RSVPs are appreciated but not required.
It's a new month which means taking a look at our Diversity Calendar to look at significant dates to consider when planning meetings or events to create greater inclusion. Click on the name of the day to learn more.
5/01: Beltane (Neo-Pagan)
5/01: Buddha Day/ Visakha Puja/ Vesek (Buddhist)
5/01: May Day (International Worker’s Day) (International)
5/01-02: Twelfth Day of Ridván (Bahá'i)
5/05: Cinco de Mayo (United States / Mexican)
5/05: National Day of Awareness for Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, & 2-Spirit (United States)
5/10: El Día de la Madre (Mexico, El Salvador Guatemala)
5/21: World Day for Cultural Diversity (International)
5/21-23: Shavuot (Jewish)
5/23-24: Declaration of the Báb (Bahá'i)
5/24: Pentecost (Christian)
5/24-29: Hajj (Islamic)
5/26-27: Eid-ul-Adha (Feast of Sacrifice) (Islamic)
5/28-29: Ascension of Bahá'u'lláh (Bahá'i)
5/31: Haitian Mother's Day (Haitian)
If you'd like to add our Diversity Calendar dates to your Google calendar, you can add it using this link.
Upcoming DEIB/Social Justice Events
For details on these and other events, workshops and conferences happening in the social justice space, visit our Events Calendar. If you have an event you would like us to share, please reach out to us!
5/01: May Day Seattle Rally
5/03: Rallying Resistance through Song Concert
5/03: Riff Raff League for Political Action
5/05: NAMI BIPOC Support Group
5/06: AANH/PI Representation in the Arts: Building Culturally Responsive Education
5/07: Leading Equity Work in Shifting Times (Cultures Connecting)
5/07: NAMI LGBTQ+ Support Group
5/08: Resistance Fridays at Common Power
5/08: And Still We Are Here: Art by Gazans
5/11: People's Institute Northwest Organizing Meeting
5/12: Collective Courage For Authoritarian Times: Strategies for Noncooperation and Resistance
5/13: Duwamish Eco Tours
...and so much more! Visit our Events Calendar to see the most up-to-date full schedule.
*Cultures Connecting workshop.
