The People's Saturday School

❤️‍🔥Final call for applicants for Belief in Action!

“Belief will not save you.
Only actions
Guided and shaped
By belief and knowledge
Will save you.

Belief Initiates
and guides action—
Or it does nothing.”

Octavia E. Butler wrote these words as part of a verse of Earthseed, a religion invented by the protagonist of her novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents.

Are you a facilitator guiding groups working towards liberation in the U.S. Northeast? Want to explore this verse with other facilitators?

Join us this Friday, March 6 from 10 am - 3 pm in person at 30 Ashley Street, Hartford for Belief in Action, an interactive workshop co-facilitated by Lisa Graustein and varun khattar sharma .

We’ll dive deeper into what it means to be a “liberatory facilitator”, especially in today’s world, and how we can foster greater alignment between our beliefs and actions and with each other.

Coffee, light refreshments, and lunch will be provided. Please note our COVID and airborne illness safety policy described in the application form!

Apply as soon as possible!

https://forms.gle/sGdaPuf6bf536rt28

Belief in Action is a program of the People’s Saturday School’s Academy of Facilitating Change. 🌞

💓 Final call for applicants for Practicing Love in a F*cked-Up World!

In his book Love in a F*cked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together, movement lawyer, educator, and strategist Dean Spade .dean writes: “If we want to build a world organized around care, connection, and freedom, we must combine our work ‘out there’ with rigorous work in our intimate lives.” 💞

In this free, three-part virtual workshop series, facilitated by danilo machado and varun khattar sharma , on Tuesdays, March 17, March 24, and March 31, 2026 from 6:30-8:30 pm EST, we’ll unpack and practice a few specific tools from the book together. 👥

There are only a couple open seats remaining! Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis until we reach capacity.

https://forms.gle/MsuHesmWurJtRcNo7

Practicing Love in a Fu**ed Up is a program of the People’s Saturday School’s Academy of Collective Care and Accountability and supported by Greater Hartford Gives’s Equality Fund.

🙏🏽 We wanted to take a moment to thank our friends and book vendors at Possible Futures!  💜

Possible Futures is a neighborhood bookspace & beloved community in New Haven, Connecticut.

Opened in 2022, Possible Futures has quickly become an anchor institution in our movement ecosystem, offering space to gather, learn, work, rest, and play!

Whether we are looking to order books, host a meeting or event, or get inspired, we know we can count on Lauren, Jada, Sugar, and the rest of the Possible Futures team! 

Thank you! 💐

What are we reading this semester? 
📕Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler 
📗The Long Haul: An Autobiography by Myles Horton
📙Practicing Love in a F*cked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together by Dean Spade .dean

Want to join us in engaging with these texts? 

💟 There are a couple seats left in Practicing Love in a F*cked-Up World, a free, three-part virtual workshop series, where we’ll unpack and practice a few specific tools from the book together. We’ll be meeting on Tuesdays, March 17, March 24, and March 31, 2026 from 6:30-8:30 pm EST. Apply as soon as possible! Link in bio. 

💟 Also, apply today to join Saturday School Reads as we read Long Haul to learn about the founding of the Highlander Center , a training ground for movement leaders in the U.S. South and Appalachia and discuss the lessons we can apply to our teaching, and organizing here in the Northeast. We’ll be meeting on the third Thursdays of the month, on March 19, April 16, May 21, and June 18, from 6-8 PM EST. Link to apply in bio! 

Pictured: 
Slide 1: The People’s Saturday School varun our friends Dri .andriana from and Biz from .nhv

Slide 2: Mural of New Haven-born abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore designed by Jess X Snow on Possible Future’s exterior  

Slide 3: Jess X Snow and Alan Pelaez Lopez reading & discussing Jess’s beautiful new children’s book We Always Had Wings

👋🏽 New program alert!

Are you a facilitator or organizer in the U.S. Northeast? Are you interested in building a more powerful and resilient movement ecosystem?

Join Saturday School Reads this Spring! 📚

Saturday School Reads is the People’s Saturday School’s book club. We seek to cultivate a more consistent practice of reading the word and reading the world, to quote Paulo Freire, as we grow our revolutionary learning community.

Each season, a different Saturday School academy- Facilitating Change, Collective Care & Accountability, Cooperative Economics, or Just Kin- will select a text to read together.

This Spring, in the People’s Saturday School’s Academy of Facilitating Change, we’re reading Myle’s Horton’s The Long Haul: An Autobiography, the story of the founding of the Highlander Center , a training ground for movement leaders in the U.S. South and Appalachia and discussing the lessons we can apply to our facilitation, teaching, and organizing here in the Northeast.

We agree with Myles when he wrote, “I began to realize that learning which came from a group effort was superior to learning achieved through individual efforts.” This is the basic premise of both Saturday School Reads and Saturday School itself! 👥

We’ll meet on the third Thursdays of the month, on March 19, April 16, May 21, and June 18, from 6-8 PM EST. In order to preserve the intimacy of the space, the group will be limited to 12 participants. This season’s book club is facilitated by two of our co-founders Kiara Ruesta and varun khattar sharma .

In order to participate, we ask that you complete this brief application:

https://forms.gle/zKZXcPJhfGV35vwH7

Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis until we reach capacity. If you get accepted, we’ll order you a copy of the book via our friends at Possible Futures!

All are welcome to apply! We will prioritize Saturday School members and alumni and applicants with facilitation and/or organizing experience.

Any questions? Please contact us via DM or email at [email protected]

🌄 New workshop alert! Next Friday!

Do you facilitate groups working towards liberation in the U.S. Northeast? Are you working to develop a more liberatory facilitation practice?

Join the People’s Saturday School for Belief in Action, an interactive workshop for facilitators co-facilitated by Lisa Graustein and varun khattar sharma on Friday, March 6 from 10 am - 3 pm in person at 30 Ashley Street, Hartford, Connecticut.

This workshop is guided by the following verse from Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower: “Belief guides or initiates action- or it does nothing.”

We’ll dive deeper into what it means to be a “liberatory facilitator”, especially in today’s world, and how we can foster greater alignment between our beliefs and actions and with each other.

Coffee, light refreshments, and lunch will be provided. Please note our COVID and airborne illness safety policy described in the application form!

Interested in participating? Please take a few minutes to complete a brief application linked below to let us know a bit about you and what you’re seeking from this space. Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis!

https://forms.gle/sGdaPuf6bf536rt28

Any questions? Please contact us at [email protected]

about the facilitators:

✴️ Lisa Graustein (she/her), MEd., is a white Q***r teacher, facilitator, artist, and solo mom. She has over 25 years of experience as a classroom teacher, administrator, and teacher-trainer. Lisa has been co-facilitating Beyond Diversity 101 since 2007.

✴️ varun khattar sharma (they/them) is a Punjabi Q***r facilitator, teacher, consultant, writer, and cultural worker based in Hartford, Connecticut. varun currently serves as lead organizer of Cooperate Connecticut and previously taught high school social sciences and ethnic studies, worked as a youth organizer and a bilingual teaching assistant, and were a founding member of Hartford Deportation Defense and the Connecticut UndocuFund.

🌞 Introducing the People’s Saturday School’s Academy of Facilitating Change! 

The Academy of Facilitating Change offers education, training, and peer support spaces for people in the U.S. Northeast looking to develop a more liberatory facilitation practice. 

When we say facilitation, we mean “supporting a body of people moving through a process”, to quote Sage Crump . This includes facilitating meetings, workshops, classes, retreats, and support groups. By liberatory, we mean “tending towards liberation.”

In other words, we are building a learning community dedicated to the study of how to guide groups on the journey to get free.

As co-founders of the People’s Saturday School, we come from many different disciplines and lineages that shape our approaches to facilitation. 

Some of us were community organizers, leading meetings and trainings as part of campaigns and mutual aid projects. Some of us were k-12 teachers, university faculty, and higher education professionals, teaching classes and advising student groups. Some of us were former peer educators, facilitating workshops with a sexual violence prevention program on a college campus. 

We are coaches, consultants, mediators, doulas, caregivers, poets, musicians, artists, curators, researchers, and librarians. 

While we’ve taken different paths as facilitators, we converged in 2020 to establish this collective around a shared belief that our abolitionist movements need more skillful facilitators and skillfully facilitated spaces. 

This year, we’re excited to hold workshops, a reading group, a group coaching space for facilitators- and to launch the next iteration of Praxis Group, our signature fellowship program that we piloted in 2022. Stay tuned for more information!

We hope you’re as excited as we are to study and practice facilitation! 💛
 
If you have any questions or want to connect, you can reach us via DM or email at [email protected]

“The only lasting truth is Change.” ✨
-Octavia E. Butler

💗 What does kinship mean to you?

This is one of the central questions of our new series, Just Kin: Conversations on Q***r Intimacy, premiering tomorrow Wednesday, February 18 from 6:30 - 8 pm EST.

We want to hear from you! What comes to mind when you hear the word kinship? Sound off in the chat!🎙️

Then, join us tomorrow as our co-hosts danilo machado and varun khattar sharma (re)introduce themselves, the Just Kin project, and this new series, where each episode we’ll invite two friends or lovers to join them to reflect on their relationship, the meaning of kinship, and how they’re queering intimacy.

Register at: https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/ticketing/just-kin-conversations-on-queer-intimacy-episode--1

Can’t join us live? These conversations will be recorded and the audio and transcripts will be released at a later date! 📻

This is a part of Just Kin, the People’s Saturday School’s cultural organizing project uplifting the stories of Q***r & Trans people building worlds that transgress borders and binaries! 💒

💗 Introducing Practicing Love in a F*cked-Up World!

One year ago, movement lawyer, educator, writer, and strategist Dean Spade .dean published the book Love in a F*cked-Up World: How to Build Relationships, Hook Up, and Raise Hell Together, recognizing the effect interpersonal relationships and conflicts have on our ability to organize effectively to resist fascism, capitalism, and white supremacy.

In this free, three-part virtual workshop series, facilitated by danilo machado and varun khattar sharma , on Tuesdays, March 17, March 24, and March 31, 2026 from 6:30-8:30 pm EST, we’ll unpack and practice a few specific tools from the book together.

This is not simply a book club! It’s a hands-on, interactive space for dialogue AND application. Participants are expected to be fully present, participate actively verbally and in the chat, and to engage with theoretical concepts, hypothetical scenarios, and our own lived experiences.

You are NOT required to have previously read the book prior to applying. If accepted, we will send you a physical copy via mail, if you’d like, and assign short excerpts to read and/or listen to and/or a brief journaling prompt to respond to prior to each session.

In order to preserve the intimacy of the space, the cohort will be limited to 12 participants.

Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis until we reach capacity, but we encourage you to apply by Saturday, February 21 at 11:59 pm EST!

https://forms.gle/MsuHesmWurJtRcNo7

All are welcome to apply! Participants who are BIPOC, LGBTQ+, reside in Greater Hartford, and involved in movement work. We encourage you to apply with a friend or comrade will be prioritized.

Practicing Love in a F*cked-Up is a program of the People’s Saturday School’s Academy of Community Care and Accountability and supported by the Equality Fund!

🟣 Introducing the People’s Saturday School’s Academy of Community Care & Accountability! 

This academy seeks to answer the question: 
How can we build relationships, organizations, and communities that keep us all healthy, safe, and free from the violence of police and prisons?

In our pilot program in 2020, a free six-week virtual crash course on abolitionist politics, we were focused on helping Black, indigenous, and people of color across the U.S. getting involved in organizing in response to the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis to gain a basic understanding the political framework of police and prison abolition. 

Our curriculum included the concepts of care work and transformative justice. However, as a collective, we were quickly confronted with the limitations of our ability to apply these frameworks when faced with conflict, harm, trauma, and burnout among our own members and communities. 

This experience motivated us to go on personal and collective journeys to deepen our praxis in transforming harm and to practicing care and accountability- and we are still learning! 

In the past couple years, we’ve read works by Black Q***r feminists like Angela Davis, Miss Major, and adrienne maree brown and offered workshops on pod mapping, non-violent communication, practicing mindfulness, processing grief, cultivating belonging, and anti-carceral peer counseling. We’ve also launched a monthly somatics practice circle for our members. 

We are not looking to re-create the wheel! We seek to learn from, amplify, and follow the leadership of organizations like Asian American Peer Counseling , the Just Practice Collaborative, and Spring Up in order to build a more powerful and resilient movement ecosystem here in the U.S. Northeast. 

This year, we’re excited to offer education, training, and peer support spaces focused on liberatory relationship skills, COVID safety, and transformative justice! Stay tuned for more updates!

If you have questions or want to connect, you can reach us via DM or email at [email protected]!

💅🏽Introducing Just Kin’s curators and hosts and two of the People’s Saturday School’s co-founders danilo and varun !

🌸Born in Medellín, Colombia, danilo machado (he/they) is a poet, curator, and Leo living on occupied land interested in language’s potential for revealing tenderness, erasure, and relationships to power.

🌸varun khattar sharma (they/them) is a Punjabi Q***r facilitator, teacher, writer, uncle, and auntie from Hartford, Connecticut passionate about guiding individuals and groups towards healing and transformation, with a combination of love and rigor.

Just Kin emerges from a decade-long friendship and creative collaboration that began in 2015 when danilo and varun were young people involved in the immigrant rights movement in Connecticut.

In 2020, they helped establish the Connecticut UndocuFund , a grassroots collective that raised and distributed over a quarter million dollars to working class immigrant households impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

danilo and varun previously co-produced UndocuPoetry Week, a series of readings and conversations with undocumented poets on IG live and Homoland Security, Come In, Gurl!, a four-part virtual series celebrating and archiving Q***r undocumented artists and cultural organizing, the winning selection of the CUE Art Foundation’s 2021 Open Call for Public Programs.

In this new series, Just Kin: Conversations on Q***r Intimacy, premiering on February 28, danilo and varun will invite two friends or lovers to join them each episode to reflect on their relationship, the meaning of kinship, and how they’re queering intimacy. 💞

Register today! https://www.zeffy.com/en-US/ticketing/just-kin-conversations-on-queer-intimacy-episode--1