Nourishing HOPE

inspired action empowering change

2 - 6pm Saturday 27 September 2025

Black Spark Cultural Centre – 126A Gladstone Avenue, Northcote, Naarm

Entry by donation: funds directed to Palestine, Pay the Rent and Black Spark.

Spaces are limited so please register here!

Pleasure is the point. Feeling good is not frivolous, it is freedom.

– adrienne maree brown

In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.

– Audre Lorde – Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power (1978)

Join us for a special community event of culture and connection and help catalyse social, cultural and political change!

If you’ve been feeling overwhelmed and powerless and wanting to make a difference, join us for a day of creative activation and inspired action! We’ll be coming together in community to celebrate art and cultural practices that energise and inspire, that raise our spirits and empower us to take action for meaningful social change – on a range of issues but most urgently, Palestine.

Participate in transformative cultural workshops that remind us of our power to shape the world with our actions:

• Singing as a collective: Harmonise with songs of hope, healing and revolution guided by choir master Virginia Bott (with special musical guests).

• Regulate your nervous system and direct healing energy where it’s needed with original somatic mantra meditation led by Marianna Doherty.

• Dance for life and be electrified with Ineke de Graaf and Camilla Mailing.

• Make art for justice in a postcard, placard, poster and paste-up making workshop with practicing artists.

• Listen to stories and ancient myths that epitomise the power available to us for the next decade. Discover the best timing windows for initiating action that is literally optimised for success when directed toward social justice aims and reforms that improve the well-being of the people, beginning this September – with Monique La Fontaine.

Stimulate your senses with:

• An exhibition of visual metaphors for the revolutionary processes currently underway in our world by multidisciplinary artist, Monique La Fontaine. In Nourishing HOPE, strangely familiar, alien ecologies and emotional landscapes are eternally shaped and reshaped by catastrophic processes of becoming and unbecoming, through cycles of destruction, transformation and empowerment, towards greater possibilities of liberation. 

• Delicious home-made chai!!

• The knowledge that you’re standing in solidarity with and taking action to support the people of Palestine!

…recognize that pleasure is a measure of freedom; notice what makes you feel good and what you are curious about; learn ways you can increase the amount of feeling-good time in your life, to have abundant pleasure; decrease any internal or projected shame or scarcity thinking around the pursuit of pleasure, quieting any voices of trauma that keep you from your full sacred sensual life; create more room for joy, wholeness, and aliveness (and less room for oppression, repression, self-denial and unnecessary suffering) in your life; identify strategies beyond denial or repression for navigating pleasure in relationship to others; and begin to understand the liberation possible when we collectively orient around pleasure and longing. Bonus: realize you are a pleasure activist!

– adrienne maree brown – Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (2018)