Run For Your Rights 2021
That’s right, we, NARAL Pro-Choice Minnesota, are lacing up our running shoes for our 11th annual 5k – Run For Your Rights, on May 15, 2021. Like last year, this will be a virtual event.
What does this mean? Run for Your Rights 2021 participants will register and raise funds for abortion access just like past years. Instead of gathering together to run or walk on May 15th, we’ll each complete the 5k run or 2.5k walk in our own neighborhoods. Participants will also have the option to track their 5k run or 2.5k walk and upload results using the Runkeeper app. After you complete your walk or run, we’ll gather together to celebrate with a Zoom happy hour!
Upcoming Volunteer Clinic Escort Trainings
Our monthly Volunteer Clinic Escort Trainings are back – with a virtual twist! Fill out our interest survey using this link below and we’ll provide call in information closer to the event.
For more than a decade, NARAL Pro-Choice Minnesota has trained clinic escort volunteers who help people safely into their local abortion provider. Clinic escorts are a friendly face and a safe barrier between patients and the anti-choice protesters who harass women outside of clinics. NARAL has trained hundreds of volunteers for our Minneapolis and Robbinsdale clinics – and we’re inviting you to become one of them.
Join us on May 17th, 2021 via Zoom for a clinic escort training. Here, you can learn the history of clinic escorting, the logistics of working with Minneapolis providers, and how to handle clinic protesters.
After the training, you’ll have the opportunity to sign up for specific escorting dates.
Reproductive Freedom Book Club
Our current selection is Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson.
In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings.
Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people’s lives and behavior and the nation’s fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more. Using riveting stories about people—including Martin Luther King, Jr., baseball’s Satchel Paige, a single father and his toddler son, Wilkerson herself, and many others—she shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day. She documents how the Nazis studied the racial systems in America to plan their out-cast of the Jews; she discusses why the cruel logic of caste requires that there be a bottom rung for those in the middle to measure themselves against; she writes about the surprising health costs of caste, in depression and life expectancy, and the effects of this hierarchy on our culture and politics. Finally, she points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.
Beautifully written, original, and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today.
Schedule:
- Wednesday, April 21st, 6:00-7:00pm, Parts One-Three, pages 3-166
- Wednesday, May 5th, 6:00-7:00pm, Parts Four and Five, pages 167-310
- Wednesday, May 19th, 6:00-7:00pm, Parts Six and Seven & Epilogue, pages 311-388
Where: Zoom online meeting (Info will be provided upon receipt of R.S.V.P.)
Our next selection is The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin.
Three-time Hugo Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author N.K. Jemisin crafts her most incredible novel yet, a “glorious” story of culture, identity, magic, and myths in contemporary New York City.
In Manhattan, a young grad student gets off the train and realizes he doesn’t remember who he is, where he’s from, or even his own name. But he can sense the beating heart of the city, see its history, and feel its power.
In the Bronx, a Lenape gallery director discovers strange graffiti scattered throughout the city, so beautiful and powerful it’s as if the paint is literally calling to her. In Brooklyn, a politician and mother finds she can hear the songs of her city, pulsing to the beat of her Louboutin heels.
And they’re not the only ones. Every great city has a soul. Some are ancient as myths, and others are as new and destructive as children. New York? She’s got six.
Schedule:
- Wednesday, June 9th, 6:00-7:00pm, Chapters 1-7, pages 1-213
- Wednesday, June 23rd, 6:00-7:00pm, Chapters 8-16 + CODA, pages 214-434