Join us for our summer lay-led service: Sustaining Activism for the Long Haul: A Conversation with Willie Fontenot, with Deb Mackey.
How do activists keep going when the wheels of justice grind along for decades? Where do people find the strength to remain optimistic when threatened by the government and powerful corporations? What resources can we develop to sustain civic action over the long haul?
These are the questions I had in mind as I prepared to interview Willie Fontenot. Willie was the Louisiana Department of Justice’s Community Liaison Officer for Environmental Affairs from 1978 to 2005. He worked with citizen activists living along the 85-mile corridor of the Mississippi River known as “Cancer Alley,” and is remembered as the grandfather of Louisiana’s environmental justice movement.
Join us as we draw inspiration from Willie’s rich gumbo of stories about individual resilience in the context of today’s grassroots civil resistance movement.
The service will be held in-person only.