In its 24th year of providing powerful and dynamic experiences, the Empowering Women of Color Conference returns to embrace voice, knowledge, music, dance and art dedicated to revolutionary love. This year’s theme explores the foundations of self-love, from which we connect mind, body and spirit, and discover ourselves. From a place of self-knowledge, we are able to extend ourselves to progressively more inclusive spheres beginning with friends, parents, romantic partners, children, and broadening to community, and the nation. The conference focuses on love as a healing process that inspires personal growth and resistance to oppression, exposing and exploring the ways in which institutions shape our perception of love. We challenge resistance and activism to begin inwardly, evolving our own reality and then progressing outward as we confront the intersections of poverty, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, militarism and imperialism. We consider the ways in which women of color can be politically active in their everyday choices while embracing their familial roles and working towards egalitarian relationships.

This year’s conference will include a panel of acclaimed Bay Area activists and leaders in community building and women’s issues, vendors, cultural performances, discussions and workshops on a variety of healing and love-related topics. The keynote speaker will be Cherrie Moraga, an Oakland, CA based playwright, poet, and essayist who is the co-editor of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, which won the Before Columbus American Book Award in 1986. In 1997, she published a memoir on motherhood entitled Waiting in the Wings (Firebrand Books). Her classic, Loving in the War Years: Lo Que Nunca Pasó Por Sus Labios (1983) updated in 2003 includes new prose in which loving is an extended prayer. Moraga is proud to be a founding member of La Red Xicana Indígena, a network of Xicanas organizing in the area of social change through international exchange, indigenous political education, spiritual practice, and grass roots organizing.

The main conference event will take place on Saturday, February 14th, beginning at 9:30 AM and ending at 5:30 PM. Conference events will be held in the Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK) Student Union Building- on the University of California, Berkeley campus. MLK is located on the northwest corner of the intersection of Telegraph Ave. and Bancroft Ave.