Tuesday, March 10 9:55 AM - 11:40 AM
On-Campus Event - — CO 106
Co-sponsored with IGNITE USFCA, Asa and Micha Budde from Restore Oakland will speak about their time as activists, community leaders, and forever students through an intersectional feminist lens. These activists will cover topics surrounding current political events, the ways the community shows up, and how each of their individual journeys has shaped their activist approach. This panel will provide students with an opportunity to learn about ways to get involved with their communities as well as ask questions from these successful champions of change.
About the Speakers:
Asa (they/them) is a queer lifelong student, multi-media artist, and scholar rooted in Black feminist movement building. Their work centers prison-industrial-complex abolition and restorative youth justice, as an homage to Ella Baker’s legacy through bottom-up leadership development that guides transitional-aged youth into struggles for basic income, free higher education, community alternatives to policing, and corporate polluter accountability. Asa has challenged the carceral state from the inside, facilitating in-custody resources and familial reunification at SF County Jail.
Now at Restore Oakland, they bridge policy advocacy, participatory defense, circle-keeping, and popular education to organize for decarceration, housing, healthcare for justice-involved people, and alternatives to carceral punishment. Asa is grateful to professors McBride, Weiner, Zunes, Paller, Taylor, Klaus, and Friedman for the wisdom they bestowed upon them which they carry every day, organizing for a more liberatory future.
Micha Budde (she/they) is a queer, multi-ethnic artist, activist, educator, life-long learner and circle-keeper. She carries on a long lineage of feminist women, who resisted patriarchy in their own ways. Micha is committed to building a world where everyone is cared for and systems of domination are abolished, drawing on Indigenous, Socialist, Communist, and Anarchist traditions to guide collective organizing. Micha’s organizing began at Western Washington University, where she co-led the successful Students for Ethnic Studies campaign, and expanded into direct action during the 2020 uprising, eviction and community defense efforts, anti-police violence organizing, and co-leading the 2022 Queer Survival Skillshare for the Bay Area queer community.
Most recently Micha has been working with various autonomous groups to defend our community from ICE terror. In her new role as a circle keeper and healing justice organizer at Restore Oakland she seeks to inspire collective action from a place of grounded community care.