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Greetings, dear NTI Community,
Our excitement continues to grow as Folx Tales draws closer. This is our big annual workshop, a time to come together in-person as a broader community. NTI needs your support for this important event. Please register now!
This year, we’re thrilled to be hosting Vikki Reynolds as our Key-Note speaker. We highly encourage you to explore her work, which she offers for free on her website.
Vikki’s resume holds a lot. She has worked passionately for decades to challenge the de-politicizing of problems and to develop and highlight practices of justice-doing, accountability and solidarity. She currently consults, trains, and clinically supervises with refugees and survivors of torture. She works directly with Indigenous survivors of state violence in Canada, mental health and substance abuse counsellors, rape crisis counsellors, frontline and housing workers, and transgender and queer communities.
Her work has deeply influenced many of us at NTI over the years. Her ideas and stories help us be very clear that responding to people in respectful, dignifying ways is possible in all helping contexts — even in the face of the most insidious problems and unjust oppressions.
“Ideas that sing to each other … “
Vikki never met Steve Gaddis, NTI’s founder, while he was physically alive. But as she has been preparing for Folx Tales, she’s dove into reading his writings, listening to the podcasts, and exploring his work. She told us recently that she really wishes she had gotten the chance to know him. She shared that his ideas of a narrative revolution “sing together” with her ideas of relationships of accountability, practices of dignity, solidarity and ethics in our work. We’re excited to imagine Folx Tales as a place where their values, passions, and spirits might meet and mingle in ways that light up our collective hearts and imaginations.
“An ethical stance of justice-doing …"
At Folx Tales, Vikki will lead us in establishing an ethical frame for our work as helpers and people in our communities. This ethical frame will offer a rich reflecting surface from which to explore and enrich our preferred ethical stances. We believe it will invigorate us all with new ideas and actions to bring back to the people and communities we care so much about.
As we were recently planning with Vikki, she was reminded of this quote by Howard Zinn. She ran to get it as she says she keeps it close by to remind her of how she wants to move through her life and build the world that she wants to live in. It resonated deeply for us with how we think of a narrative revolution. We are now holding it close to us, too, as we continue to shape Folx Tales.
“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.” ― Howard Zinn
Yours in a Narrative Revolution,
Sarah Beth Hughes, Greg Bodine, Guadalupe Morelos, Darcey Surette & Ashley Gaddis
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