As the holiday season approaches and you start to think about what you’ll be gifting your loved ones, our team at the Action Alliance wanted to share a few things to give to the emerging or seasoned preventionists and activists in your life!
FOR CHILDREN
A is for Activist or Counting on Community by Innosanto Nagara
“A is for Activist is an ABC board book written and illustrated for the next generation of progressives: families who want their kids to grow up in a space that is unapologetic about activism, environmental justice, civil rights, LGBTQ rights, and everything else that activists believe in and fight for. The alliteration, rhyming, and vibrant illustrations make the book exciting for children, while the issues it brings up resonate with their parents’ values of community, equality, and justice. This engaging little book carries huge messages as it inspires hope for the future, and calls children to action while teaching them a love for books.”
“Counting on Community is Innosanto Nagara’s follow-up to his hit ABC book, A is for Activist. Counting up from one stuffed piñata to ten hefty hens–and always counting on each other–children are encouraged to recognize the value of their community, the joys inherent in healthy eco-friendly activities, and the agency they posses to make change. A broad and inspiring vision of diversity is told through stories in words and pictures. And of course, there is a duck to find on every page!”
Sex is a Funny Word by Cory Silverberg
“A comic book for kids that includes children and families of all makeups, orientations, and gender identities, Sex Is a Funny Word is an essential resource about bodies, gender, and sexuality for children ages 8 to 10 as well as their parents and caregivers. Much more than the “facts of life” or “the birds and the bees,” Sex Is a Funny Word opens up conversations between young people and their caregivers in a way that allows adults to convey their values and beliefs while providing information about boundaries, safety, and joy.”
Little Justice Leaders Subscription Box
Perfect for kids in grades K-5, this subscription box highlights a social justice issue each month through arts and crafts, projects, books, conversation starters, and other activities that help the young person in your life how to understand complex issues. Options include a sibling pack for families with more than one child and a teacher version for teachers!
My First Book of Feminism (For Boys) by Julie Merberg
With simple and colorful illustrations and engaging, age-appropriate language, this book is perfect for children ages 0-3! At the Action Alliance we believe it’s never too early for young people to learn about respecting other people’s boundaries and no’s and that masculinity can be expansive, tender, and caring; this book is a great way to start those conversations with the young people in your life!
FOR YOUNG ADULTS
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
“Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed. Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters are taking to the streets in Khalil’s name. Some cops and the local drug lord try to intimidate Starr and her family. What everyone wants to know is: what really went down that night? And the only person alive who can answer that is Starr. But what Starr does—or does not—say could upend her community. It could also endanger her life.”
The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo
Recently named a National Book Award Winner! “Xiomara Batista feels unheard and unable to hide in her Harlem neighborhood. Ever since her body grew into curves, she has learned to let her fists and her fierceness do the talking. But Xiomara has plenty she wants to say, and she pours all her frustration and passion onto the pages of a leather notebook, reciting the words to herself like prayers—especially after she catches feelings for a boy in her bio class named Aman, who her family can never know about. With Mami’s determination to force her daughter to obey the laws of the church, Xiomara understands that her thoughts are best kept to herself. So when she is invited to join her school’s slam poetry club, she doesn’t know how she could ever attend without her mami finding out. But she still can’t stop thinking about performing her poems. Because in the face of a world that may not want to hear her, Xiomara refuses to be silent.”
Girls Write Now: Two Decades of True Stories from Young Female Voices by Girls Write Now
Girls Write Now builds community through their Writing & Mentorship Program, Digital Media Mentoring Program, and monthly workshop series. For the last 20 years they have connected girls and young women with progression women writers to provide mentees with tools to grow as writers and storytellers. In a starred review, Booklist wrote, “Through poetic verse and infused with native language, these 116 autobiographical short stories from black, Asian, and Latina young women are thoughtful, earnest, raw, regretful, angry, and impassioned . . . The authors’ authentic experiences will elicit strong emotional reactions from readers and maybe even encourage them to write their own. Strongly recommended.”
FOR EVERYONE
Fund Abortion/Build Power Earrings or We Fund Abortion Socks by National Network of Abortion Funds
The National Network of Abortion Funds builds power with its members to remove barriers to abortion access. In their work they center people who have had abortions and organize at the intersections of racial, economic and reproductive justice. Many Action Alliance staff have a huge crush on NNAF and the abortion funds (and individuals) that make up their membership (including the Richmond Reproductive Freedom Project), and it’s not just because they have some of the coolest merch out there.
Octavia’s Brood edited by Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown
“Whenever we envision a world without war, prisons, or capitalism, we are producing speculative fiction. Organizers and activists envision, and try to create, such worlds all the time. Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown have brought 20 of them together in the first anthology of short stories to explore the connections between radical speculative fiction and movements for social change. These visionary tales span genres–sci-fi, fantasy, horror, magical realism–but all are united by an attempt to inject a healthy dose of imagination and innovation into our political practice and to try on new ways of understanding ourselves, the world around us, and all the selves and worlds that could be. Also features essays by Tananarive Due and Mumia Abu-Jamal, and a preface by Sheree Renee Thomas.”
Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements by Charlene Carruthers
“Drawing on Black intellectual and grassroots organizing traditions, including the Haitian Revolution, the US civil rights movement, and LGBTQ rights and feminist movements, Unapologetic challenges all of us engaged in the social justice struggle to make the movement for Black liberation more radical, more queer, and more feminist. This book provides a vision for how social justice movements can become sharper and more effective through principled struggle, healing justice, and leadership development. It also offers a flexible model of what deeply effective organizing can be, anchored in the Chicago model of activism, which features long-term commitment, cultural sensitivity, creative strategizing, and multiple cross-group alliances. And Unapologetic provides a clear framework for activists committed to building transformative power, encouraging young people to see themselves as visionaries and leaders.”
Mama’s Bail Out Shirt or Chisholm for President Crewneck
Philadelphia Print Works is a social justice brand and screen printing workshop. They have partnered with organizations such as the Philadelphia Community Bail Fund, Assata’s Daughters, March to End Rape Culture, and the Philly Trans March to support organizing around food security, police brutality, liberation, tlgbq+ rights, mass incarceration and more!
Chisholm for President shirt in red, available at Philadelphia PrintWorks, a social justice heritage brand and screen printing workshop. It was founded in 2010 by Maryam Pugh and Ruth Perez.
Rise Up: The Game of People & Power
This collaborative board game is all about building people power and winning together for social justice! A great game for nights in with friends or office team building alike, this game is all about building movements. Created by the folks at the TESA Collective, don’t forget to check out the rest of their store full of expansion packs and other social justice-centered games.
“Friends Don’t Let Friends” Repeal Hyde Art Project Print
The Repeal Hyde Art Project aims to create dialogue and awareness around the Hyde Amendment. Passed in 1976, the Hyde Amendment prevents people from using Medicaid to pay for abortions. This art project highlights how the Hyde Amendment has disproportionately impacted women of color and is connected to other forms of oppression such as transphobia, ableism, and classism. Many Action Alliance staffers have these beautiful prints in their office to reminds us that “Friends don’t let friends plot to dismantle the imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist heteropatriarchy alone!”
Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines edited by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams
“Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Frontlines is an anthology that centers mothers of color and marginalized mothers’ voices—women who are in a world of necessary transformation. The challenges faced by movements working for antiviolence, anti-imperialist, and queer liberation, as well as racial, economic, reproductive, gender, and food justice are the same challenges that marginalized mothers face every day. Motivated to create spaces for this discourse because of the authors’ passionate belief in the power of a radical conversation about mothering, they have become the go-to people for cutting-edge inspired work on this topic for an overlapping committed audience of activists, scholars, and writers. Revolutionary Mothering is a movement-shifting anthology committed to birthing new worlds, full of faith and hope for what we can raise up together.”
Feminist Fury Pencil Pack by Bitch Media
Bitch Media has provided thoughtful feminist responses to mainstream media and pop culture since 1996 in print, online, on the air, and on campuses. This pack three-pack of neon pencils are ready to help you write or sketch out your angry feminist agenda and support Bitch Media at the same time!
Don’t Call Us Dead: Poems by Danez Smith
“Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place where suspicion, violence, and grief are forgotten and replaced with the safety, love, and longevity they deserved here on earth. Smith turns then to desire, mortality—the dangers experienced in skin and body and blood—and a diagnosis of HIV positive. “Some of us are killed / in pieces,” Smith writes, “some of us all at once.” Don’t Call Us Dead is an astonishing and ambitious collection, one that confronts, praises, and rebukes America—“Dear White America”—where every day is too often a funeral and not often enough a miracle.”
Be the Change: Just Seeds Coloring Book by Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative
“Be the Change is the first coloring book featuring the art of Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative! These 35 illustrations envision radical social transformation and pathways toward a more just future. People of all ages will find inspiration here. In a world that is getting faster every day, slow down and celebrate art and resistance. Make the revolution bright, colorful, and irresistible! Together we can be the change we want to see!”
Queer and Trans Artists of Color: Stories of Some of Our Lives by Nia King
“A collection of sixteen unique and honest conversations you won’t read anywhere else… Mixed-race queer art activist Nia King left a full-time job in an effort to center her life around making art. Grappling with questions of purpose, survival, and compromise, she started a podcast called We Want the Airwaves in order to pick the brains of fellow queer and trans artists of color about their work, their lives, and “making it” – both in terms of success and in terms of survival. In this collection of interviews, Nia discusses fat burlesque with Magnoliah Black, queer fashion with Kiam Marcelo Junio, interning at Playboy with Janet Mock, dating gay Latino Republicans with Julio Salgado, intellectual hazing with Kortney Ryan Ziegler, gay gentrification with Van Binfa, getting a book deal with Virgie Tovar, the politics of black drag with Micia Mosely, evading deportation with Yosimar Reyes, weird science with Ryka Aoki, gay public sex in Africa with Nick Mwaluko, thin privilege with Fabian Romero, the tyranny of “self-care” with Lovemme Corazón, “selling out” with Miss Persia and Daddie$ Pla$tik, the self-employed art activist hustle with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha, and much, much more. Welcome to the future of QPOC art activism.”
Marsha P Johnson Poster by Micah Bazant
The tagline on Micah Bazant’s website is “making social change look irresistible,” and that is very much what they do. They are a “a trans visual artist who works with social justice movements to reimagine the world. They create art inspired by struggles to decolonize ourselves from white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, and the gender binary.” This particular poster was first created in 2014 for their “No Pride for Some of Us Without Liberation for All of Us” series as a way to “challenge whitewashed gay pride and celebrate Marsha, one of the mother of the trans and queer liberation movement.”
This holiday gift-giving guide is brought to you by the Action Alliance’s Social Change Team, which works on social change and movement building to disrupt the conditions that give rise to violence and oppression.
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