Registration is Open for the 2025 Racial Justice Summit
YWCA Madison invites you to join the 23rd Annual Racial Justice Summit on September 25-26. The Summit offers dynamic opportunities for community dialogue, practice, and action-envisioning around intersectional racial justice within an environment that encourages learning from one another and mutual support in nurturing this common imperative across our personal lives, communities, and organizational roles. Register today and join us in connecting with the practices, mindsets, values, and actions needed to become a community that can respond to the moment and context we are living in!
General tickets range from $100–$300, with additional discounts available for groups, youth, chaperones, young adults, and elders. We’re also committed to accessibility and offer scholarships for those who want to attend but experience financial barriers. To learn more and register, please visit our website at ywcamadison-racialjusticesummit.org
Theme
The theme for the Summit this year is Get Together: Becoming the Liberation Ecosystem. This theme invites us to deepen our practices of coming together as an interconnected, inter-communicating, inter-responsive, and ever-changing ecosystem. By strengthening this ecosystem, we can disrupt the escalating violence and attend to harm in our country and planet, while also unapologetically dreaming, re-imagining, and seeding for the liberated and racially just future we dream of bringing to life.
Drawing on this theme, we are guided by our four Pillars of Practice: Solidarity, Abolition, Mutual Aid, and Repair. Each pillar serves as an entryway into a range of practices across levels of impact—from systems and structures, through communities and organizations, to the level of our relationships, and all the way to our internal selves. Integrating our personal and relational practices with a systems approach allows us to develop alignment across communities and organizations. This integrity and alignment at the lower levels allow us to build power so we can engage in collective action to shape change in the broader structures.
Keynotes
To support us in becoming the liberation ecosystem, we are deeply grateful to draw on the vast, critical, and timely insights of the featured practitioners: Robin Wall Kimmerer, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Maurice Mitchell, and Adaku Utah.
The Virtual Day of this year’s Summit will open with a keynote from Robin Wall Kimmerer, a beloved scientist, storyteller, and author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, and of The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World.
The Virtual Day will close with a Generative Dialogue with our keynote contributors: Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Maurice Mitchell. Ruth Wilson Gilmore has been a leading voice on abolition for decades, contending with the impacts of racial capitalism and bold visions for building life-affirming institutions. Maurice Mitchell is the National Director of the Working Families Party, a nationally recognized social movement strategist, a visionary leader in the Movement for Black Lives, and a community organizer for racial, social, and economic justice.
Featured Practitioner
The In-Person Day will include Adaku Utah as our Featured Practitioner. Adaku is the Senior Manager of Movement Building Programs at the Building Movement Project, where she works with organizations on short-term rapid-response efforts and long-term projects to deepen solidarity within and across networks and ecosystems. They also uplift narratives through the Solidarity Is This podcast, conduct transformative trainings and workshops, and develop resources and tools to catalyze strategic solidarity practices.
Join Us!
“The Summit is a life-giving gathering that invites us to center love, community, and possibility—not just to survive the times we are in, but to support us in recalibrating toward the values, tools, and practices we need to transform systems of harm and violence at every level. Now is the time to rebuild and reimagine how we show up for one another, and to build sustained movements rooted in multiracial solidarity, mutual aid, abolition, and repair,” said Gery Paredes Vásquez.
We can and must build a thriving world shaped by our shared humanity, abundance, liberation, and a commitment to keep each other safe and well. Please join YWCA Madison at the Racial Justice Summit on September 25-26. Registration is now open through August 29, 2025!
