We are offering an unusual resource to your organization. We know that, in these challenging times, art adds significantly to the inspiration we all need: from the handmade signs and hats and puppets at rallies to the creative videos and songs that emerge daily, artists fuel our conversations and add texture to our analyses and actions.​

At the East Side Freedom Library, we’ve been planning an arts learning event for organizations and the general public since early Fall 2016 — and we’re now ready to invite YOU so that you can put it on your organizational calendar.  This interactive project is called “Tempests in Teapots: Tea and Talk in the Library.”  From March 4 through March 17, this project will be available, and it’s free for your use:  staff issues retreat, mission development, relationship building, or organizing tool.

​”Tempests in Teapots” puts resources at your disposal for new listening and learning:

* the functional and beautiful pottery of local activist, Freedom Rider, and potter Claire O’Connor, and the makings of tea to sip as you listen and talk;

* the Popular Education Collection of Larry Olds, beloved educator in the popular education tradition, who passed away in Fall 2016 and gave his personal archive to ESFL;

* the rocking chairs of ESFL, a gesture to the Highlander Research & Education Center in Tennessee — chairs that support you as you stir up “tempests in teapots,” using pop-ed question sequences we provide or any org-development questions you might bring along.

​This is a new way, a cultural work way, to deepen conversations about democracy​, endurance, respite, and more.  You and your comrades can come for two hours in a kind of “retreat” — drink tea, talk tempests — and bring back to your work new ideas, modes of speaking, ideas for action. And it’s free.  Just book your time and arrive.  It’s all here.

Intrigued?  Call Peter Rachleff at 651-230-3294 or email ESFL at [email protected] for more information and to book your time.  Peter can help you craft your “Tempests in Teapots” experience.  You’re welcome here!!