About Vital Conversations
Our movements for justice and liberation are fractured. People are isolated and under attack: hunted on the streets by immigration agents, under threat of deportation for their political expression. And it’s become increasingly clear that we can’t turn to our elected officials for guidance.
If we’re all we’ve got, what are the lessons we have to learn from each other?
A lot of us are feeling dispirited, powerless in the face of advancing authoritarian repression, having the same conversations over and over without knowing quite what to do next.
So, we decided to seek the wisdom in our communities. The U.S. Department of Arts and Culture is rooted in building dialogue: bringing smart people together and seeing what magic happens. So we are returning to those roots: having conversations with people about a variety of topics, tackling big and small questions.
We’re going to be sharing these conversations in different forms: video, zine, comic, music, and more. We’re engaging our own networks and friendships to model the kind of community connection that’s going to help us fight, and we’re making art while we’re at it.
Join Us.
We’re inviting you to learn with us in real time. We will post new episodes (roughly) once a month, and we encourage you to engage with this content in community: watch with a friend, host a dinner party with the same topic as the focus of discussion, or record and share your own conversations.
We know there’s no silver bullet that will solve things. It’s going to take a lot of brilliant thinkers and practitioners. That’s why we encourage you to replicate this same practice we’re building. Not only a conversation, but the creation of something beautiful from it.
We’ve always said that our work is an act of collective imagination. And that feels true now more than ever.