This event is open to ALL students, staff, faculty, and community friends.
Kelly Hayes (Menominee) is a direct action trainer and a co-founder of the Lifted Voices collective and the Chicago Light Brigade. She is also the host of the Truthout podcast Movement Memos. Kelly’s written work can be found in Truthout, Teen Vogue, Bustle, Yes! Magazine, Pacific Standard, NBC Think, her blog Transformative Spaces, The Appeal, and multiple anthologies, including Truthout's Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Kelly also co-authored two essays with Mariame Kaba which are featured in Kaba's new book, "We Do This Til We Free Us." Kelly was honored for her organizing and education work in 2014 with the Solidarity to Celebrate award in Chicago, and in 2018 with the Chicago Freedom School's Champions of Justice Award. Kelly's movement photography is featured in the “Freedom and Resistance” exhibit of the DuSable Museum of African American History. In her online projects, Kelly has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in recent years to support various forms of mutual aid and community care, and helped to launch coordinated mutual aid efforts in Chicago at the onset of the pandemic. Kelly has also been involved with numerous defense committees, including the campaign to free Bresha Meadows, and has organized fundraisers that have helped secure the release of incarcerated people, including #FreedomDay, a Twitter fundraiser that freed 22 people from immigration detention in the summer of 2019.
