Local

Saturday, June 15, 12-8pm
Mayme Moore Park, 867 Mt Vernon Ave.
We laughed, we cried, we danced, we told Stonewall Columbus to F-OFF, and this year... WE’RE BAAAACK!!!
Black Queer & Intersectional Collective and its partners are organizing a 2nd annual Community Pride celebration which centers QTIPOC and those at other intersections of oppression, takes no corporate sponsorship, and outrightly fights against state-sanctioned violence.
Celebrating our Revolutionary History on the 50 Year Anniversary of The Stonewall Uprising. There’s nothing we want more than to commemorate THE TRUE history of our roots with you, our community.
We can’t wait to centralize Black and Brown queer, trans/GNC, and intersex voices, talents, and vendors who have dedicated their lives to resisting Rainbow Capitalism, and fighting for true Liberation for all of us.
Come join us and be apart of what the Stonewall Uprising was REALLY about:
Freedom from the Police State and the overreaching, menacing alliance between Corporations, The State, and the violent-exclusionary cis white gay-geoisie.
We Love and Need You More than You Know!

Fri, June 14, 4:30-7:30pm
Franklinton Cycle Works, 897 W. Broad St.
A celebration of our bicycle culture and promotion of its growth with food, games, stuff for the kiddos, music, bike demos, and much more; stayed tuned for the details. facebook.com/FranklintonCycleworks.

UK folk-pop singer Lucy Spraggan will be playing a headlining show at Rumba Cafe on June 23rd.

She just released her fifth (!!!) studio album Today Was A Good Day on May 3rd via Cooking Vinyl. The four-time UK Top 40 artist's signature folk-pop style (Think a mix of Courtney Barnett, KT Tunstall, and Ed Sheeran) has captured hearts in her home country, allowing her to forge her own path across Europe and the UK. She has also received hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube (With some of her videos reaching millions of views!!).  

The NFL has created headlines over the last few years for many reasons. Whether it’s the Deflategate issue with Tom Brady or Colin Kaepernick taking a knee, the famous league has had to find its way out of hot water for plenty of reasons. But it is the concussion debate in the NFL that has trickled down as far as college and high school football as well. So much so, in fact, that there is an increasing demand for change from the NFL to better protect its players.

With each criminal conviction, the state of Ohio matter-of-factly tells the defendants how long they will spend behind bars. Hidden from view, in the “fine-print,” is a long list of additional penalties attached to these convictions. 

Only upon leaving prison and while attempting to rebuild their lives, do offenders experience, first-hand, how these non-prison “collateral consequences” limit or deny their basic rights to housing, food stamps, education, voting, employment, child custody and much more.

A 2018 study conducted by the Prison Policy Initiative found that “formally incarcerated people are unemployed at a rate of over 27%—higher than the total U.S. unemployment rate during any historical period, including the Great Depression…[and]…Exclusionary policies and practices are responsible for these market inequities.”

The study concludes: “A prison sentence should not be a perpetual punishment…States should implement automation record expungement procedures and reform their licensing practices so as to eliminate the automatic rejection of people with felony convictions.”   

Thursday, June 13, 9am-12am
SkateZone71, 4900 Evanswood Dr., Columbus
This is the FOURTH Community Pride event and the last one before the Community Pride Festival!
This event is 18+!

We are partnering with Skate Zone 71 on their Pride Skating Party to bring you Skate Against State Violence! Come through with your cutest looks and show us what you got on the floor! We plan on having an area in the rink dedicated to letter-writing to incarcerated trans folks, as well as collecting donations for the Marsha P. Johnson Institute.

Community Pride’s third event was a screening of Laverne Cox and Jac Gares’ documentary, “Free CeCe!” The film is about the revolutionary prison abolitionist politics of CeCe McDonald, a black trans woman who was incarcerated into a men’s prison for acting in self-defense when experiencing fascist violence. The film was shown in the Beeler Gallery on Tuesday at 7pm and was followed by a panel discussion of four black trans activists with co-director of the festival, Dkéama Alexis, as the moderator.

A prominent theme in the documentary is how transmisogynoir, oppression of black trans women, is legalized in the police and prison systems. Cox and Gares highlight how there is no respite from violence and abuse as a trans woman of color. The film portrayed McDonald’s resistance to the state’s racist policies and the international support for her. The integral argument is that solidarity with black trans women means to reject respectability politics. There can be no trans liberation without prison abolition. McDonald skyped in after the screening to express her disgust at mainstream pride events and explain why she will not be celebrating Pride.

The affordable housing crunch in Columbus is growing by the day and you can see one of its causes at the corner of Lane and High just off-campus.

Located there is the shiny new Wilson Place, where (trustafarian) Ohio State students can rent a tiny 2-bedroom with a 24-hour concierge for $2,400-a-month.

No doubt the Scott Schiff-owned property – yes, the ambulance chaser who is also one of the largest property owners around OSU – is putting upward pressure on the cost of off-campus housing.

Negatively affected is a huge number of not-as-fortunate young adults in need of affordable housing.

The invasion of over-priced apartments has caused local market price, which was once affordable, to overheat. And as the region continues to boom both economically and in popularity, greedy landlords can’t resist but to overcharge.

For Central Ohio the average cost of rent has risen from $758 in 2013 to $942 in 2018, according to local real estate research firm Vogt Strategic Insights. The apartment-finder website Rentcafé states 55 percent of Columbus residents rent, compared to 46 percent in 2006.

What does a community herbalist do? “Many people are confused when they see my business cards. says ‘Lily Kunning, Community Herbalist.’ Some are familiar with clinical or medical herbalists and wonder if that means that I do not see clients. Actually, I was trained in a clinical herbalism program and do indeed see clients. So why do I call myself a community herbalist?”

The answer is perspective and point-of-view for Kunning. To her, community herbalism is not “less than clinical herbalism” but instead is a form of activism rooted in plant medicine – what Lily calls “the people’s medicine,” because people can grow their own treatments cheaply.

In the past, all herbalists were community herbalists, and it wasn’t until the advent of heroic and capitalist medicine that a distinction was made between clinical and community herbalists, much in the way that western philosophy emphasizes the individual and the mind over the community and the body. In the past, healers treated everyone in their community, because the health of the community ensured the health of all individuals. “We need to get back to a community-centered form of healing.” says Kunning.