Table Talk (2020)
A series created by and for people of color and other underrepresented communities to ensure greater equity in end-of-life care and celebrate our contributions to the world.
Our Vision for Table Talk
The table is where we gather, eat, live, and pray. It’s where we talk about what happened that day, in our dreams, who we love, who we dislike, what we want. The table is where we interact with others: family, friends, colleagues, and rivals. The table is where all things, real, bold, good, bad, beautiful, and ugly-- come to the light. We may not agree with each other when we’re at the table, but we might find common ground, understanding, and learn something from each other we didn’t know before.
Our tables are worth more than we can ever measure. Your grandmother’s dinner table, your dad’s card table, or maybe the first table you ever bought-- these stay in our families for generations. Here is where we bring our pain, our love, our worries. These tables hold scars and scratches from the hardest discussion, but stay strong throughout our lives. However you define it, the most important conversations happen at the table with those closest to us.
This is universal. This is Table Talk.
- Stephanie Rivers, Reimagine
Reimagine aims to honor these traditions, by creating space for people of color and other underrepresented communities to host events relevant to their work and their own communities.
Reimagine’s Table Talk Series is a focused narrative on overcoming inequities, living well, healing, grieving, and end-of-life planning created by leading practitioners, scholars, and producers. We invite people of all backgrounds to join us to witness, listen and learn, but ultimately, we are creating space for people of color and other underrepresented communities to thrive, educate, and spread love to their peers, families, and friends.
The Table Talk Series will pilot this fall with a focus on the Black/African-American community and the theme:
The Realities of Life and Death in the Black Community & the Heroes Championing the Way
With participant/collaborator feedback at the forefront of our decision-making process for this series, Reimagine aims to open up Table Talk to other collaborators to begin producing new spaces for underserved communities beginning in Spring 2021.
Taking Care Of Business: Advance Planning With Faith
Having “the talk” is hard for everyone, but for African Americans, end-of-life discussions are especially challenging. Compounded by the social and economic issues that have altered the lives of families for generations, Black people are statistically shown to have shorter life spans due to comorbidities, health care disparities, and a disposition to experiencing a violent death. Add to this a long history of mistrust and fear of medical and death care institutions, many families inadequately plan for a healthy life, let alone an honorable death.
Tending The Garden: Cultivating Healing Amidst Trauma
For over 400 years in the United States, traumatic and sudden death have been a continuous reality for Black lives in a nation rooted in systemic racism. COVID-19 has revealed the void of mental health services--including grief support--for African American survivors of violent crime. Rather than investing in caregiving, healing, and restorative justice, federal and state governments for the past four decades have ramped up prison expansion, incarceration, and aggressive policing. How can African Americans sustain their journey towards self and communal empowerment, recovery, and care? What can white folks do to support those efforts?
Strange Fruit: A Sounding Board For Life, Death, and Justice
This experience, facilitated by musicians Ali Sharif, Latoya Cooper, and Stephanie Rivers, will examine the impact, implications, effects, and rich meanings of these musical expressions to inspire us to action, instill greater empathy in our hearts, all the while considering the social, economic, and political struggles that have consumed Black and brown people with grief.
Meet, Greet, and Dream with Reimagine Collaborators of Color
Note: No recording available
Do you identify as a person of color or BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, or a Person of Color)? Are you interested in creating powerful new partnerships? Maybe find a co-host for your next Reimagine event to amplify your work? We've created a low-pressure space to dream and connect, in a fun speed-dating like format.
