GameChangers Zine
Dreaming Ourselves
The Sexual Violence Resource Center (formerly the Rape Crisis Center) Youth Advisory Board (GameChangers) created a zine based on lineages of DIY, accessible, and popular/people’s education activism.
A message from the GameChangers:
The theme of our collective Zine is world-making - we believe another world is possible, and we want youth to lead the way! “World-making” emphasizes the role of imagination, joy, resilience, community care and current-moment practices for laying the foundation for a just future. This project strives to articulate how and allow radical change to happen - dreaming, envisioning, imagining the world(s) that we desire, long for, require in order to truly thrive.
We wanted this project to be specifically from the perspective of young people because young people are inheriting the world that has been imagined and that is being shaped everyday. Young people will not only bear the impact of the choices we as a society make today, but we will also soon have the power to change society for the better.
This year especially has been challenging for people. Isolating. Depressing. Harm-full. Grief-full. We have witnessed in real time the cruelty, the inhumanity, the failure of systems to protect and preserve the health and wellbeing of its citizens. So, part of the inspiration for this project is to provide joy, a reminder that we are all connected, that we depend on each other for survival, and that that is beautiful and necessary. It is also to provide the space to imagine what we DO want, need, and desire and how we can begin nurturing the vision of the future that allows all people to thrive.
THE ORGANIZERS
The GameChangers Youth Advisory Board is committed to empowering youth to engage in activism, change the culture of sexual violence, and foster progress across our country. Made up of brilliant high school students from across Dane County, participants work together to educate themselves and their fellow board members about various of advocacy, activism, and some of the root causes of rape culture. The address these issues through projects and presentations in the community — like this zine itself!
The focus of their work is on social justice, primary prevention, rape culture, and the intersectionality of oppressions within sexual violence. Zine vision and planning by Ana Shriver, Maggie DiSanza, Make Renfro-Sargent, Azalea Holt Wick, Lizzie Johnson, and Lucy Nonemacher. Supervised by Bri Breunig and Heather Chun.
THE PARTNERSHIP
This partnership and collaboration included: The GameChangers Youth Advisory Board, Communication Print Collective, The Bubbler at Madison Public Library, ArtWorking, Underbelly Collective, Madison Print & Resist organizers, and artist Lesley Numbers. Together we were able to riso-print 200 copies of the zine to distribute at three locations across town during the 2021 Madison Print & Resist event to spread awareness, elevate youth voice and raise funding for the Rape Crisis Center.
*This project is inspired from a long lineage of dreaming work, primarily lineages of and direction from BIPOC revolutionaries, dreamers, artists, rebels, healers and the demands for “reorganizing society based on the collective needs of the most oppressed.” (Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor, How We Get Free [2012] and the Combahee River Collective Statement of 1974)
