EventsCommon Ground

Build Back Better: Erik Forman

Featuring Forman and Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper

Thursday, November 4, 2021 2 p.m. Eastern / 11 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

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Union organizer and entrepreneur Erik Forman joins Rail Editor-at-Large Donna Schaper for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Cole Swensen.

In this Talk

Please note this conversation will take place at 2pm ET.

Erik Forman

A photo of Erik Forman on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
Union organizer turned teacher turned social(ist) entrepreneur Erik Forman is co-founder of The Drivers Cooperative, the first driver-owned rideshare platform cooperative in the United States, as well as People’s Choice Communications, the world’s first worker-owned ISP, launched by striking cable technicians. Before turning toward cooperative development as a strategy for system change, Erik was active in the labor movement for over 15 years, leading groundbreaking unionization campaigns in the fast food industry and conducting organizing trainings and workshops across the world.

Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper

A photo of Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
Community builder Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper served as Senior Minister of Judson Memorial Church from 2006 to 2021. She was formerly at Coral Gables Congregational Church in Miami and before that at Yale University, and teaches leadership at the Hartford Seminary. As an elder, she is passionately concerned about leaving the next generation well-prepared for all they have to face. She has written over 35 books including Approaching End of Life: A Practical and Spiritual Guide (2015), Grace at Table: Small Spiritual Solutions to Large Material Problems, Solving Everything (2013), to her most recent book I Heart Francis: Letters to the Pope from an Unlikely Admirer (2016), among many others. She is an Editor-at-Large at the Rail.

The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poetry reading, and we're fortunate to have Dao Strom reading.

Dao Strom

A photo of Dao Strom on The Brooklyn Rail's New Social Environment
Artist Dao Strom works with three “voices”—written, sung, visual—to explore hybridity and the intersection of personal and collective histories. She is the author of Instrument (Fonograf Editions, 2020) and its musical companion Traveler’s Ode (Antiquated Future Records, 2020); a bilingual poetry-art book, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else (AJAR Press); a memoir, We Were Meant To Be a Gentle People, and song cycle, East/West; and two books of fiction, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and Grass Roof, Tin Roof. Born in Vietnam, Strom grew up in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California and lives in Portland, Oregon. She is co-founder of two collective art projects, She Who Has No Master(s), and De-Canon.

We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨

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