By Stacy Small & Marie Smith

Hate crimes and social tensions are on the rise in the U.S., exacerbated by the rhetoric of the 2016 elections. The Southern Poverty Law Center has catalogued 1053 instances of post-election hate crime nationally (as of late February 2017).

While many are stepping up their civil rights advocacy and activism in response, what individual actions can we take to recognize, document, and reduce hate crime and harassment in our communities? We invite you to an interactive workshop to learn to identify, intervene and de-escalate potentially hostile situations before they turn violent, applying simple but effective tactics rooted in principles of non-violence.

Full event details

The workshop will be co-facilitated by Stacy Small-Lorenz, PhD and Marie Smith, JD, MEd, co-organizers of the Women’s March on Washington-Maryland Chapter. Stacy and Marie met by chance in an elevator in Washington, DC, quickly discovered they shared the same birth name, and the rest is history. They have trained together and taught Bystander Intervention tactics with the Montgomery County Civil Rights Coalition. Stacy is an ecologist specializing in climate change adaptation and resilience in her day job at The National Wildlife Federation in Washington, DC. Marie is a litigation attorney who also directs a high school and college career mentoring program for Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority in Fort Washington, MD, and teaches high school dating violence prevention workshops.

Free and open to the public.