SPEAK! Women of Color Media Collective

What Is the Speak! Women of Color Media Collective?

SPEAK! Women of Color Media Collective is a netroots coalition of media-makers interested in strengthening our communities through truth-telling, media justice and the creation of a network of women of color media makers.

SPEAK! member reading into a microphone at the studio

SPEAK! members blend together personal experience with an intersectional [includes everyone] multi-issue feminist perspective. SPEAK! members believe in media that is for our communities, by our communities. The framework SPEAK! uses is the one created by earlier feminists of color: a life-long commitment to addressing interlocking forms of oppression by creating radical transformative relationships to each other and the world.

What Has Speak Been Up To?
SPEAK! members believe in the need for self-sustaining, community-supported funding [money that lasts and that people have control over it]. SPEAK! members seek ways to support each other and our work without being dependent on grants or donations that could potentially quiet or co-opt [steal, take over] our voices.

With the help of Liquid Words Productions, we created a CD & zine [handmade book] that weaves together the works of artists, poets, and story-tellers to create a quilt of brave expressions of the experiences, interventions and insight of Radical Women of Color SPEAKing up!

 With the buildOn members from Cass Tech, Renaissance and University Prep High Schools in Detroit, MI designing and creating the CD cover, allies working with us (shout out to Matthew Cross who gave us hours of free studio time and produced the CD for us!), and the Allied Media Conference family supporting us with love and start-up funds, this has truly been a community-created, grassroots product. We hope you will be a part of it.

Why a CD?

This CD’s purpose is two-fold. First, we hope that this CD will be an outreach tool and a resource for women of color and allies seeking to bring important issues to light. Many teachers and activists are already planning ways they can use the CD in their work. We have a free curriculum available for download underneath the Listening Party page in hopes that people will come together around the CD.

Second, this is a fundraising tool. We plan to use all profits from the sale of the CD to support single mothers of SPEAK! in coming to the Allied Media Conference. Mothers are instrumental to our work and have been some of the key advisors to the AMC’s INCITE! Women/Trans People of Color Media Track, as well as instigators and shapers of SPEAK! from the beginning. We use the Allied Media Conference as a place to come together and plan our work.

We want other women of color to know they are not alone in their experiences and know that this CD will give sound, voice and space to the often silenced struggles and dreams of women of color.