ACE Projects
We hold workshops, playshops, classes and lecture series, in the Labrys School for Self Healing Arts for Women and Girls. We publish a newsletter The Labrys Speaks, with copies and articles here on our web site. ACE is a 501c3. |
Associates for Community Education, a non-profit corporation, currently has three projects:
- The Northern California Women’s Music Festival,
- The Lesbian Fund, and
- The Labrys School of Self-Healing Arts for Wimmin and Girls
The Northern California Women’s Music Festival has been produced annually since 2005 as a venue for up and coming women artists to showcase their talent and share the stage with more well-known artists. Musicians, comediennes, spoken word artists and dancers perform on a small stage among the trees each afternoon and under the starry sky each evening, while drumming circles and the music of voices, flutes and guitars can be heard softly throughout the day.
The three-day, campout event also has featured educational workshops, to empower us in Unlearning Racism, Healing Teeth and Gums, Meditation, Yoga, Qi Gong, Hawaiian Goddesses and Sacred Dance, Middle Eastern Dancing and Drumming to name but a few. We share our diverse cultures with one another playing instruments, browsing or shopping in the crafts tent, sharing food and camaraderie on wooded land near Laytonville. The Healing Tent offers first aid, massage and chiropractic services.
Herstorically the festival has been attended by women and children from most of the northern counties. Some have come from Riverside and Los Angeles, others from Oregon and Arizona, and internationally from Australia, England and Holland.
The thirteen women of the core team are all volunteers, including the producer, Linda Stonestreet. The main staffing of the event is through a full work exchange program whereby fifty women tend shifts in various work areas to enable the production to take place. Other participants pay a ticket fee, which includes their meals, performances, workshops, camping and childcare, without working unless they volunteer to do so.
The 2008 operating expenses were $33,000. Income has been through sales of tickets and festival merchandise. To allow the festival to continue into 2009 we must add income and increase the attendance. And that’s where ACE stepped in to help attract donations and grants, and to increase publicity for the festival.
We are looking for a grant writer and for donations. If you have either to contribute to this project, please send them our way. All donations, publicity and other help you may offer are welcome. Make checks payable to Sentinel Investments, with “NCWMF” in the memo line. Send them to ACE, c/o Joan Margaret, D.C., 6536 Telegraph Avenue, Suite A-102, Oakland, CA 94609.
Our goal is to produce the next festival in August of 2010.
The Lesbian Health Fund was founded in 2004 by members of the Labrys Healthcare Circle in an effort to create an endowment, to treat Lesbians who cannot afford to pay their healthcare needs.
As healthcare practitioners we are aware of potential patients who cannot afford our fees. Each of us contributes in different ways to give our work at reduced fees or no fee to however many we can. We would like to be able to expand the number of Lesbians using natural healthcare, by offering treatment from this fund, while also keeping our small businesses profitable enough to pay our own bills.
At this time the fund is still small. A single donor gave $1500 to the fund and some money came from a fund-raising event featuring The Average Dyke Band and sale of nutritious, organically grown desserts and drinks at this event. We are soliciting donations with expectations that soon we will be able to offer natural healthcare for more individual Lesbians in need.
Make checks payable to Sentinel Investments with “Lesbian Fund” in the memo line. Send to ACE, c/o Joan Margaret, D.C., at the above address.
The Lesbian Health Fund was modeled on The Feminist Health Fund in Ohio, founded in 1977 by Joan Margaret and her sisters at Women, Inc. This fund is still going strong, fundraising for individual women’s healthcare treatment.
The Labrys School of Self-Healing Arts for Women and Girls was founded by Joan Margaret in 1995. For five years ACE members and other healthcare practitioners joined in facilitating studies in healing arts. We published the class schedule every equinox in our newsletter, The Labrys Speaks.
The Labrys School currently offers workshops upon request. Joan Margaret offers workshops to introduce self-muscle testing to wimmin and girls and facilitates monthly study groups in Applied Kinesiology to female acupuncturists and chiropractors.
Any womon-born-womon is welcome to contact the Labrys Healthcare Circle office and inquire about attending a workshop or the study group series.