“We can go solo but together we make a bigger sound.”
Did you know there are Girls Rock camps all over the world?
Each year, the Girls Rock Camp Alliance brings together participants from many of the independently operated Girls Rock Camps for an international conference where we share resources and ideas. This year’s conference took place March 30 through April 3 - and Girls Rock! Rhode Island was there!
Staff member Johanna Walczak, board member Delia Kovac, and volunteers Darlene Reina and Khym Carmichael joined over 200 participants for the conference in Elmer, NJ. It was a whirlwind gathering of workshops, discussions and lots of networking with camps from across the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, and South America.
The conference offered over 40 sessions, including hands-on workshops, panels, curriculum shares, writing groups, and presentations, as well as meet-ups, causes, solidarity working groups, the annual member meeting, and evening activities. The sessions were organized into seven different tracks, focusing on different themes, while all incorporating a social justice framework.
Throughout the weekend, Delia and Darlene attended workshops in the “Radical Approaches to Music” track, including a multi-part workshop on how to build a contact microphone, led by Bonnie Jones and Suzanne Thorpe from TECHNE. These workshops not only taught the hands-on skills to build a contact mic, but also discussed the design and pedagogy of how they teach this workshop at other programs, with the aim of training participants to be able to lead workshops at their own camps.
Another workshop favorite that Darlene and Delia attended was “Rock & Roll Was Invented By A Queer Black Woman,” facilitated by Laura Chow Reeve, who also co-organized the Political Education Track at the conference. In this session, Laura shared the curriculum she developed for a workshop about cultural appropriation (in general but also specifically in rock & roll music), as a way of starting conversations with youth and other folks in rock camp programs around the ways race, gender, and sexuality intersect in music (both historically and in the present). The co-coordinators of the Political Education Track also put together this awesome resource guide.
Johanna attended workshops on curriculum development and program planning and implementation. Her favorite was a workshop on Universal Design for Learning, led by Jenn Fox-Thomas from Girls Rock! DC. She is excited to use the knowledge she learned at the conference to strengthen the workshop curriculum for our Girls Rock Camps this summer, and better support our volunteer workshop facilitators, instrument instructors, and band coaches with new tools and ideas.
Khym attended a variety of workshops throughout the weekend, her favorite being a workshop on “Rihanna: Pop Music and Mainstream Feminist Narratives,” facilitated by Kate Walsh from Girls Rock! Chicago. This workshop discussed ways in which song structures and different sounds can be oppressive or liberating, using Rihanna’s music as an example of how her choice of sounds and musical structure reject mainstream narratives. Khym also co-facilitated the “White People Challenging Racism Working Group,” where participants discussed ways to combat racism within their own communities and across the Girls Rock Camp movement.
Girls Rock! Rhode Island shared our knowledge about and experience with grassroots fundraising for Girls Rock Camps in a workshop on Sunday, “Our Work Deserves to Be Well Funded.” Delia and Johanna facilitated this workshop, providing a basic overview of grassroots fundraising for new camps, or existing camps that want to start raising money from individual donors. We shared the experience of growing our own campaign, and shared some basic tools for planning and implementing an individual donor campaign.
New to the conference this year was an opening ceremony on Friday, featuring keynote speaker Kai Lumumba Barrow, co-founder of Critical Resistance and founder of Gallery of the Streets. GRR! also participated in the Annual Member Meeting, where members of the Girls Rock Camp Alliance approved the annual plan and voted in a new slate of members to the Board of Directors.
Outside of the structured activities, we all enjoyed one-on-one and small group conversations with other conference attendees from around the world over many meals, breaks, and late night hangouts in the cabins. We even performed an impromptu camp song, written on the fly, during the Friday evening activities and had a late night jam session with folks from Boston, Montreal, Reykjavik and Saskatoon on Saturday.
The conference left us feeling energized and inspired to bring new ideas and approaches to our camps and programs in Rhode Island!
