FREEDOM LECTURES

Freedom Lectures are more than public talks—they are community gatherings designed to bring people together in good spirit, shared curiosity, and deeper connection. Hosted in the Reading Room or with neighborhood partners, each event creates space for real conversation and collective reflection. Rooted in the power of community, the series introduces Cleveland to changemakers from across the country who are advancing Black-led work and reshaping cultural narratives. Guided by themes from The Peoples Practice and shaped by the visions of the Cleveland Freedom Dreams Coalition, Freedom Lectures invite us to learn together, dream together, and build a freer, Blacker future side by side.

In 2025, the series launched through five Freedom Lectures, each exploring a core dimension of Black liberation and future-making: Black Feminism, Sow Liberation, Black Fashion Is Future, Black Education Futures, and Black Queer Intersectionality. Together, these lectures deepen the collective imagination, offering lenses through which community members can explore identity, power, creativity, and possibility while continuing to cultivate a shared vision of freedom.

Hosted at ThirdSpace Reading Room and facilitated by Ifeoma Ike, M.A., J.D., LL.M., Founder + Chief Equity Weaver, Pink Cornrows introduces radical imagination as both a mindset and a collective social practice that allows us to envision the world not as it is, but as it could be. It invited coalition members to unlearn limiting beliefs that claim “there is no alternative,” and to instead generate just, equitable, and regenerative futures rooted in history and responsive to present conditions. Because colonized frameworks, resource constraints, and daily hardship often suppress our most expansive thinking, the workshop outlines a practical pathway forward: first believing we deserve more than the current systems allow, then naming the radical futures we want, and finally committing to the deep work of unlearning, relearning, and learning anew what is required to make those futures real. This foundation is supported by reflection prompts and group dialogue that helped coalition members surface what assumptions shape their vision, who benefits from the status quo, and what courage looks like in this chapter of their work.

The workshop emphasized that radical imagination matters because it expands our  community’s sense of possibility, shifting organizations and movements from crisis response to future-making. By disrupting dominant cultural stories and centering those most affected by inequity as architects of new narratives, radical imagination makes restorative and liberated futures both conceivable and achievable. Mindset videos introduce foresight, decolonizing the future, community-rooted value creation, and questions around growth, profit, beauty, and design justice. This helped participants translate insights into practice by articulating emerging ideas, rethinking who is included in shaping the future, and defining what long-term success could look like if they exceeded their own expectations. Together, these tools cultivate the conditions for CFDC to become better designers of new systems—ones guided by possibility, belonging, and collective liberation.