Creative Community Spaces #5
Today I chat with Sara Sadak and Lesley Numbers about building community through creative practices and their collaborative zine Folkweaver.
Over the next few months, through a series of interviews, I am interested in exploring the many and varied ways creative practices can be used to forge connections and build robust communities. These creative activities might include facilitating workshops, creating art, collaborative crafts, designing protest posters, musical performances, publishing zines, anything really; there are so many ways we can use creativity to unite us.
Through these collaborative artistic endeavors we can build friendships and support systems, reignite inter-generational connection within families, deepen our connection with nature and create a sense of belonging within a community. We can also use creative practices to combat and dismantle oppressive systems, support marginalised communities and protect our planet.
There are so many ways we can use art and creativity to build a better world; let's explore and share ideas together!
If you have a community project you would like to share, please reach out in the comments, I would love to hear from you.
FOLKWEAVER ZINE
Today I’m chatting with Sara Sadek and Lesley Numbers who collaborate on the Folkweaver Zine, a four-volume calendaring journal that allows the seasons to guide us in an active practice of weaving together more robust, interdependent communities of radical care.
Sara Sadek, founder of Folkweaver, is a writer, educator, advisor and community builder exploring connection, care, and creative freedom as a pathway to co-liberation, particularly in motherhood and childhood.
Lesley Numbers is an artist, educator, mother and earth-tender who loves to co-create projects and experiences that nurture creative exploration and a shared sense of belonging.
I asked both Sara and Lesley about what lead to their current creative practice and community work:
Sara responded: Motherhood really opened up my liberatory community-building and creative practices. I felt so isolated in the early days of mothering, and everything in my bones told me this was not the way we were meant to move through the journey of motherhood. So I sought out an aligned community of parents, which started a decades’ worth of community-building work and creative practice centered on reconnecting to ourselves, each other, our planet. In 2018, I started a screen printing-as-activism project called Radical Matriarch, where we made politicised screen prints in community, and that project has morphed into what I now call Folkweaver. I look to motherhood, community and creative practice as my pathways to shaping a more liberatory, care-centered future.
Lesley said: Like Sara, becoming a mother empowered me to embrace a creative practice, centered around printmaking, and share it with others. When I was pregnant in 2012, I felt a strong desire to connect with others through creative practices and build a life with my daughter that felt aligned with our values. Since then, I’ve engaged in a number of collaborative and community-based projects, which include, co-creating murals, risograph printing zines, screen printing shirts and posters for protests, teaching all ages and abilities a variety of printmaking processes, as well as committing to an art practice rooted in a sense of spirit, curiosity, gratitude and love for the living world.
Lesley and Sara, who first met at high school, reignited their collaboration and friendship in recent years through their Palestinian solidarity work coupled with their shared experiences of motherhood and community care work. Their first collaborative project was designing a series of prints for Palestinian Mutual Aid Fundraisers (which you can see here). They continued to connect over dreams for weaving more robust communities of care and liberation. That’s how their first zine, Germinating Dreams of Community, came to life.
I asked, What makes you both feel passionate?
We’re both so passionate about how to live and breathe liberation into being with our actions and the way we live our lives, modeling those values for our children, and seeking out and connecting with others similarly invested in shaping a kinder, more caring, more liberated world. We see art as a way to both process all that’s so hard and broken about our current world, but also as a tool to radically vision what’s possible. We believe we get to weave a better world every day together, and our work is an active practice of that.
Next, we chatted more about they ways they are using creative practices to build community and the process of launching their zine Folkweaver:
Sara and Lesley responded: I think a lot of us have been circling around how isolated and separate our current society has made us, and are actively seeking ways to reconnect and radically care for each other.
This past year, we started having honest, vulnerable conversations about our current reality and the world we wanted to live in, which in and of itself is a radical act of connecting. We went from inhabiting similar space for so much of our formative years, but not knowing each other very well at all, to establishing an intimate collaboration based on deeply shared values and a belief that a different way of moving through this all is possible.
Our zine emerged from that.
We wanted to create a zine that reconnects us to the seasons, the cycles, and each other: a project that would actively help us build more robust systems of care in our real, actual lives.
We envisioned this first zine as volume I of IV, releasing one each season to nudge us toward each other in creating radical systems of care.
We wanted to ask: What happens when we do this intentional work together in community after a full circle around the sun, after a full year? How might our communities look different?
After releasing our first winter zine, Germinating Dreams of Community, we’re already so heartened by the ways folks are engaging with it in their real, actual lives, as a nudge toward finding and deepening relationships within their own communities, and we’re finding it such a helpful tool in our own lives to anchor our active practice of community building.
The second volume of their zine, Sowing Seeds of Creativity, is now available to pre-order. It is a calendaring journal from the spring equinox-summer solstice that harnesses the energy of springtime to bring our creative visions of community to life.
I asked, what was your favourite part of the project?
Sara and Lesley responded: The deep connections we continue to form both with each other and our wider community, and the connections we’re hearing about from others engaged in the work.
It is so beautiful when we get a message from a community member telling us about their latest bonfire, or organizing a circle in their living room, or printing the zine for all their co-workers. We dreamed it as an active practice and it’s really joyful to see it as a catalyst for folks to gather.
To end our conversation, we chatted about hopes, plans and dreams for the future.
Lesley and Sara shared: We’re really curious and excited about how our communities will look after we’ve created, shared out, and engaged with four seasons of our zines. We’re creating one zine per season, and are mid-creating our Spring zine right now. We’re hoping to continue to collaborate with other artists and creatives who want to contribute prompts, art, recipes to the zines, and are just hopeful for the possibilities of connection the zine can bring for all of us.
Tell me about something in your community that gives you hope for our collective future?
Lesley: I feel hopeful about all of the folks I know who are actively building communities and networks of care; from weekly meals with friends and neighbors, to seasonal gatherings around a fire, to mutual aid organizing, to parents figuring out how to share childcare and enjoy time together, to artists navigating how to share resources and uplift one another, to humans re-learning ways to feel more connected to the land, plants and animals that support us. I am hopeful about shifts I can see and feel in our collective thinking and ways of being from scarcity to abundance, independence to interdependence, charity to solidarity and a willingness to be vulnerable, navigate fears and embrace more loving lives together.
Sara: I feel hopeful when I work with school communities, educators, parents and community members radically re-imagining ways we can be in relationship to our children.
I get excited about actively practicing connection as a pathway to freedom in our relationship with our kids, and about school communities that actively disrupt power hierarchies between adults and kids by giving kids connection and agency steeped in a container of liberation. When kids are treated in a way that honors their freedom, within a culture that’s rooted in anti-racism, cooperation, interdependence, and mutual care, they in turn grow up to be adults who know in their bodies what connected, interdependent freedom feels like, and can walk through the world with an unwavering commitment to wanting that for every being.
Seeing that in practice in the communities I’m a part of gives me so much hope.
You can find out more about Folkweaver and pre-order your copy of the new spring zine here»
For my southern hemisphere friends, the zine is following northern hemisphere seasons so we just need to wait a few months until we head into winter, then we can begin with the first winter zine.
FIND OUT MORE ABOUT SARA & LESLEY:
Both Sara and Lesley currently live in the US, Sara is based on the Ohlone land known as San Francisco. Lesley is based in Madison, Wisconsin on ancestral Ho-Chunk land.
You can find their zine collaboration at Folkweaver.com
You can see most of Lesley’s art at lesleyannenumbers.com and connect with her on Instagram @lesleyannenumbers and on Bluesky @lesleyannenumbers
You can subscribe to Sara’s weekly essays at the Folkweaver Substack, learn more about Sara’s advising and community building work at sarasadek.co and follow along on Instagram at @folkweaversf or on Bluesky @folkweaver
I want to say a huge thank you to both Lesley and Sara for sharing their stories, ideas and experiences. I feel so inspired after hearing their stories to continue the creative community building work I do in my own community and to hear more stories from other community builders around the world.
Thank you all for taking the time to read.
Eleanor X
MAKE YOUR OWN MINI ZINE:
Creating zines is such a fun activity to do with young people, to ignite creativity and story-telling skills. I’ve created a fun and easy printable zine template and guide which can be downloaded from MINIMADTHINGS.COM
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