Dear community,
After 8 years in the collective & over 4 years as one of our Co-Coordinators, Dylan Cooke will be leaving Catalyst Project in early July. We are sad to see her go, but looking forward to the new ways she will be working for social justice!
As an alum of the Braden program herself, Dylan helped run eight Anne Braden Antiracist Training Programs, including our largest-ever Braden program, currently happening online with 140 participants from around the US and Canada.
One of Dylan’s largest contributions to Catalyst was to help sharpen our organizational analysis and practice supporting Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. As part of her work with Catalyst, Dylan went to Standing Rock during the historic fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline, helping non-Native people think about how to come as guests and be of service in that incredible space of Indigenous-led resistance. Dylan helped create an “Indigenous Justice for Environmental Movements Toolkit” to support non-Indigenous sections of climate and environmental movements to align our work with Indigenous organizing and with Indigenous sovereignty.
Over her 8 years in Catalyst, Dylan supported dozens of racial justice actions, rallies, and marches, developed many anti-racist tools, curricula, and reading lists, and trained hundreds of people. She played an important role in many organizations’ anti-racist transformation processes, including Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, Sunrise, and 350.org. And she was a core part of the process of launching our sister c4 organization, Catalyst Action Fund, to bring our racial justice work into the policy and electoral arena.
Whether mentoring new anti-racist activists or skillfully facilitating a workshop, Dylan brings intentionality, kindness, goofy jokes, a sense of possibility, a huge heart, and a clear commitment to collective liberation. We’ll continue to work together in many ways in the future, and we’re excited to see what the next shape her commitment to justice will take.
From Dylan: I can’t believe I’ll be leaving this incredible organization this summer. It’s been 8 years of heart-fulfilling work, many months of running transformational programs together, weeks full of facilitating profound processes with movement organizations, hundreds of hours of laughter-filled meetings, and more emails than you want to know about. I’ll always love this work and this movement family. I’m excited to take a mid-life mini-retirement in the woods for a while and then come back invigorated for the next decade of building movements to win the world we long for.
With gratitude,
-Clare, David, Donna, Elisabeth, Ellen, Lee, Molly, Rochelle, and Rahula (Catalyst Collective)
PS Since Dylan might end up out in Minnesota supporting this fight, we want to point you to https://www.stopline3.org/ to join the Indigenous-led fight against Enbridge’s attempt to build a new pipeline.