Christa Robles (she/her)
Christa has spent 15+ years doing the unglamorous work that comes after the burning down: building the spaces people actually walk into once the old structures are gone. Six years as a Charlotte-based Middle School Social Studies teacher taught her what inequity looks like up close, in real classrooms, with real kids — and sent her into education consulting to build something better at scale.
As a neurodivergent eldest daughter, she leans into pattern recognition, spotting the threads that connect people, ideas, and systems, and using them to build relationships people can trust. Her guiding philosophy is "Whimsical Ferality": staying unapologetically whimsical and a little untamed, while holding fiercely high standards for the safety of that whimsy. It's the same instinct this workshop is built on — you don't just tear the walls down, you make sure what you build in their place actually lets people in.
Co-Facilitator of: After We Burn It Down: Building Feminist Spaces People Can Actually Enter
Dismantling is only part of feminist work. Building the on-ramp is feminist work, too. We ask people to leave patriarchal churches and harmful families or relationships, to reject rigid gender roles, to unlearn racism and misogyny, and dismantle other oppressive beliefs and behaviors, but to do so often means leaving communities that offer important supports and resources.
While there’s power in “burning it down,” people can also lose community, identity, relationships, childcare, financial security, certainty, purpose, ritual, belonging, and more when they do. Those losses represent barriers to learning and rebuilding.
We’ll use examples ranging from religious deconstruction to exiting the manosphere and the tradwife life to ask:
If someone takes the off-ramp from a harmful system, have we built an on-ramp into something better
Together, we’ll examine our organizations, communities, and movements for potential pitfalls and barriers, including material barriers, participation barriers, and barriers of belonging. We will also examine the intersections of safety, accountability, and inclusion and ask who carries the load when someone is learning?
Participants will leave with a framework for examining a space they influence and one concrete change they can make to reduce an unnecessary barrier, redistribute a load, or strengthen accountability.
If we’re serious about asking people to leave oppressive systems, we should be equally serious about what we’re inviting them into.
Get in, friend. We’re going to fuck the patriarchy.