Hi folks this is Jamar Tisbee co-host of the Pass the Mike

podcast and solo host of the Footnotes podcast I've got a very special announcement to share with you today.

It's probably, oh, it's undoubtedly our most ambitious project yet,

but before I get to that, let me tell you a story. In October 2019, the

witness, a black Christian collective, had our first national conference. It was the Joy and Justice Conference continuing the

400-year journey of Black Joy and Justice from 1619 to 2019. This was a huge undertaking. Anyone who's ever planned a big event, you know what goes

into it. There's all these details, all of these moving parts to think about. And if you're planning a big event you know there's

a ton of obstacles and as we were planning this conference we probably ran into just

about every obstacle you can think of. For one, we were working remotely.

So none of us are in the same city. We had to do all of this conference planning via email and

text and slack and phone calls it was

difficult to say the least. Another challenge was we had never done this before

so we didn't have sort of any institutional knowledge about how to

do this well. We faced a whole lot of other challenges as far as finding folks to

help us organize the event, communicating with people on the ground in Chicago where

the event was held, all of these kinds of things. But here's the thing, we could handle any of those

sort of logistical challenges, The one challenge that threatened to

derail the entire conference was money. So people ask me oftentimes with our work with the witness of Black Christian collective

what's your budget you know what what are you working with here and I just kind

of chuckle because ever since we started back in 2011, we've had pennies.

I mean, everybody who works with the witness on the team

were volunteers.

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