Community Organizing Efforts
OSE Past and Present
Think of Therapy disguised as interactive world-building. ❤️
Follow Us for more specialty curated groups to help communities heal together. Offering for both Adults and Teens Launching Spring 2025. ✨
The kids are going to be alright yall ❤️..
This past weekend Operation Social Equality (OSE) hosted our Decolonizing Grief Workshop. This is a small peak into a portion of our 4 hour workshop.
These teens found instant community and bonded over their shared Dreams of a World where money didn’t exist, Justice was more restorative, and bathroom breaks at school had no time limits 😂.
Contact us for your teen who may be interested.
Charlottesville, VA
The Decolonizing Grief workshop is designed to support BIPOC groups in understanding the fundamental principles of grief and loss while fostering critical thinking and skill development to navigate both individual and collective experiences of grief. This non-clinical workshop is grounded in a popular education approach, which aims to raise participants’ consciousness and help them recognize how personal experiences are interconnected with broader societal issues. By empowering participants, the workshop encourages them to take action and create change regarding the problems that affect their lives.
No Filter Volume 1, 2, 3:
Battle rap showcase in collaboration with UVA to strengthen relationships among Black Charlottesville Residents and Black UVA students to tackle local social issues through the vehicle of hip hop. No Filter events challenged hunger in the Charlottesville Community, raising and donating over 100lbs + of Canned food items to local food banks.
Cville Solidarity March for Ferguson:
In 2014, the shooting death of Mike Brown took the nation by storm. Activists across the nation stood in solidarity with those on the ground in Ferguson, MO. OSE , being the lead organizers in Charlottesville, VA, stood in solidarity with the movement to speak out against police violence while taking a firm stand against racism-white supremacy. Organizing a rally of over 500 participants, OSE, facilitated a space where community members embraced rage, expressed pain and stood in unity to fight against police mistreatment in Charlottesville and surrounding communities.
Find Sage Smith Initiative:
In November 2012, the trans youth Sage Smith was reported missing from the Charlottesville area. The case was neglected by local police. The case was neglected by officers because Sage, who identified as a Black Woman, and was viewed as a person of low-economic status. OSE, partnered with the grassroots group, APOC, and committed ourselves to learning and teaching the black community about tans visibility. Utilizing community events, like No Filter, as a platform, OSE demonstrated its commitment to trans awareness by encouraging battlers to sign a contract prohibiting transphobia in their lyrics in order to participate in the event.
Campaign Against Media Race Baiting:
In 2014, racist media coverage of two LBGTQ-identifying Black males in Charlottesville was released. The two men were falsely characterized as the violent, unprovoked attackers of a white couple on the Charlottesville Downtown Mall when in fact, the two men were acting in self-defense after being unfairly targeted based on their race and sexual orientation. OSE became their biggest supporters and advocates to help them share their side of the story. The supportive efforts led OSE to organize our first rally, calling for the removal of the initial article that misrepresented the incident. We relied on community support, encouraging participation in advocacy efforts such as court support. More broadly, we sought to raise awareness of the layered injustices in this case, which reflected the everyday struggles of marginalized peoples in our area.
Black Bereavement Crisis Workshop Series:
Grief and Loss are a natural cycle of life. OSE partnered with community agencies, utilizing popular-education-styled workshops to provide education and training for services providers, equipping them with social political lens of grief and bereavement centering the Black experience amid the COVID-19 pandemic, developing a framework to support attendees with identifying the tenets of collective trauma and how to heal individually and collectively from major loss events.
Stand Up! Fight Back !: Cville organizes against nazi attacks
July 8th, August 12th
Standing true to dismantling white supremacy in Charlottesville, VA, OSE supported the efforts to mobilize community engagement, to counter the attacks of Neo-Nazis in Charlottesville. OSE, stood on the front lines of the July 8th and August 12th protests, contributing to direct-action responses to white supremacist violence.
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