The F Word en Feminizando

F Word Superheroines and Heroes
Accept New Mission
Press Release
Maureen Burdock & Kelley Rainwater,
The Narrative Art Center & Dhaturra Announce
Launching of F Word Empowerment Project
Santa Fe, NM - June 22, 2009

The F Word Empowerment Project, based on Maureen Burdock's Five feminist Fables for the 21st Century, will bring facilitated empowerment groups to women's shelters, rape crisis centers, prisons, schools, and the community at large. The five F Word Fables graphic novels will be used as part of a curriculum based on established narrative therapy techniques to help those affected by violence re-author their lives. The strong feminine role models in The F Word Project speak to women's sense of personal power and choice and encourage men to act as respectful, humanist allies. The F Word Fables bring to light contemporary women's issues from around the globe, thus encouraging participants to see beyond their own circumstances and discuss themes of community, identity, visibility, activism, and solidarity.

The F Word Empowerment Project is cosponsored by F Word Project author/artist Maureen Burdock and Santa Fe-based non profit organizations, the Narrative Art Center and Dhaturra. Kelley Rainwater, founder and director of Dhaturra, holds an MBA in International Management Studies from the University of Texas and a Master's in Transpersonal Psychology with an emphasis on Goddess and Indigenous Wisdom from he Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. She also holds advanced certifications in group process facilitation and in coaching. The curriculum for the F Word Empowerment Project was developed by Maureen Burdock and Kelley Rainwater, with input from advisers Cinny Green, educator, author, and editor; Amyen Evert, women's shelter therapist; and Kate Wolf-Pizor, MFT, senior clinical instructor and associate professor at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology in Palo Alto, California.

A growing team of professionals in Northern New Mexico and the San Francisco area are working to raise funds and create the pilot curriculum and program that will launch in the fall of 2009. Fundraising for this project is planned as a series of dinner parties inspired by the cultures of the F Word superheroines. The first fundraising dinner is scheduled for July 18, 2009, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and in San Francisco for October, 2009. After the pilot program's successful launch, the F Word Project team plan to raise funds to make this process available to institutions throughout the United States. National rollout is anticipated beginning in 2010.
Other Current News Feminizando la Historieta en la Frontera (Feminizing Comics on the Borderland)

Maureen Burdock will be teaching this workshop in collaboration with 656 Comics and MECENAS Gallery in Juarez, Mexico, on July 11. In 2007, MECENAS sponsored the first exhibition of the F Word Project novella art from Marta & the Missing, about the femicides in Juarez. It is an honor to be invited back by these artists to work with girls, using art to find empowering ways to converse about our border.

This workshop is part of a series that is offered free of charge to young artists in Juarez this summer.

Thanks to Cinny Green and Francisco Arce who will aid in interpreting!

To learn more and to make a donation, please use the paypal link on the Narrative Art Center web site: www.narrativeartcenter.com


Or mail a check with your contribution to:
F Word Empowerment Project
Narrative Art Center
1315 Luana St
Santa Fe, NM 87505

About The Narrative Art Center

The Narrative Art Center is a 501(C) 3 nonprofit that supports literature and arts of the Southwest and beyond. Located in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the NAC sponsors projects, workshops, and writers'retreats.

About Dhaturra

Dhaturra is a New Mexico non-profit organization whose ultimate purpose is to elebrate the gift of woman. Our hope is that every woman we work with will come to know the gift she is to the world in the expression of her fullest and most essential self.

We achieve this purpose by offering a new vision of womanhood to American women that is supported by education, transformational learning experiences, collective social action, research & support services.