Welcome to Atlanta Guide

Welcome to Atlanta Guide

Irresistible Futures: Moving from Impossible to Inevitable

Contents:

• A Message from SiX’s Co-Executive Directors
• A Curated Study Guide for an Irresistible Future
• Welcome to Atlanta from SiX’s National Conference Local Advisory Committee
• Recommendations for Exploring Atlanta

A Message from SiX’s Co-Executive Directors

Dear friend,

We are overjoyed to be with you for SiX’s National Conference in just a few days. We’ll be gathering over 500 state legislators and movement partners in Atlanta, exactly 10 years—to the date—from when SiX was first publicly launched in 2014 at a conference in Washington, DC. This year’s conference, “Irresistible Futures: Moving from Impossible to Inevitable,” celebrates our work together and the work that each of you drives in your states and communities. We can’t wait to reflect on the last decade, build community, and strategize for the future with each of you in a place that holds so much historic significance to our movement.

At SiX, we know that state legislatures have long been on the front lines of protecting and advancing our most fundamental rights. Our decision to gather at this pivotal moment in Georgia is a direct reflection of our belief that our collective power to deliver a brighter future lies in the hands of state legislators working in collaboration with their communities all across the country. More than ever, we understand that states hold the mantle of a fragile democracy on their shoulders. We are prepared to help you combat authoritarianism, build relationships, and focus on long-term building to win the future we all deserve.

We recently announced that we'll be transitioning out of our roles as Co-Executive Directors at the end of March next year. Alongside our team and movement partners, including many of you, it’s been our honor to build the SiX that exists today: an institution that stands ready to transform American governance from the states outward. Looking back on the last seven years of our leadership, we are proud to pass the baton to others who will continue to grow power by, with, and for our communities.

Our time together in Atlanta is both a celebration of the past and an invitation to each of you to co-create the next chapter of our work to build power in the states alongside our communities. The power that has been built by the collaborative efforts of legislators and activists for generations here in Georgia stands as a beacon of light for how our movements can make our vision for the future irresistible to those around us when they see their own hopes and dreams in the future that we unfold. This is what we mean by collaborative governance: the people most impacted by governing decisions have real agency, through collaboration with their elected decision makers, to pursue racial, gender, social, and economic justice by shaping the rules, processes, and structures that govern their lives.

We assembled a Local Advisory Committee, including Georgia-based legislators, partners, and SiX staff, to support us in ensuring that while we are in Atlanta, we can tell the story of how local legislators, advocates, organizers, and community members have built power in service of justice and liberation. We’ve also asked the Committee to facilitate meaningful connections with the city of Atlanta for our attendees in ways that invest in local communities, and they have generously compiled some of their personal favorites in this guide. We encourage you to take full advantage of this guide to plan around the conference (view the agenda here) in ways that invest in local communities.

As we gather together in Georgia, we recognize that the movements we fight for today were cultivated by generations of leaders, including many whom we may never meet and others who will be speaking at this very conference! Let us move forward together to prepare the ground for the next generation to walk on as they build an irresistible future.

In solidarity,
Neha Patel and Jessie Ulibarri
Co-Executive Directors, State Innovation Exchange

PS: If you are looking for some airplane reading, we’d like to suggest this list of articles, podcasts, and resources curated by our team to help us root in a common framework and language about how we can build a new world from the states outward. Please consider taking some time to review these materials as you prepare for our time together in Atlanta!

A CURATED STUDY GUIDE FOR AN IRRESISTIBLE FUTURE

Welcome to Atlanta from SiX’s National Conference Local Advisory Committee

Dear colleague,

We’re thrilled to welcome you to Atlanta, a city we love and are proud to call home. Whether it’s your first time here, or you’re a long-time visitor, we hope you’ll be able to experience a bit of Atlanta while you’re here for the conference. But first: a brief introduction to our host city.

For centuries, the Muscogee (Creek) people called present-day Atlanta home, in addition to much of the southeastern part of the country. The Muscogee built an expansive network of towns and a complex political structure to govern the Confederacy. Subsequently, they were violently removed from their lands by the United States government in the early 19th century. As we gather in this city, we honor this land and its Indigenous caretakers and recommit ourselves to dismantling oppression in all its forms and continuing to care for the land and its people.

Today, Atlanta is perhaps best known as the cradle of the Civil Rights Movement. Throughout the movement, the city was a critical hub for iconic leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Coretta Scott King, U.S. Rep. John Lewis, and C.T. Vivian, as well as powerhouse organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) that paved the way for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. There are many historic and cultural sites commemorating the Civil Rights Movement we hope you will consider visiting during your stay here, many of which we’ll highlight in our recommendations.

We also want to share a brief, but far from comprehensive, history of the lesser-known contributions that Georgia and its people have made to advancing democracy, racial justice, and civil rights in this country.

In the same way that our relationships with each other allow us to organize as a movement united in purpose, our relationship to the land grounds us in our connections to past and future generations. The fertile land of the Black Belt, which stretches through southeast Georgia, tells an enduring American story of settler colonialism and racialized capitalism, animated by white supremacy: beginning with the violent expulsion of Indigenous peoples in the 1800s, to the brutal exploitation of enslaved Black people in service of the plantation economy, to the state-sanctioned theft and dispossession of millions of acres of land from Black landowners from Reconstruction through the 21st century, and the denial of low-cost government loans to Black farmers as recently as the 1990s. Despite this history, today, across Georgia and the South, Black farmers continue to ensure that the region’s rich soil can continue to provide for generations to come by employing regenerative practices steeped in ancestral traditions and joining together in farming cooperatives.

Reproductive justice—the right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities—has deep roots in Atlanta. The founders of the reproductive justice movement, highlighted how mainstream reproductive rights activists failed to consider the intersectional barriers that burdened women of color, marginalized women, and trans people when they tried to access reproductive health care. This group of Black women went on to establish Atlanta-based SisterSong, the nation’s largest multi-ethnic reproductive justice collective. On our final day together, during the closing plenary, we’ll hear from one of the founders of SisterSong, local Atlanta resident, Professor Loretta Ross! Today, Atlanta is also home to several notable organizations working to advance reproductive health, rights, and justice. Access Reproductive Care-Southeast is an abortion fund that provides critical support to help pay for and access abortion care for people living in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee. The Feminist Women’s Health Center is the only independent abortion clinic in the region that also works to protect and expand access to reproductive health care with a full-time lobbyist and legislative advocacy program.

Atlanta also has an enduring legacy as the Black Gay Mecca of the nation and as the LGBTQ+ capital of the South. In 1969, just six weeks after the Stonewall riots in New York City, Atlanta City Police conducted a raid of a screening of a film at a queer-friendly theater. This sparked a wave of organizing in the local community, including the city’s first Gay Pride March and winning the passage of three anti-discrimination ordinances in the Atlanta City Council. Faced with anti-Black discrimination in queer communities and businesses, often led or owned by white gay men, Black queer movement leaders mobilized to create spaces that centered their own experiences. Black queer spaces flourished across the city, and Atlanta Black Pride, which began as informal picnics hosted by friend groups in the 1980s, became the largest Black gay pride celebration in the world. In the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Atlanta-based activists played pivotal roles in developing an effective response, including pressuring the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to be responsive to the needs of women living with HIV, providing prevention and treatment services to Black women, and marshaling resources for Black queer communities.

As you prepare for the 2024 SiX National Conference, we hope you arrive in Atlanta inspired by the incredible resilience, strength, and solidarity that our communities have been building here for centuries. This guide includes some of our favorite places in the city as a starting point for you to explore Atlanta yourself. There is so much more to see and discover here—welcome!

See you in Atlanta!
The 2024 SiX National Conference Local Advisory Committee

Recommendations for Exploring Atlanta

GETTING AROUND ON MARTA

We hope you’ll consider taking advantage of the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) to get you around town while you’re here! Getting to and from Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport is a breeze on the MARTA. The Airport Station is inside the airport’s domestic terminal (between the North and South baggage claim)—and is more convenient than the walk to the rideshare pickup location. MARTA Passes, which provide unlimited rides for a consecutive period, are available for purchase (1-day for $9, 2-day for $14, and 3-day for $16).

To get to the conference hotel, take the Gold line (heading north to Doraville Station) and get off at the Peachtree Center Station. The conference hotel is just a short 8-minute walk from the station.

RECOMMENDATIONS

🗺️ View a map of these recommendations to plan your itinerary!