The Bend-It Collective

About me:

Bend It is a queer artist activist collective that makes the world a more fabulous place by building welcoming, liberated spaces, strengthening community, and creating meaningful alternatives for queer young people and their friends.

Bend-It holds 4 major Values.
DIT — Do it together. We promote working together as a community to get things done. We have agency, resources, and the ability to create change. We strive to strengthen and expand the wider queer community as well as to recruit allies and build ties with other communities.
Respect — We are committed to respecting ourselves, people in our community, and the world at large, keeping mindful of the larger effects of our actions and events. We will strive to create a safe space in our collective itself and in all the events we put on.
Anti-Oppression — We hold anti-oppression based values in organizing and event planning. We are committed to working on our own internalized–isms and to make our events welcoming and accessible to all. In particular, we are focused on creating a safe space and empowering ourselves as young, queer organizers.
Glitter — We value sequins, individual style, rhinestones, making creative space for artists, and theatricality. We encourage genuine, intentional artifice. We all bring our unique selves to this community and our diversity makes us strong. We invite self-definition in all forms, and embrace a wide definition of queerness.

Since 2003, Bend-It has had been organizing a three-day arts festival during the weekend of the Seattle Pride Parade in June. We designed our festival as a meaningful, non-corporate, proactively inclusive alternative to Pride, hosting community artists-led workshops, concerts, photography exhibits, film festivals, fashion/drag/burlesque shows, and spoken poetry open mic nights. We have encouraged DIY (do-it-yourself) and DIT (do-it-together) mentalities by offering reciprocal skill-building workshops—as opposed to top-down, one-way interactions.

We are in a new year and we need new organizers to continue this tradition.
Check out a weekly Monday meeting
in the Community Room at Kaladi Brother's Coffee
511 E Pike St
@ 630 pm
LINKS AND RESOURCES:

Three Dollar Bill Cinema (Producer of Seattle Lesbian and Gay Film Festival) *THE FISCAL SPONSORS OF BEND-IT

The Vera Project

Seattle Young People's Project