About this Event
What can the legacies of Olive Morris and Toni Cade Bambara teach us about care, cultural work and collective responsibility in a time of increasing anti-Blackness?
On 10 October 2026, the annual Olive Morris Awards Luncheon will convene a unique transatlantic gathering dedicated to bringing awareness and awarding African heritage women caring for community and exploring the urgent role of care, cultural work and collective responsibility in confronting the growing impact of anti-Blackness within our communities.
This year's 3 COURSE MEAL luncheon will create a bilateral space for dialogue and exchange between the United Kingdom and the United States through a special partnership with the Black Women Cultural Worker Archive in Baltimore, Maryland with special guest Keynote from Sharayna Ashanti Christmas (U.S.). Bringing together practitioners, community leaders, artists, educators and cultural workers, the event will examine how the legacies of two extraordinary African heritage women, Olive Morris and Toni Cade Bambara, can guide contemporary responses to the social, cultural and psychological challenges facing Black communities today.
Rather than positioning anti-Blackness solely as a problem to be analysed, the luncheon seeks to foreground the traditions of care, sisterhood, creativity, political education and community organising that have historically enabled Black communities to survive and thrive. Through collective reflection and consultation, participants will explore how cultural work can function as a practice of healing, memory, resistance and renewal.
The luncheon will also serve as the launch platform for a new transatlantic initiative connecting the two archives and living legacies of Olive Morris and Toni Cade Bambara. Through creative exchange, archival activation and community-led programming, the project will explore how the stories, methodologies and visions of these two women can be transmitted across generations and across borders.
Together, we seek to develop a diasporic cultural response rooted not only in resistance to anti-Blackness, but in the cultivation of Black wellbeing, cultural confidence, intergenerational knowledge and collective flourishing.
This community led initiative can only survive if you support it by buying tickets which helps us to make it happen every year to cover food, venue, awards and expenses.
KEEP UPDATED VIA OUR INSTAGRAM TO HEAR WHOSE NOMINATIONS HAVE WON AND MORE ABOUT OUR SPECIAL FILM SCREENING AND GUESTS.!
Sharayna Ashanti Christmas is a founding member of Women Cultural Worker Archive in Baltimore, she is a mother, womanist, abolitionist, and cultural worker whose creative practice is central to how she moves through the world. A dancer, producer, filmmaker, and assemblage artist, her work explores movement and the ways our bodies connect with the subconscious to tell stories of the past, present, and unseen. Trained in ballet at Dance Theatre of Harlem from the age of three, she has more than 25 years of embodied study and has performed works by Ulysses Dove, Robert Garland, and Geoffrey Holder. In 2004, she founded , a radical youth development organization that radically develops the next generation through political education, global studies, and creative praxis. Through programs including Rayn Fall Dance Studio, New Generation Scholars, and Spark of Genius, Muse 360 creates spaces that cultivate curiosity, nurture ingenuity, and deepen young people’s connection to an intergenerational communal pursuit of knowledge of self.
Dr. Damian Cohall is the Dean of the faculty of medicine in Barbados. He will be sharing his book that has archived medicinal plants herbs and remedies collected by the descendants of African heritage women in Barbados who were enslaved during the African holocaust. His book it titled Medicinal Plants of Barbados. You will be able to buy the newly updated copy at the event.
Event venue & nearby stays
Brixton House, 385 Coldharbour Lane, London, United Kingdom
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups — all the happenings, one place.