The World Beyond Borders convening was a global, multi-day digital gathering that brought together activists, artists, educators, and organizers to explore issues of human rights, climate justice, migration, and collective liberation. Calling Up Justice supported the event by designing and hosting an interactive space within the Digital Encampment, allowing participants to connect, witness, and engage across sessions in real time. Communications Producer, Jesenia, representing One Free Community, played a key role in supporting the design and coordination of the convening.
Calling Up Justice presented Sunday April 26, 2026 at 12 pm – 1:30 pm Pacific at the A World Beyond Borders: A Global Gathering for Learning, Organizing, and Collective Care. Our presentation called “Digital Placemaking as Resistance: Organizing Online for Access, Art, and Action” will be hosted by Claudia Alick, Jesenia & Maiamama.
A World Beyond Borders: A Global Gathering for Learning, Organizing, and Collective Care
Jesenia along with One Free Community are collaborating with JayWalk App to produce an international 2-day virtual gathering to connect people across the globe doing the work, with the goal of peer knowledge sharing, connection and conversation.
April 25-26, 2026
We’re inviting activists, organizers, artists, educators, and community members from all over the world to propose sessions for A World Beyond Borders — a weekend dedicated to learning, connection, action, and collective care. This is not a conference built around polished lectures or influencer talks. It’s a shared space for practical tools, lived experience, honest dialogue, and creative resistance across movements, borders, and generations. You don’t need a big platform or institutional backing. If you have something to share, explore, question, or build together, we want to hear from you.
World Beyond Borders Sessions
Saturday Sessions
Addressing Human Rights Violations and Accountability in Sudan: The Role of Regional and International Responses
Presenter: Mukthar Korsi, Sudan Action Hub
Mukthar Korsi is a legal researcher and refugee law specialist with nearly a decade of experience in international law, human rights, and legal advisory services. Sudan Action Hub mobilizes information, networks, and practical tools to support humanitarian relief, document human rights abuses, strengthen advocacy, and coordinate global action for the people of Sudan, with particular focus on communities affected by violence in Darfur and other regions.
Session Description: This presentation explores ongoing human rights violations in Sudan, including acts of violence that may amount to genocide. The session examines accountability frameworks for addressing these crimes, preventing impunity, and supporting justice, protection, and sustainable peace.
Palestinian History and Movement
Presenter: Omar Karem
Omar Karem is a Palestinian journalist from Gaza who participated in a 60-day hunger strike against the genocide at the beginning of 2024. Since then, he has organized 5- to 10-day hunger strikes in Belgium and the Netherlands, often in Christian churches, with hundreds of participants, especially young people.
Session Description: With Omar Karem as guide, and with participation from other activists for the Palestinian cause, this session explores the long history of injustices experienced by the Palestinian people and the ongoing struggle for liberation from colonization and genocide.
From Awareness to Action: What Moves People to Show Up?
Presenters: Mark Portelli, Akiba, Raj Thamotheram, Sophia, Kamau Franklin
Mark Portelli is the founder of Mori, a civic participation platform helping people turn concern into practical action. Akiba is an engineer and organizer based in Japan who created an app to help people find protests and founded Apartheid Free Zones Japan. Raj Thamotheram is co-founder of Bystanders No More, supporting professionals who are troubled by injustice but have not yet acted. Sophia is Product Lead at Find a Protest, a global platform connecting people to grassroots action. Kamau Franklin is founder of Community Movement Builder, a Black member-based collective of community residents and organizers.
Session Description: Across movements, many people care, but far fewer take action. This panel brings together organizers from different regions to explore what moves people from awareness to participation. Through grounded experience and reflection, panelists discuss barriers, cultural differences, and small shifts that help turn passive support into meaningful action.
Earthstorytelling for Climate Action: Engaging Young People Through Stories and Outdoor Learning
Presenter: Victor Ayegba Mathew
Victor Ayegba Mathew is an environmental educator and youth development advocate based in Kano, Nigeria, with over seven years of experience inspiring young people to take meaningful climate action. He is the founder of the Vikipedia Initiative, which integrates environmental education, mentorship, and community engagement.
Session Description: This interactive session explores how storytelling and outdoor education can inspire young people to take meaningful climate action. Drawing from practical experiences in Northern Nigeria, participants learn how “Earthstorytelling” can simplify climate change concepts, build emotional connection with nature, and promote local solutions.
Bear Witness & Let Yourself Be Moved
Presenter: Maureen Pascua Medina
Maureen Pascua Medina is the author of My Fears Out Loud. Their work blends art, somatic experiencing, self-inquiry, and mental health advocacy. With over 15 years of service to marginalized communities, Maureen centers safety, agency, dignity, and consent.
Session Description: This session explores individual and collective experiences of power, privilege, oppression, and liberation. Participants engage in grounding practices, hold space for emotions and somatic experiences, map social location, identify mutual aid and resistance groups, and begin designing self-care and resistance plans.
The Commons Era: A Collaborative World Building Experiment on Trust, Power, and Accountability
Presenter: Di
Session Description: The Commons Era is a storytelling and systems game set in a world where legacy foundations have fallen and movements steward the world’s remaining wealth. Participants explore the moral, emotional, and systemic challenges of wealth redistribution, trust, power, and accountability. This is a game of care rather than conquest.
Sunday Sessions
Operation Olive Branch
Presenter: Operation Olive Branch
Operation Olive Branch is a women-led, majority BIPOC, volunteer-powered nonprofit rooted in solidarity and committed to collective liberation alongside communities in Gaza, Congo, and Sudan.
Session Description: This session shares how Operation Olive Branch works in direct solidarity with communities enduring displacement, blockade, and occupation. Participants learn about the organization’s initiatives and what collective liberation looks like in practice.
The Earth Has a Voice: Discovering the Voices of Nature through Non-Human Personas
Presenter: Yağmur Güngör
Yağmur Güngör is a facilitator, researcher, and healer dedicated to ecological consciousness and regenerative futures. Born and raised in Istanbul and currently based in Barcelona, she creates embodied, imaginative, and transformative experiences for systems change.
Session Description: This workshop invites participants to listen to the Earth and step beyond an anthropocentric lens. Through Life-Centered Design and Nature-Based Mindfulness, participants create non-human personas inspired by rivers, soils, plants, and animals, carrying the voices of nature into resistance and repair.
Rainbow Warriors 3.5
Presenter: Grian Cutanda
Grian Cutanda is a social scientist, researcher, author, and social and environmental activist. He has participated in movements including the Indignados movement in Spain, the People’s Climate March, and Extinction Rebellion. He is the founder of Rainbow Warriors 3.5.
Session Description: This session introduces Rainbow Warriors 3.5 as a complex system of small, diverse, independent, and autonomous activist groups working across social and environmental justice. The session focuses on helping people who have never practiced activism become involved through their talents and skills.
Pinkwashing, Intersectionality, & Palestinian Liberation
Presenter: Pink Thawra
Pink Thawra is a Lebanese-led queer and ally community and consulting organization supporting LGBTQIA+ Palestinian and broader SWANA communities in the fight for Palestinian liberation.
Session Description: This webinar examines pinkwashing: when states, corporations, or organizations promote themselves as LGBTQIA+-friendly to distract from or justify violence. The session centers queer Palestinian voices, explores the gap between rainbow branding and actual LGBTQIA+ safety, and shows why Palestinian liberation and queer liberation are inseparable struggles.
Climate Change, a Threat to World Peace
Presenter: Seth Tsongo
Seth Tsongo is a young social change activist and environmental campaigner based in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Born amid war near Virunga National Park, he uses creativity and performance to address social and climate injustices in his region.
Session Description: This session explores climate change as a threat to world peace, connecting fossil fuel exploitation, extractivism, imperialist policy, land grabbing, pollution, militarization, forced displacement, and human rights violations.
Senegal’s Struggle Against Neocolonialism
Presenter: Coline Fay
Coline Fay is a former French activist from Extinction Rebellion Spain who was imprisoned in Senegal for two months between 2023 and 2024 after participating in a nonviolent protest in Dakar.
Session Description: This Spanish-language session reflects on anti-imperialist and Pan-African social movements in the struggle against Françafrique and imperialism. It explores identity, modernity, and current political questions from Senegal’s popular revolution of 2023 to the present.
Digital Placemaking as Resistance: Organizing Online for Access, Art, and Action
Presenters: Calling Up Justice, Claudia Alick, Jesenia, and Maiamama
Calling Up Justice produces accessible digital gatherings that center disability justice, collective care, art, and rapid response.
Session Description: This session explores what it means to organize online in ways that are accessible, human, and politically responsive. Calling Up Justice shares best practices from virtual protests, accessible online convenings, livestreams, digital placemaking, and theater-based interventions including 24 Hours for Palestine and Korematsu Revisited.
Lunar Narrative Rhythms: Writing Stories with the Moon Cycles
Presenter: Dominique Daye Hunter
Dominique Daye Hunter is an author and narrative strategist whose work explores storytelling as a space for healing, cultural continuity, and thrivance. She is the author of Seeds: Stories of Afro-Indigenous Resilience and Hasi Čhigǫ:yǫ (Sweet Berry).
Session Description: This session explores the moon as both timekeeper and creative collaborator. Through storytelling, cultural reflection, and creative practice, participants engage lunar cycles as a framework for writing and artistic creation, from idea generation and incubation to development, release, and celebration.
Reflection on World Beyond Borders Program
The World Beyond Borders gathering unfolded as a carefully structured, multi-room digital convening that balanced global urgency with human connection. From the opening moments, the event established itself not just as a conference, but as a shared space of witnessing, learning, and collective imagination.
The day began with an opening gathering that brought all participants into a single virtual room. This initial moment functioned as both orientation and grounding—a reminder that despite geographic distance, attendees were entering a common space with shared intention. The use of a central “Main Hall,” alongside additional platforms like GatherTown, created a layered digital environment where participants could move between formal sessions and more informal networking spaces. This fluidity mirrored the event’s broader theme: crossing borders not only geographically, but socially and structurally.
As the program moved into its first session block, participants were invited to make choices about where to focus their attention. This structure acknowledged the multiplicity of issues under the umbrella of “borders” and “human rights,” while also empowering attendees to follow their own interests and urgencies. Sessions such as the discussion on human rights violations and accountability highlighted the ongoing realities faced by displaced and marginalized communities. Facilitators brought both professional expertise and lived experience, grounding abstract policy conversations in real-world impact.
The pacing of the event—alternating between collective gatherings, breakout sessions, and breaks—allowed for both intellectual engagement and necessary rest. The inclusion of networking time and informal digital spaces suggested an understanding that connection is as important as content. Participants were not only receiving information but also building relationships, exchanging ideas, and finding resonance with others navigating similar concerns.
Across the program, a clear throughline emerged: the need to confront systems of injustice while imagining alternatives. The sessions collectively pointed toward a world where borders are not sites of harm but spaces of transformation. Legal frameworks, advocacy strategies, and storytelling all appeared as tools for change, reinforcing the idea that no single discipline holds the solution.
Importantly, the event demonstrated a commitment to accessibility and global participation. By providing multiple time zones, digital access points, and varied modes of engagement, the organizers expanded who could be present and how they could participate. This approach aligned with the event’s core values—challenging exclusion and creating pathways for broader inclusion.
By the end of the gathering, what remained was not just a collection of sessions, but a sense of shared momentum. Participants had moved through a day of learning, witnessing, and connecting, carrying forward new insights and renewed commitments. World Beyond Borders functioned as both a container for dialogue and a catalyst for continued action, reminding everyone involved that while borders may define systems, they do not have to define our collective future.
Find out more and join https://gathering.jaywalkapp.org/