Announcing the 2025 GAIN Conference Theme!
In community with one another, GAIN aims to create a space where we can all share our wisdom, learn together, and grow toward collective liberation from oppression in Higher Education. At this year’s conference, we will anchor our time together in compassion and joy while we strive to understand the dependencies between self care, healthy interpersonal relationships, and restorative practices in higher education. We are thrilled to announce that the 2025 GAIN Conference theme is:
The Power of Community:
Moving Toward Collective Liberation
This year we are intentionally designing each aspect of our conference to foster connection and community, while challenging ourselves to rethink how we build communities. We will develop skills to help us examine and dismantle the oppressive systems at work in higher education and talk about how to effectively rebuild our spaces by designing for all people who experience systemic minoritization.
Over the past several years, marked by the OWHE to GAIN pivot, we have made progress towards creating an inclusive space for members with underserved gender identities. This continues to remain a priority as we think about our future as an organization. At the same time, GAIN has not made the same progress toward creating an inclusive space for members with underserved racial identities. This is also a key imperative for our organization and is the impetus for this year's conference theme. The theme, The Power of Community: Moving Toward Collective Liberation, is intentionally rooted in theories of Black feminism to up-skill our community so that we can:
Better understand the interdependence of the systems that perpetuate both sexism and racism in higher education, and;
Have more effective tools in our kits for responding to the harm caused by those systems, both at our institutions and within GAIN
Through meaningful community-centered workshops, story sharing, and curated presentations, we will learn from each other with the goal of continuing to build an inclusive community of care, responsibility, and justice.
GAIN humbly invites you to share in this space with us, knowing that your own lived experiences and identities are at the core of our community. Our conference will return to the Seaside Convention Center April 21 - 23, 2025. Conference registration is open now! Sign up by December 31 to catch the early bird rate.
Think of this newsletter as the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Over the next five months we will be sharing content to provide additional context for our theme and inviting you to help co-create the conference with us by volunteering to present and/or help host various components of the 2025 conference.
To ensure you continue to receive email updates, please head on over to our membership page and sign up. Membership is always free, and members receive emails with information directly to their inbox!
