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Embrace Boston Ideas Festival returns with focus on collaboration

Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up According to Imari K. Paris Jeffries, Embrace Boston's president and CEO, this year's festival, its fourth, is occurring in a different context than previous iterations. 'Now we're in a context where the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities — that funding has been wiped out, and cultural organizations feel like they're under attack. Organizations that are both cultural and historic, and focus on diverse histories are threatened.' Advertisement All of which lends urgency to the festival's mission, he adds. 'I think this is a Juneteenth that is symbolic of the times. It reflects the type of rebellion and the type of joy required and necessary in this moment.' Advertisement Collaboration is another necessity, Paris Jeffries said, pointing to the joining efforts among the NAACP, Urban League, the Divine Nine Partnership, and other organizations to provide a citywide celebration of Juneteenth. Giselle Byrd, executive director of the Theater Offensive, will speak on the panel discussion titled 'Black Pride in Public Space.' 'It is not easy to live and be liberated in this world and in our lifetime,' she says. 'A lot of folks live at the margins of being Black and queer or Black and trans, and sometimes those conversations don't happen because historically there has been erasure. It's an honor to have this moment of fellowship.' For Byrd, who took over the helm at the Theater Offensive in December 2023, it's crucial to have these conversations both to build community ('it's really community who takes care of another,' she says) and to loudly proclaim one's pride — even, or especially, in a time of heightened oppression. 'None of us have the luxury of being silent,' she adds. 'Audre Lorde said it best to all of us, 'your silence will not protect you.'' Kate Tuttle, a freelance writer and critic, can be reached at