MOVEMENT ART IN THE FIGHT FOR THE ROOF DEPOT

This Fall 2025 Semester at Augsburg, I had the incredible opportunity to join the Sabo Center as a Community Changemaker guest speaker and workshop presenter, leading a three part event series centered on the role of artwork in movements. This programming was part of a collaboration and partnership between the Sabo Center and the East Phillips Neighborhood Institute (EPNI). 

From January, 2024 to June of 2025, I served as the East Phillip Neighborhood Institute’s Director of Community Outreach and Engagement. In that role, I helped to ensure that community members were kept up-to-date and East Phillips residents’ dreams and desires were reflected in the planning process through a wide array of community outreach and engagement tactics. 

I led and oversaw a Community Outreach Team of 30+ member-volunteers, including representatives from partner organizations, community leaders, and East Phillips residents. Our community outreach team hosted monthly Community Meetings with rotating topics, often in a world cafe style format, and helped collect community input to shape a novel community ownership & governance model.

We also spearheaded EPNI’s community outreach efforts in East Phillips / Little Earth, engaging constituents, residents & stakeholders through popular education and bi-monthly office hours, and convened a Community Advisory Group and held intake meetings with prospective tenants.

Prior to joining EPNI as a full-time contractor, I was a community volunteer who helped to create large hand-painted banners and screen printed artwork in support of the neighborhood’s struggle to build upon a historic environmental justice victory, working to realize the community’s vision of an Indoor Urban Farm (not toxic harm). Throughout my time at EPNI, I sought to weave movement art into this historic environmental justice fight, whether that was hosting art builds to create giant paper-mache vegetables and signs, or hand-painting a series of banners for the annual Harvest Moon Block Party in Little Earth / East Phillips.

I am immensely grateful to Community Engaged Learning Program Manager, Jenean Gilmer, for the incredible opportunity to engage with the Augsburg campus community through this series which included a talk followed by two unique workshops!

SEAN’S WORKSHOP SERIES

Workshop 1 –  Sean Lim: Making Movement Art Talk

On Wednesday, November 19th, I hosted a talk at Augsburg’s Oren Gateway Center, discussing the role of artwork in various social justice moments, with key case studies in the Twin Cities. I discussed my work as a local community organizer who weaves artwork and mutual aid into the organizing projects I lend my capacity to, and my work through the Spill Paint, Not Oil (SPNO) art collective. I highlighted how art is invaluable in the toolbox of organizing. Artwork in all of its forms, whether that be poetry, murals, signage, plywood, prints, song and dance, spoken word, and everything in between, can lend itself to advancing the rapid response narrative messaging needs of on the ground causes we care deeply about. During this talk, we co-ideated concepts and drafts alongside Augsburg faculty and students for a screen-printed poster to the Sabo Center’s programming, and a hand-painted banner for the Augsburg Campus Kitchen.

Workshop 2 – Sean Lim: Movement Art Workshop – Banner Making

On Monday, November 24, I brought a traced muslin banner for Augsburg’s Campus Kitchen, and hand-painted the design with acrylic paint alongside campus community members at the Christensen Center, East Commons. This banner, adorned with paintings of fresh produce and all of the offerings of the Campus Kitchen program, will be hung at the Sabo Center’s office, and can be used by the Campus Kitchen program at events across the campus for tabling and event fairs. 

Workshop 3 – Sean Lim: Movement Art Workshop – Screen-printing Posters

On Monday, December 1st, I hosted a live screen-printing workshop in the lobby of the Christensen Center to teach students and faculty members the steps of printing their own silk-screen printed poster in various colors. Over the course of the workshop, we made 150 prints for the Sabo Center to distribute to members of the Augsburg Campus community. The poster highlights six different on-campus programs offered by the Sabo Center: the Community Garden, Community Change, Community Engaged Learning, Campus Kitchen, Augsburg Local Businesses, and Bonner Community Leaders.

ABOUT SPILL PAINT

Spill Paint Not Oil is an autonomous network of artists, organizers, friends, and mischief-makers, primarily based in Mni Sóta Makoce (Minnesota) who’ve held various roles across movements, art projects, and campaigns. 

We’ve been, and continue to be, shaped by resistance movements to prevent fossil fuel expansion, and fight social and environmental injustices. Since 2021, our collective has stewarded a community studio space that hosts regular art builds and assisted many ongoing community art projects. We screenprint, make banners, signs, and occasionally dip our fingers into paper mache.  Hundreds of people come through our studio space every year, some on a one-time basis, others as more consistent collaborators.

We believe that art making is world building. Together we engage in the necessary and shared work of envisioning better and more just worlds. We are committed to responding to the urgencies of daily life under late-stage capitalism. We are committed to the long, intensive, and slow work of relationship-building, mutual-aid, skill sharing, and collective transformation. We believe in participatory and collectivized world-making. Grab a paint brush.

ABOUT SEAN / BIOGRAPHY

Sean Lim 林佳軒  (he/him) is a first-generation Malaysian Chinese American, the eldest child of immigrants; born on the East Bank of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis – a lifelong resident of Mni Sota Makoce (Minnesota).

Sean is a community organizer, artist, and mutual aid practitioner who has spent the past 8 years building community power — from electing historic candidates into office, to passing legislation, and winning monumental issue campaigns. His advocacy has consistently centered youth organizing, education, housing, & environmental / climate justice.

His near decade of on-the-ground community organizing experience spans projects and organizations including the Minnesota Youth Collective (MNYC), St. Paul Camps Support (SPCS), East Phillips Neighborhood Institute (EPNI), Minneapolis Federation of Educators (MFE Local 59), Art Shanty Projects (ASP), The Southeast Asian Diaspora (SEAD) Project, The Paper Lantern Project (PLP), and many others. 

Since 2021, Sean has been part of a core team of artist-organizers who steward the local art collective and community third space, Spill Paint Not Oil (SPNO, spillpaint.org) where his artwork in solidarity with movements helps facilitate rapid response to assist the messaging needs of local organizing efforts, in real time. Sean’s project, “Movement Art for Mutual Aid” seeks to get screen-printed posters out into the world, while raising and redistributing grassroots funds to local mutual aid projects in need of resources. 

He currently works as a freelance graphic designer and literature designer in local politics for various candidates for office… building the bench of local elected leaders, having worked on the campaigns of over 30+ local candidates for various levels of office from School Board to Congress. 

As an arts educator, he was an Metropolitan Regional Arts Council (MRAC) Arts Impact for Individuals 2025 Grant Recipient for his workshop series, ‘Banners for a Better World.’ You can find Sean at the Spill Paint studio, or online at @SeanLimMN on Instagram, X, or Bluesky.

The Sabo Center is proud to co-sponsor the Carl H. Chrislock Memorial History Lecture and welcome to campus Dr. Christopher Lehman, Professor of History in the Department of Ethnic and Women’s Studies at St. Cloud State University to discuss his latest book, It Took Courage: Eliza Winston’s Quest for Freedom. The book tells the story of an enslaved woman who sued for and won her freedom in Minnesota in 1860. Winston escaped and was pursued while her case was in the courts and hid in a house near Augsburg’s campus, a stop on the Underground Railroad. In honor of Winston’s courage to fight for her rights, we will be hosting a training following the lecture by the Mixed Blood Theater, Know Your Rights! Say Them Loud! You’ll get the chance to practice saying your rights with professional actors, building the confidence to do so boldly, if necessary.

Event details:

Monday, March 6th, 7:00 – 9:00 pm

Marshall Room, Christensen Center

To learn more about the life of Eliza Winston and slavery in Minnesota, you can visit the exhibit that Dr. Lehman helped curate at the Hennepin History Museum, Winston: A Woman’s Fight for Freedom in Minnesota. The exhibit is up until October of 2027.

In the Sabo Center, we work closely with many different communities in the Cedar-Riverside, Seward and East Phillips neighborhoods. A core part of our work is to connect our campus community with those living and working in the neighborhoods adjacent to campus. This provides learning opportunities for our students, staff and faculty, and lends support to our neighbors in meaningful ways. 

As long as Cedar-Riverside has been a neighborhood it has been a neighborhood of immigrants. Today, those immigrants come from many places, mainly East Africa and many from Somalia. The warmth and welcome, the spirit of joy that permeates Cedar-Riverside has been amplified by the Somali community. We at the Sabo Center likewise extend that warmth and welcome to our Somali neighbors and all immigrant communities near and far. We stand in solidarity with our neighbors and will do all that we can to support and keep safe as many people as possible. We invite you, allies, collaborators or wherever else you stand, to join us.

The following are ways to support Cedar-Riverside:

• Share the care and respect you have for the Somali community widely using social media and any other outlets available to you. Augsburg’s community is rich with examples of the contributions that our Somali students, colleagues, and friends have made and will continue to make. 
• Join Trinity Lutheran and friends in providing some care and welcome to our Muslim neighbors. We’ll be serving tea and coffee at Dar Al-Hijrah Mosque this Friday, December 5th at 1:15 pm. If you would like to walk from campus together, please meet at the Sabo Center in Oren Gateway Center at 1:00 pm. 
• Support the Brian Coyle Community Center in feeding our neighbors. Their food shelf is open Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday from 11:00 am to 3:00 pm. With many residents afraid to leave their homes, they need help making deliveries. Stop by during open hours to lend a hand.
• Give money. The Brian Coyle Community Center is part of Pillsbury United Communities, there are multiple ways for you to support their work. Make sure to note that you would like any funds you contribute go to Brian Coyle by making a note when you donate. 
• You can also support those working to protect immigrant communities by giving to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee (MIRAC).
• Find resources, learn about trainings, and find Know Your Rights materials in English, Spanish and Somali at Monarca.
• Join Sabo Center Staff next Wednesday, December 10th at 12:30 pm to learn more about the neighborhood and have lunch at Sagal. We’ll meet at the Sabo Center, please fill out this short Google Form to let us know you’re interested.
• Spend time in the neighborhood. Cedar-Riverside is rich in wonderful restaurants and entertainment. Grab dinner at the West Bank Diner or Nader before catching a show at the Mixed Blood Theater or the Cedar Cultural Center–if you haven’t had the great pleasure of seeing Black Market Brass make your way there this Friday!
• The Sahan Journal and Minnesota Reformer are good local media sources for keeping apprised of what’s happening.

We will continue to post opportunities to engage here on the Sabo Blog and in A-Mail. Please reach out to Jenean Gilmer, Community Engaged Learning Community Manager in the Sabo Center (gilmerje@augsburg.edu) with any questions or concerns.

Over the last two months, the Sabo Center has hosted our inaugural Community Changemakers collaborators, the East Phillips Neighborhood Institute, for six talks and three workshops with EPNI staff. We’re now inviting proposals from our campus community, including students, staff, and faculty, for projects to be completed in collaboration with EPNI in the spring semester. 

These projects work to build relationships with EPNI staff and community members and bring their knowledge and experience to campus while providing experiential and community engaged learning experiences for our campus communities. Proposals may be organized around an event, course development, lesson plan, campus project or whatever else you might imagine. 

Some examples for potential projects might include:

• connecting a student group or class to work with Forest Hunt to revitalize the Indigenous Student Plot in the Community Garden
• bringing Sean Lim to your class or student organization to collaboratively plan and complete an art project (banner, screen prints, stickers, buttons) around an issue or event
• invite Kieran Morris to class to talk about the uses and importance of community gardens and urban farms for building and sustaining communities

Applications will be accepted until Friday, January 2nd. Please submit your proposal using this short Google Form or email Jenean Gilmer to discuss your ideas. You can find additional details in the form to submit proposals. Please reach out to Jenean with any questions or concerns at gilmerje@augsburg.edu.

Join the Sabo Center Community Engagement Council’s Community Changemakers this week for a talk and workshop with Forest Hunt and part two of Kieran Morris’ talk on community power and urgan agriculture! Stay tuned to A-Mail and the Community Changemakers page for more information about upcoming events for Fall 2025! If you’re interested in learning more please email gilmerje@augsburg.edu.

by Ethel Zidenga

When I first began my internship at the Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. I knew I’d be challenged. I hoped I’d be changed. What I didn’t anticipate was how deeply this experience would shape not only my understanding of community engagement, but also my place within it.

One of the most transformative parts of this internship was the opportunity to explore the meaning of community engagement. I spent time researching how it is defined and practiced, and I quickly realized that true community engagement must be intentional. Whether it’s a partnership between an institution and a community, or among individuals, both sides need to be fully invested and both must receive equitable benefit. Just as importantly, both parties must have an equal voice in setting the goals and defining what success looks like.

Too often, institutions hold the upper hand in these relationships, directing the terms and outcomes. But if we are serious about creating anti-oppressive and anti-racist models of engagement, we must center the voices of marginalized communities. Their leadership, knowledge, and lived experiences must guide the work, not be tokenized or added on as an afterthought. This shift in power is not optional; it is essential.

During my time at the Sabo Center, I also had the opportunity to dive into powerful readings that pushed me further in my thinking. One that left a lasting impact was Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira. I truly believe everyone should read this book. I only wish I had encountered it at the beginning of my MSW journey, but perhaps it wouldn’t have impacted me the way it just did. Sometimes the right book finds you when you’re ready.

In Hospicing Modernity, Vanessa challenges us to unlearn everything we’ve been taught by oppressive systems. She calls on us to recognize the harms embedded in modernity, systems that reward domination, extraction, and control, and instead be part of birthing something new. Her words awakened something in me: a deeper responsibility not just to question oppressive systems, but to actively participate in creating liberatory ones. She reminded me that being uncomfortable is necessary and that unlearning is a lifelong process.

I am also incredibly thankful for the mentorship and support I received from my field supervisor, Dr. Alex Fink, and my task supervisor, Ms. Jenean Gilmer. They created a brave and safe space where I could make mistakes, ask hard questions, cry when I needed to, and grow into a more critical and reflective practitioner. Their encouragement helped me find my voice and stay grounded, even when I was struggling to extend grace to myself. I will forever be grateful for the compassion, honesty, and guidance they offered throughout my internship.

Reflecting on this journey, I truly believe that the MSW program and the Sabo Center are a perfect partnership at Augsburg University. I may be biased, but the way both programs embrace holistic approaches to learning, justice, and community makes them a powerful team. The MSW program gave me the theoretical foundation, while the Sabo Center gave me a living, breathing classroom in the real world. Together, they shaped an experience that was not just educational but transformative.

As I close this chapter, I carry with me more than new skills. I carry a renewed sense of purpose and commitment. I will continue to unlearn, to listen, to act with intention, and to walk alongside others as we collectively build a more just and compassionate world.

Ethel Zidenga completed a Master of Social Work in Spring of 2025. She spent a year as an intern in the Sabo Center with Jenean Gilmer and Alex Fink, developing an extensive Community Partner Database, researching definitions and practices of community engagement, participating in relationship building and community development in the Cedar-Riverside Neighborhood. Her contributions are deeply appreciated and continue to provide meaningful support.

Author: Greta Klawiter-Lein, Community Garden Coordinator

Fall is the perfect time to harvest veggies. And as the weather cools, stews and soups are a wholesome way to utilize these garden goodies! This fall, the Augsburg Community garden got to play host for a super special plant-based cooking class. In collaboration with Edible Boulevards; a food initiative focusing on supporting Green Zone residents, and the amazing Ifrah Hashi, we saw how to turn a bountiful fall harvest into a warm, delicious meal. It was such a warm, cozy early afternoon full of good food, good people, and beautiful stories.

Ifrah walked us through how to make a vegan lentil stew that hit all the right fall notes—hearty, flavorful, and perfect for chilly evenings. While she chopped garden kale and peppers, she shared about growing up cooking and peeling potatoes with her Somali mom in London. Her stories were personal and heartfelt, and made the food feel even more meaningful and filling.

The class brought together a really lovely mix of people—gardeners, students, neighbors, and community members, all learning together. The room was relaxed and welcoming, and of course, there were door prizes of dried lentils and culinary spices!

Big shoutout to Edible Boulevards for the work they do helping people grow food right in their boulevard spaces, and for hosting monthly plant-based cooking classes that bring folks together around healthy, accessible meals. Every month is a different cooking class, in a different community garden with rotating hosts. While the location and chef might change, the meal prepared is always vegan and focuses on elements of the chef’s cultural heritage.

Events like this remind us why the Augsburg community garden exists in the first place—to connect, to learn, and to grow (literally and figuratively).

HAPPY CONSTITUTION DAY!

Constitution Day is an American federal observance that recognizes the adoption of the United States Constitution and those who have become U.S. citizens. It is celebrated on September 17, the day the U.S. Constitutional Convention signed the Constitution in 1787 in Philadelphia.

Make a plan to vote on November 4.

This year local elections will be held on November 4 and Augsburg has made election day a holiday during which classes are canceled so that all eligible voters have time to vote. The office of the Minnesota Secretary of State has sample ballots and information about voting. If you have questions feel free to reach out to the Sabo Center staff, we’d love to help.