Becoming part of the "Tapestry" for change // Intercultural Microgrant Guest Blog
The following guest blog is from 2024 Intercultural Microgrant recipients Shana Goggins & Angie Weaver about their project creating a social justice toolkit for all Kentuckians. They received support through our Artist-led Projects Generating Economic Impact in Eastern KY fund. Learn more about this project at kyrux.org/microgrants/2024.
Tapestry isn’t just a collection of stories—it’s an invitation to add your thread to the tapestry of change we’re weaving in Kentucky. Write in these pages. Dog-ear them. Share them. But most importantly, let them inspire you to take action in your community, to move beyond words into the vital work of creating justice.
Every tapestry tells a story. Looking closely at the fabric of Kentucky’s social justice movement, you’ll find countless threads—each one carrying its own history, its own lived experience, its own truth. Our own threads, woven from different cultures, histories, and lived experiences with marginalization, have taught us the power of intersectional resistance and the strength found in our differences.
During one of our evening Zoom calls in 2020, amid a pandemic that was disproportionately impacting our communities and a national uprising for racial justice, we found ourselves diving deep into what it means to create real change in Kentucky. Our friendship, forged through twenty years of advocacy work, has always been grounded in understanding how different forms of oppression intersect—and how our resistance must do the same.
We saw how many people were holding back from this work, their threads still waiting to be woven in. Not because they didn’t care, but because they feared making mistakes in navigating the complexities of social justice work. We recognized that fear— we’ve felt it ourselves. But we’ve also learned something vital: no single thread has to be perfect for the tapestry to be powerful.
This understanding comes from lived experience, from witnessing how communities build power together across differences. It comes from seeing how various forms of resistance and solidarity can strengthen each other, creating something more resilient than any single approach could achieve alone.
This zine, “BECOMING,” is about adding your thread to this work. Between these pages, you’ll find stories from women across Kentucky who are weaving their paths in social justice work. Their experiences reflect the diverse realities of life in our state—each story is a unique intersection of identity, challenge, and resistance. Some are veteran activists with decades of experience, others are just beginning to find their place in the pattern. Each one shows us that the most crucial thing isn’t having the perfect thread—it’s about joining yours with others to create something larger than yourself.
The stories they share aren’t just words on paper. They’re invitations to action because we’ve learned that words without action are like threads never woven—full of potential, but not yet part of the change we need to create. Every story here is a reminder that real change happens when we move beyond our fear of imperfection and start doing the work that needs to be done.
We may not have all the right answers yet, but we know this: the tapestry we weave together will outlast any single one of us. Every conversation you start, every action you take, every time you show up for justice adds another thread to this growing work. The pattern we’re creating didn’t begin with us, and it won’t end with us—but right now, at this moment, we have the chance to add our threads to its design.
We’re all becoming. We’re all learning. And together, we’re weaving something beautiful and strong, a tapestry of justice that future generations will inherit and continue to create.
In solidarity & hope,
—Shana Goggins & Angie Weaver
Creators
Read the first volume of the magazine:
Contact the team at Tapestryky@gmail.com.
The Kentucky Intercultural Microgrant Program is a seed grant to support two or more individuals or organizations collaborating across distance, difference, or sector on projects that celebrate and connect Kentucky's people and places.
Launched with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, Kentucky Waterways Alliance, Fund for the Arts, the Monument Workshop at UK, the Josh May Memorial Fund, and individual donors, the 2024 Microgrant Program invests in a series of seed grants (awards from $250-2000) to support short-term projects that foster dialogue, connection, or collaboration among Kentuckians from disparate backgrounds, identities, or experiences. Projects that involve diverse partners and invite the public to participate are preferred.