Press Kit
2024: 3 Year Pilgrimage Press Kit
We hope May We Gather’s 2024 national gatherings—our multi-part online speaker series on January 24, February 8, and February 21, as well as the in-person pilgrimage in Antioch, California on March 16, 2024—will bring together an expansive range of participants.
You can support our efforts by sharing about these events widely with your family, friends, religious communities, educational institutes, and local media outlets via email, social media, and word of mouth.
A press release and sample invitations in Burmese, Chinese, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Sinhala, Thai, Tibetan, and Vietnamese are available below.
Please use the hashtag #MayWeGather2024 for social media posts and include the URL www.maywegather.org.
Graphics & Flyer
Graphic
Use this graphic for sharing on social media.
Suggested caption:
Please join me in supporting #MayWeGather2024, May We Gather: A National Buddhist Pilgrimage for Asian American Ancestors, to be livestreamed on March 16, 2024 at 1pm PDT. Learn more and register to gather with us in-person at www.maywegather.org.
Flyer
Please share this flyer widely.
For Printing
For Screens
InfoGraphic
This two-page infographic contains more detailed information about the 2024 pilgrimage.
Illustration by Rob Sato
instagram.com/robsato/ | robsato.com
Sample Social Media Message
for Mastodon, X, etc.
For Pilgrimage:
Please join me in supporting #MayWeGather2024, May We Gather: A National Buddhist Pilgrimage for Asian American Ancestors, to be livestreamed on March 16, 2024 at 1pm PDT. Learn more and register to gather with us in-person at www.maywegather.org.
For Online Speaker Series:
Please join me in supporting #MayWeGather2024, Resilience, Recovery, Repair: An Online Speaker Series hosted by May We Gather and Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. This public, multipart speaker series is free to attend and will be held online January–February 2024. Learn more and sign up to join the conversation at https://tricycle.org/events/resilience-recovery-repair/.
Host a Viewing
For those who cannot attend in-person, we encourage temples and sanghas to consider hosting an in-person or virtual event in conjunction with May We Gather: A National Buddhist Pilgrimage for Asian American Ancestors. The livestreamed event will be 90 minutes long, from 1–2:30pm PDT (4–5:30pm EDT) on Saturday, March 16, 2024. Your community may wish to hold a ritual or discussion immediately before or after the livestreamed event. Alternatively, our ceremony and pilgrimage will be recorded and made publicly available on the May We Gather YouTube channel, and you are welcome to use the recording for an event at a later date.
Sample Invitations in Asian Languages
Please use these sample invitations in Burmese, Chinese, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Sinhala, Thai, Tibetan, and Vietnamese—which roughly translate to the following English text.
We invite you to join us for May We Gather, a national memorial ceremony and pilgrimage to pay respect and offer merit to Asian American Buddhist ancestors. Together, we will form a bridge between the 19th-century immigrants who experienced aggressions in America, and those in the 21st century who have lost their lives to violence in Atlanta, San Francisco, and numerous sites across the United States. The ceremony and pilgrimage will be held in-person in Antioch, California on March 16, 2024, with the participation of Buddhist leaders from various traditions, languages, and cultures, including Burmese, Cambodian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Lao, Sri Lankan, Taiwanese, Thai, Tibetan, and Vietnamese, among others. For those who cannot attend in-person, the ceremony and pilgrimage will be broadcast live on the May We Gather YouTube channel at 1pm (PDT) / 4pm (EDT) on March 16, 2024. For more information and to register to attend the in-person ceremony, click this link: www.maywegather.org. Please share widely with your friends, families, and communities. #MayWeGather2024
Please feel free to adjust these Asian language translations to best serve your community's needs.
Press Release
###
May We Gather 2024 (www.maywegather.org) will commemorate the 2021 Atlanta-area spa shootings through two intertwining programs: May We Gather: A National Buddhist Pilgrimage for Asian American Ancestors, an in-person pilgrimage and peace walk on March 16, 2024; and Resilience, Recovery, Repair, an online speaker series funded by the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative and co-hosted by Tricycle: The Buddhist Review in the weeks leading up to the pilgrimage.
May We Gather: A National Buddhist Pilgrimage for Asian American Ancestors (www.maywegather.org) will take place in Antioch, California on March 16, 2024. In keeping with Buddhist ritual cycles of mourning and remembrance, we will commemorate the three-year memorial of the 2021 Atlanta-area spa shootings, which claimed the lives of eight people, six of them women of Asian descent. We will recover and celebrate Asian American Buddhist history in Antioch, in California, and across the United States, to strengthen the ties of kinship that connect each of us across time, place, race, religion, and gender. Our ceremony and pilgrimage will feature Buddhist chanting, Dharma reflections from six women Buddhist leaders across lineage and heritage, a communal peace walk, and a Daoist memorial ritual, followed by an informal community reception.
The 2-hour-long ceremony and pilgrimage will be held on Saturday, March 16, 2024 at 1pm PDT (4pm EDT). We welcome Asian American Buddhist temples and organizations as well as allied communities and individuals of all backgrounds to participate in this ceremony by registering to attend in-person, sharing about the gathering, and/or watching the livestream.
Resilience, Recovery, Repair (https://tricycle.org/events/resilience-recovery-repair/) is our three-part online speaker series, funded by the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative and co-hosted with Tricycle, from January–February 2024. Bringing community elders and leaders, acclaimed historians, archaeologists, educators, and spiritual teachers together in conversation, this series builds on discussions generated from the first May We Gather memorial in 2021 and highlights topics central to the May We Gather 2024 memorial pilgrimage. Resilience, Recovery, Repair reflects on 19th-century gender and immigrant experiences, folk religion and spiritual life, and contemporary projects of restoration and repair in California and beyond.
The May We Gather collective recognizes that marginalized communities across traditions have experienced physical oppression and the violence of having their sacred sites destroyed. We consider these experiences interlinked. The parallels we observe in the 1876 burning of Antioch’s Chinatown, the fatal shootings in Atlanta, and ongoing acts of aggression toward communities seen as "others" are a reminder that racial, religious, and gendered violence affects us all. Our 2024 programming—May We Gather: A National Buddhist Pilgrimage for Asian American Ancestors and Resilience, Recovery, Repair: An Online Speaker Series—is dedicated to healing these historic and present-day harms, and to recognizing the contributions of Asian American women.
###