Nevertheless She Preached (NSP) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that hosts an annual conference and offers ongoing support and development opportunities for faith leaders and justice makers. NSP seeks to elevate and center female, queer, and B/I/POC voices who offer transformative theologies of liberation and critical reflection of our social and religious contexts. We work to foster a brave space for authentic community and collective healing while pursuing freedom from the toxic power of patriarchy, colonization, racism, and heteronormativity.

Our 2024 conference theme is “Liberate: Imagining Faith Decolonized,” which was chosen in conversation with a diverse team of women, largely in response to the horrific colonial violence occurring in Palestine. The conversation will be led by B/I/POC and queer women, including a Muslim Palestinian and a pro-Palestinian rabbi.

For the first time this year we will be producing a published volume to accompany the conference theme, which is a new practice we hope to continue each year in connection to the conference. This year’s book will feature essays from our paid speakers, but we also want to include the wisdom of our wider community because we believe that wisdom is collective and not just held by those with platforms. Community members who have a clear and compelling idea about how to imagine an anticolonial faith and want to participate are invited to submit entries. We are keeping the labor low by asking for a 750 word summary as the entry point.  

Our editorial and selection team is composed of three BIPOC scholars (we will be sharing their names with you very soon) who are being compensated for their labor. They will be reviewing the summaries and selecting who is invited to write a fuller essay for publication.

We would like to note that unless they are bestsellers, collected volumes rarely provide payment to the individual contributors, so the primary form of compensation for the individual contributors is being published and having your work promoted as part of the collective. However, one of our values at NSP since our inception has been to pay women, most especially women of color. So despite having a tiny budget, we came up with the funds to pay our speakers a small but additional boost to their honorarium if they choose to be included in the volume, and we also created a series of prizes for the winning essay entries. The contest is optional so we only invite submissions from those for whom the prizes plus publication is sufficient compensation at this time. We hope to elevate the critically important voices of up and coming writers who would benefit from the boost our platform can provide. Any royalties from the book will go towards paying our editors and further elevating voices of people on the margins. 

NSP is committed to intersectional feminism. Most of the essays selected for this book will be written by persons of color because we believe the survivors of colonization are the ones to lead and guide this conversation. The essays of a few white writers who are dedicated to interrogating whiteness and the colonial mindset in which white people are raised may also be included. Our work at NSP is about elevating wisdom from the margins, creating community for marginalized persons, and acknowledging and examining our varied points of privilege.