Stakes Is High pays homage to Septima Poinsette Clark, known to many as simply "Mama Seppie," and her design, implementation, and teaching of the Citizenship Schools she built in Johns Island, South Carolina. After being forced out of her Charleston teaching post over her unrelenting affiliation with the NAACP, Mama Seppie became director of workshops at Highlander Folk School and, from there, opened the first Citizenship School.

Sixty-five years later, Mama Seppie's Citizenship School Pedagogy created a network of teachers, Black women, and fostering classrooms where direct questions about their current situation were met with immediate responses on where to find employment offices, where they were, and what hours they kept. Answers went down on dry cleaner's bags where they didn't have blackboards. That classroom turned into spaces where citizens learned how their local government worked and how a registered vote could change their situations.

Though three days of Stakes Is High cannot hold a candle to the scale of Mama Seppie's impact and Citizenship Schools Pedagogy, nor the decade of organizing across Septima, Bernice Robinson, and Esau Jenkins did across the South. The intention with this gathering is to pick up where their legacies left off and answer the questions from the people, with answers from the people, with community made by the people, in real time - equipping folks, the best way we can.