In 2015, Riv founded a digital storytelling service called Sacred Witness Media, telling stories that amplify social change and uplift progressive organizations.
Oakland (Huichin village)-based nonprofit Lead to Life (www.leadtolife.org) melts donated guns into shovels and plants trees at the sites of violence. On MLK Day 2019, they led a ceremony to turn the liquified metal into the shapes of constellations that were in the sky on the night Oscar Grant was murdered ten years prior.
This is Oakland's prohetic vision from a future without violence, a future where everyone is fed and housed and cared for. We create this future now. We live into it each moment. We bring our guns to the fire and transform them from something that takes life into something that gives it. This is the Now moment of the future we’ve dreamed of.