• The NAACP of Lane County’s “Community Conversations: Building Unity in our Community” series of public meetings on race, privilege and equity continues from 5:30 to 8 pm Thursday, April 14, at the EWEB Community Room, North Building, 500 E. 4th Ave. The meeting begins with a light dinner at 5:30. Additional meetings in the series will be at the same time and place on the second Thursday of each month through May. Reservations are requested through naacplanecounty.org or the Facebook page. Call 682-5619.
• 10 am to 1 pm Friday, April 15, at the Eugene downtown Post Office, 520 Willamette, community members will be calling on the Federal government to redirect taxes spent on war to instead fight climate change and to fund education, job creation, health care and other vital services. Taxpayers will have the opportunity to decide where their tax dollars go by participating in a penny poll. The event features a noon rally with speakers and the music of the Raging Grannies and Labor singer Mark Ross. All are welcome. From 11 am to 10 pm the same day, Whirled Pies Pizzeria, 1123 Monroe, will donate a percent of sales to CALC. For more information about the day’s events, contact CALC at (541) 485-1755.
• MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies) is holding a fundraiser in order to purchase one kilogram of pharmaceutical grade MDMA to continue Phase 3 trials of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD. A Eugene Psychedelic Dinner will be held April 17 as part of dinners happening all around the country this April to raise awareness and funds to progress the therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs and continue to remove the stigma associated with these substances. For more info go to razoo.com/us/story/Global-Psychedelic-Dinner-Eugene. To go to the Eugene potluck dinner, contact Mike Francis at mikefrancisnow@gmail.com.
• Princeton historian Hendrik Hartog speaks on justice and the complexities of gradual emancipation in early 19th-century America 7:30 pm April 21 in 175 Knight Law Center at the UO. Hartog’s O’Fallon lecture comes out of his current research on the long legal history of slavery in New Jersey. He is the author of Public Property and Private Power: the Corporation of the City of New York in American Law, 1730-1870 (1983); Man and Wife in America: a History (2000); and Someday All This Will Be Yours: A History of Inheritance and Old Age (2012). The lecture is free and open to the public and will be live streamed. For more information, or for disability accommodations (which must be made by April 14), visit ohc.uoregon.edu or call (541) 346-3934.
• Springfield City Club will feature Ted Taylor who recently retired after almost 18 years leading the area’s alternative newspaper, Eugene Weekly. An avid fly fisherman, he will reflect on his years of leadership at the end of a long journalistic career and on how the community and media have changed. Noon Thursday, April 21, Willamalane Sports Center, Springfield. Free to members, $10 nonmembers; with lunch $11 members, $22 nonmembers.