Valarie Kaur is a Civil Rights leader, lawyer, award-winning filmmaker, educator, and best-selling author building a movement to reclaim love as a force for justice, healing, and transformation in America. She believes the love ethic is essential to birthing a multi-racial democracy and sustainable future, and declares, “Revolutionary Love is the call of our times — the choice to leave no one outside our circle of care.” Today, she leads The Revolutionary Love Project.
In the thick of the 2024 election season, SOZE was hired by The Revolutionary Love Project to produce the ‘Revolutionary Love Bus Tour’ to 40+ cities across the country to ignite courageous action rooted in love. At every stop, the tour offered storytelling, music, ancestral wisdom, and community-building. The tour drew from Kaur’s new books, Sage Warrior (presenting the wisdom of her Sikh ancestors) and World of Wonder (a children’s book that brings Revolutionary Love to a younger audience) and her acclaimed best-selling memoir, See No Stranger.
The national book tour set out to bring the concept of Revolutionary Love into action. Each stop included a book reading by Valarie accompanied by four live musicians, along with a conversation with a local cultural leader, including the likes of adrienne maree brown, Rainn Wilson, Patrisse Cullors, and many more. There were also opportunities for audience members to write a letter of Revolutionary Love to someone in their life, and enjoy some local food on their way in and their way out.
Soze produced the Revolutionary Love Tour, a transformative event series across The United States igniting people to rise up in love and courage. In collaboration with The Revolutionary Love team, we spent six months designing all of the elements of the tour, including the audience experience, program design, tour routing, programming, marketing and promotions.
The tour included over 40 stops across the country, with special routing attention paid to sites of historical trauma, like the Oak Creek Gurdwara, Japanese American National Museum Plaza, George Floyd Memorial Square, to reclaim these spaces as symbols of healing and solidarity, as well as prioritizing underserved areas such as the U.S./Mexico border and the South. Overall, the tour passed through New York, California, Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, DC, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and Louisiana.
In co-designing the program, we ensured that on stage at each stop, Valarie could guide the audience on a transformative journey through ancestral wisdom, accompanied by music—performed by Sonny Singh, Nirinjan Kaur Khalsa, Qais Essar, and Shahejan Khan— that was interwoven into the storytelling, uplifting and deepening the impact of each ancestral story.
For each tour stop, Soze booked special guests to connect locally and increase visibility of each event. These guests included Rainn Wilson, Shepard Fairey, Ani DiFranco, Deja Foxx, Patrisse Cullors and many more. Soze also produced many Instagram livestreams from the road, where special guests who were unable to join on the road were able to speak with Valarie Kaur and their audiences.
The Revolutionary Love Compass, designed by artist Shepard Fairey, was given to every participant, and Valarie Kaur led an interactive session teaching audience members how to use the compass as a tool to navigate personal and collective transformation.
To connect each tour stop to the next, at the end of each event, each participant wrote a letter sharing “When did an act of Revolutionary Love change everything for you?” which was then given to someone in the next city, creating a link between strangers. These love letters were carefully archived and managed by the team, ensuring that the messages of love reached their intended recipients, fostering a sense of unity and shared humanity in a time of national division, reinforcing the tour’s mission to build a collective movement rooted in love and solidarity.
In the end, the tour made 44 stops in cities across the country. Out of our projected attendance of 7,000, we nearly doubled that goal with over 12,000 attendees through digital and physical activations. We had over 75 special guests involved with the tour, and had almost 3,000 love letters written and shared with attendees across different cities.
On all digital platforms, we reached over 6 million impressions as a result of raised visibility from the tour. We had almost a 100% download rate of tools and resources that we had shared for attendees, and we sold over 40% more of the Sage Warrior books than our preliminary projections.
As a tour that focused on centering diversity and community, we are proud to have spent 40% of our budget with BIPOC, women, formerly incarcerated, local or immigrant owned businesses.
