Courageous Love Luncheon

YWCA Bethlehem held the Courageous Love Luncheon on Friday, October 17, 2025, from 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM at Ben Franklin TechVentures.

This inspiring event brought our community together to empower, educate, and connect through meaningful dialogue and shared experiences.

Keynote Speaker

Dr. Durryle Brooks is a scholar, healing practitioner, and founder of Love and Justice Consulting, where he supports organizations and communities in building cultures rooted in empathy, accountability, and collective care. He is the creator of the Critical Theory of Love—a justice-centered framework shaped by his lived experience as a Black queer person navigating systems that often confuse control with care.

Durryle’s work emerged from a deep reckoning with how love is taught, weaponized, and withheld—and how we might reclaim it as a liberatory force. Through years of research, facilitation, and healing work, he has helped individuals and institutions reimagine love as a practice of grace, truth-telling, and repair. His sessions on the Critical Theory of Love and Self-Reverence invite participants to move beyond survival, toward wholeness, authenticity, and a love that does justice.

MC

Elizabeth R. Ortiz, Ph.D., is a media and communication consultant and celebrated media literacy educator who helps organizations and individuals critically analyze and challenge the narratives that shape our society and culture. With over 20 years of experience, her mission is to empower historically marginalized groups to reject the stereotypes and limitations that media and society impose on them and to use their voices - online and real life - to make the world a more just place.

Ortiz earned her Ph.D. in Teaching, Learning, and Technology from Lehigh University, where her research focused on how Black and Latina women navigate media and negotiate mediated representations of race, gender, sexuality, and class. Her most recent research explores how elementary-age Black, Latinx, and multiethnic learners use storytelling as a form of counternarrative, asserting their agency to critique dominant narratives and author their own identities.

She and her husband, Adam, co-own the popular Cactus Blue Mexican Restaurant, where she leverages her expertise to connect with the community and support local nonprofits. Beyond her professional work, Ortiz is actively involved in various community-based efforts including serving on the boards of the Boys and Girls Club of Allentown and the Rising Tide Community Loan Fund, and mentoring emerging leaders through the Chamber’s Women 2 Women program.