In March 2023, when more people got arrested and charged with “domestic terror” for the non-crime of caring about forests and life, as embodied in the @defendatlantaforest and @stopcopcity movement, a whole ecosystem of solidarity—already well grounded—mushroomed in size and variety. And to my mind (and heart), a particularly essential yet often overlooked piece of solidarity emerged: collective emotional care, or emotional mutual aid.

That took the form of, say, in-person care clinics, gifts of medicinal herbs, and grief spaces, to therapists and other healers lending virtual support, to two earlier care-focused webinars that I pulled together, mostly behind the scenes, with tech aid from the @the_cldc and @chava_lah. (A recording of the webinar by the amazing Nicole explaining PTSD and trauma from state repression, and numerous ways to cope, can be found in the link at @solidarity.apothecary.)

Now, I’m humbled that three other remarkable folks—like Nicole, all former defendants who are committed to a politics of care, and all incredibly wise, skilled, and loving—are gathering for a third webinar, kindly Zoom hosted by @firestormcoop. You won’t want to miss the ways that @ashwilliamsclt, @_fouquieria_, and @banderitanegra engage in “Cultivating Care & Resilience to Weather the Stress of State Repression.”

No need to register! Just tune in on Tuesday, July 18, from 7 to 8:30 pm EST, via bit.ly/resiliencecare.

And bring friends and accomplices, especially those you know are going through waves of emotional turmoil—whether they (and/or you) are doing jail or legal support, fundraising or letter writing, awaiting trial, continuing to organize, and/or so much more that keeps up the good fight.

As this webinar, which will be recorded, notes, “The goal of state repression is to divide and fragment [us, including via] stress. It’s a tactic meant to fuck with our heads. And too often, it works. The fear, anxiety, uncertainty, and loss of control over our lives can be so overwhelming that we turn on each other with lateral aggressions, crushing us and our solidarity. How do we not let the state win in this way?”

#CollectiveCare
#ArtOfResilience
#UntilAllAreFree

isolation sucks

Being chronically ill and isolated sucks.

Yet society is deadset on making itself as hostile as possible for people like me to survive in it. I wish our communities fought against the normalization of death/mass-disablement and did more collective action like mutual aid. Instead, folks like me get tossed out as inconvenient and left behind.

It hurts even more when my communities claim to 'leave no one behind' and yet people like me (millions of us) are being left behind anyway due to lack of accessibility (Covid mitigations are part of accessibility by the way) and mutual aid to aid in our survival in an increasingly warming, hostile-to-life world.

It's so... exhausting and dispiriting.

Check in with disabled people. Aid us and support us, and please stop leaving us behind. Be accessible, please.

#Accessibility #MutualAid #CollectiveCare #PandemicMitigations #StopIsolatingDisabledPeople

Radical Resilience: a film for grassroots movements about activist #burnout & #trauma

Now available to watch online https://radicalresilience.noblogs.org/watch/

At that link you’ll also find questions that you can use and adapt to structure a discussion.

We encourage you to watch the film together with friends and comrades & reflect how we can be more #resilient and deal with activist #trauma and #burnout.

These are systemic and structural problems that can only be overcome collectively.

#CollectiveCare not #SelfCare!

PS: There are several languages spoken in Radical Resilience, so don’t forget to switch on subtitles! (EN, DE, PL, FR, ES).

@theneurotrust crucial conversation indeed!
Just recently listened to Cara Page on #healingjustice... Some notes and emerging thoughts:

- Not all healers are political but I bet true healing is.

- Asuming one self a healer is different to finding pieces of collective health within me

- collective memory and mediation by other languages confirms once and again to be strategic, so the individual painful narratives turn into deep treasure searching and other metaphores...

- when certain metaphores build #CollectiveCare?

- How to walk together thru the broken twigs of deep shared losses? How to build bridges collaborativelly for not falling into power unballances?

"I’m not lonely, I’m enraged. Having a non-compromised immune system doesn’t make you lucky, it makes you privileged in an ableist society. We need to reframe risk. In the context of oppression, immunocompromised people and other vulnerable populations aren’t at risk for reasons related to their individual bodies. They are put at risk by systems of oppression that value some bodies over others, an ideology that forms the basis of eugenics. Ableism is compromising our immunity. Oppression is compromising our immunity.

This is a big part of the reason why individualizing safety is so absurd. Immunocompromised people need to be protected. Most of all, we need to protect each other." ~ Mecca Monarch

https://truthout.org/articles/im-immunocompromised-i-know-ableism-is-oppression-we-need-disability-justice/

#Pandemic #CollectiveCare #Ableism #COVID19

“How’s your covid grief these days?”

Those words, which traveled across an ocean and many borders as a DM, supplied a recognition that’s too rare in this so-called post-pandemic world: someone else feels stuck in mourning.

For without collective reckoning of what humanity has gone and is still going through …

Without collective processing of the innumerable losses as our sacred shared duty …

Without public do-it-ourselves altars, memorials, and other pandemic grief spaces woven into the public landscape, acknowledging the immensity of the collective and individual trauma and myriad absences …

Without honoring our dead and actively fighting for the living …

Without collective care for those who are sick, disabled, grappling with long covid, or dying …

Without people routinely inquiring into each other’s losses in this world where there’s so much to mourn and grieving demands its own good, communal time …

Without masks and other visible gestures of everyday forms of looking out for the well-being of all …

Without regard for how some people are being cut off from living fully and in community because they are at risk while so much of social and work life is “back to normal” …

Without those in our own anarchist(ic) circles steadfastly, reciprocally, and without question always including and lovingly abiding by covid and other harm reduction as practices in all our spaces …

How can one not be stuck?

How can one not feel dead inside? A hollow shell? Alone?

Grieving needs the company of others, not merely to hold the profundity of any loss and make it more bearable, but to witness, believe, and remember the loss, and thus integrate it into how we want to move forward.

Without that, especially in the face of the human-made catastrophe of a global pandemic, most of humanity has shifted backward into a delusional normal that denies both death and qualitative life, thereby ensuring the hum of a murderous social system.

A few, too few, take time to ask each other and really listen to the reply, “How’s your grief?”

With that small act, mourning rebelliously finds some ground from which to mend this world.

#CollectiveCare
#RebelliousMourning
#CollectiveWorkOfGrief

(photo: black-and-white etching-style image of skull wheat pasted on a white-painted brick wall, with the edge of the forehead peeling off a bit, as seen in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal, winter 2023)

We Drum & Dream with love and joy in the collective care circle of Centering Justice, in conversation about Shared Leadership in my practice and play at the Great Lakes Taiko Center (GLTC) in SE Michigan, leaning into a Solidarity Economy & Sociocracy.

#Drum #Dream #Love #Joy #CollectiveCare #Circle #CenteringJustice #SharedLeadership #practice #play #GreatLakes #Taiko #Michigan #SolidarityEconomy #Sociocracy

You can watch the recorded session hosted by NEW.org at https://vimeo.com/799230826

🧵 (4/5) In Radical #Resilience we hear from #activists from many different struggles and realise that we are not alone with these experiences. And although these subjects are often taboo, there lies a great strength in sharing and learning from each other.

The next step is to build up new structures that support us collectively and strengthen existing ones. And to challenge discrimination and oppression in our groups. Then we can truly find power in #CollectiveCare and dismantle the system in our heads!

🧵 (2/5) On our blog you’ll also find questions that you can use and adapt to structure a discussion.

We encourage you to watch the film together with friends and comrades & reflect how we can be more #resilient and deal with activist #trauma and #burnout.

These are systemic and structural problems that can only be overcome collectively.

#CollectiveCare not #SelfCare!

There's an "Arctic Cold Front" coming next weekend. Looks to be dry with no snow, but very cold.

If you haven't already, now is the time to check in with your community and the people around you. Figure out what supplies you can get, and what you can offer, and what others can share. Our relationships are our strongest tool for surviving crisis

While the weather does not seem as intense as Winter Storm Uri, prepare as if this were 2021. Build the muscle of responding to crisis, and worst case you end up with some relationships and supplies that you don't need *yet*

#Austin #Texas #WinterStorm #Freeze #Weather #ColdFront #MutualAid #CollectiveCare

Care packages aren’t just beautiful on the inside—for what they contain as gifts, as sustenance, as rebel “love letters” to each other. (Though getting a no. 10 envelope filled with stickers from @municipaladhesives last week was lovely indeed, as the shimmery-metallic circle A that found a good home outdoors today attests to.)

It’s what overflows outward into the “worlds in which many worlds fit”—to borrow Zapatista words—that we are already, always, crafting in the here and now that’s especially beautiful, messiness and all.

That includes the “little touches” like the black and red rubber-stamped logos that Municipal Adhesives put on the envelope’s outside, meaning that various postal workers maybe couldn’t help but notice—perhaps speaking to their antifascist and/or anarchic hearts during yet another deadening day of capitalism.

Or the bigger, prefigurative ones, in which Municipal Adhesives thinks to make and distro stickers with circle A slogans that hold out a hand—on public walls and lamp posts—to the anarcho-curious or world-weary who long for something besides the daily disasters of the current social order—but need glimpses of what that could be and is when one embraces anarchistic forms of social relations and social organization.

Or the bigger-still ways that anarchists create do-it-ourselves spaces in which we remember that “we are the ones we waited for”—spaces open and welcoming to whoever is on a journey, their journey, to liberation and freedom. For as Municipal Adhesives reminded me when they PM’d me about sending a care package my way, we’d met years ago at the annual National Conference on Organized Resistance, in which a tiny anarchistic collective brought some 2,500 young folks together for a weekend that was a smorgasbord of hundreds of workshops and tables (by young-at-heart folks) spanning the whole range of radical politics. In this outwardly solidaristic, generative, open-door space, thousands found their political passion and calling—and each other.

Care packages are a joy—a life line—on a personal level in these dispiriting times, warming our insides. Yet anarchistic care shines when we common it, outward and upward.

#CollectiveCare
#WeAreAllWeHave
#EverydayAnarchism
#TryAnarchismForLife

My name's Dandy, I've been an activist since around 2008 and I've always been an artist. "Make the trees and flowers grow and you can make my troubles go away." Interests: #squats #protest #housing #campaigning #advocacy #evictionresistance #directaction #mutualaid #Art #CollectiveCare #RightToRoam #mentalhealh #recovery
#Introduction

Hola querides, estimadis, Hi lovelies! :anartrans_symbol: :knife_lgbt: :acab: :anarchoheart2:

This is me and my presentation toot :abunhdhappyhop:

Postearé en español, english i català, probablement depenent del contingut.

My interests
:antifa_100: #antifa
:acabkitty: #meme
:solidarity: #CollectiveCare
📚 #literature
:black_sparkling_heart: #WeirdFiction
:heart_cyber: #RPG
🗯️ #PerformingArts

I'm interested mostly in discovering new forms of organization and mutual aid. También en descubrir, discutir y hablar sobre cultura y entretenimiento. I en saber què s'està movent i coent per la meva zona (Barcelona).

See you around! :QueerCat:

Hello, new folks!
Would LOVE to see more people using #AltText to describe images. There are a number of blind and low vision folks here, and #accessibility is a thing we can create together!
Don’t know where to start? It’s easier than you might think. Here’s a guide!
https://accessibility.huit.harvard.edu/describe-content-images
#a11y #FediTips #NewHere #HowTo #CollectiveCare

#introduction hello linktr.ee/eileensho
#taiko drummer & dreamer michigantaiko.net
#liberation practice transformativechange.org
#SolidarityEconomy people & planet art.coop
#sociocracy just governance sociocracyforall.org
#connection building community taikopeace.love
#CenteringJustice we are who we need new.org
#CollectiveCare circles womenofcolorinthearts.org
#transparency participatory opencollective.com
#joy wonder #love sing #play dance #dream be #ShowUpForMyself now
https://www.instagram.com/p/CHHQIyyjhIS/

MUTUAL AID CALL — PLEASE BOOST:

Hiii autonomous people - I decided to re-share this again. I hope everyone’s day is going well. I’ve actually never made a mutual aid call for me but the reality is that I’m scared. I was unjustly fired. A racist staff misconstrued things about me which led for me to be fired without even getting a chance to explain myself. The reality is that this racist staff targeted me because she couldn’t take advantage of a Native person. She expected me to do most of the laboring work and didn’t like it when I spoke up. I’m an undocumented person because I was displaced from my native land in MX due to settler-colonialism. Do you love avocados? Well — my land was stolen because my kin and ancestors traditionally harvested avocados. Avocados are even called bloody gems because of the awareness of land theft and genocide to harvest on stolen land. After I was able to benefit from DACA (a work permit that I have to renew every 2 years for around $1000+) - I was able to show up for Black & Indigenous asylum seekers in Tijuana & Chiapas in MX. Having DACA gave me the opportunity to find a job that didn’t exploit me physically such as when I used to work as a farmworker & in factories. It gave me the capacity to be able to have the energy to join in supporting those who experience the brunt of State violence. I and other homies would pitch in funds and liberate items to organize safe fundraiser parties in the Bay Area prior to the pandemic. We never turned anyone away for lack of funds due to our experience in growing up low-income. Because of those fundraisers we were able to support asylum seekers who seeked asylum in the US & some in Canada after being denied asylum in the US. Back then as youth we showed fund transparency on our personal IG accounts - but now as adults we have learned to create a separate account for specific mutual aid calls. Later after that - I autonomously made a mutual aid call to support undocumented indigenous farmworkers in 2020 when the pandemic started and also due to the wildfires in the Central Coast in California. I come from a farmworker family. I was angry in seeing viral posts tokenizing how strong farmworkers are for not quarantining and working under hazard air conditions — that’s not being “strong” — that’s what happens when you’re undocumented: the State exploits you when you have no other choice. Because of community support (and those who later joined the collective) we were able to raise over $60K. Those funds were directly distributed to families in envelopes of cash aid of $300 to $500 since undocumented people didn’t qualify for stimulus checks and undocumented farmworkers are laid off during the winter without access to unemployment benefits. The people who provide some of the food in our tables live in survival mode. We also distributed medication, backpacks for children of farmworkers, and KN95 masks for wildfires. Fund transparency has been posted in the collective DESOLASOL.COLECTIVA account on IG. Because of my experience as a Native femme in the US empire — I understand my privilege as a DACA recipient and I have used it to show up for those who experience State violence due to a document. Being fired from my job has left me with so much stress. I somehow need to raise funds to renew my DACA and basically have funds to survive. I’m not sure if I even qualify for unemployment benefits due to being fired. Being disabled makes it hard to find a job that works with my capacity. I developed chronic pain because of farmwork and I hope to find a job where it doesn’t make my body pain worse. Not having a job will also impact my capacity in showing up for those I’m in community with. This winter I & the homies were hoping to raise funds again to support undocumented indigenous farmworkers since the harvest comes to an end without them having access to funds due to agriculture being seasonal. I’ve sadly communicated that I won’t be able to join in mutual aid because I’m scared about my current situation. If anyone is at capacity please help me raise funds for my survival. My CashApp is $NebulaAzul. Thank you for taking the time to read this. I wrote this to give y’all an idea of who I am and that I’m not just some random scammer asking for funds. I hope White anarchists / abolitionists / accomplices in collective liberation show up for me. Please boost this if you’re not at capacity to donate. I hope each and one of you is safe and protected under this unjust system ♡

#MutualAid #CollectiveCare #WeGotUs

Am Dienstag den 16. März 2021 um 17:45 gibt es eine Online-Filmvorführung von Radical Resilience mit anschließender Diskussion mit uns. Kommt vorbei!

Alle Infos und Link zum Online-Raum: https://radicalresilience.noblogs.org/de/
#Burnout #Aktivismus #CollectiveCare