What made you interested in community organizing ?

This makes me think of bell hooks’ essay “Theory as a Liberatory Practice” where she starts off the essay with “I can to theory because I was hurting.” I feel the same way about organizing, I came to it because I was isolated and alone. I felt I had no real community to turn too and many other Black women, Black queer/non-binary folks and others that I was in community with, didn’t have those relationships and resources either. I saw what real community could be and was, I grew up in a neighborhood where no one went hungry because we cooked meals for each other, we had monthly potlucks, when folks were BBQing everyone in the projects was invited. When there were conflicts, my father and other adults would help to mediate, when the public housing agency would hurt, and mistreat my family or others we stood for one another. My family gave me this understanding of what a world should be like and when I saw our white-supremacist, capitalist imperialist world wasn’t fostering conditions to build these communities, I knew this was a life’s work I wanted to do.
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Community organizing is an intentional way for me to build the community and world I wanted to see. It allows me to grow as a person, as a Black woman, a queer person, a low-income person. I am able to work to build solidarity between my communities and communities that are affected by similar institutions and work in collective spaces that not only make me hopeful in building towards a truly free world, but also having relationships that directly reflect the world, relationships and communities I hope to see.

How has being a community organizer impacted how you see and understand your own identity as a Black femme? 

Community organizing allows me to see the varying overlaps of the kinds of isolation, harm and violence that is inflicted upon many communities and identities. Whether I am advocating for ending the cycles of gender based violence , or cycles of racial violence they all connect to larger interconnected systems of white supremacy, capitalism and colonialism that perpetuate these systems of subjugation.

How does wellness and liberation connect for you?

Wellness and liberation are directly tied in everything I do (although I am still working on it myself haha). The society we currently live in thrives on Black, Brown, disabled, and queer folks being unwell. We are exploited and violated not just physically but mentally and socially. We are exploited and harmed in the workplace when workers can't unionize and fight for fair, just working rights. We are harmed and exploited in the criminal punishment system when Black women and queer folks are jailed for fighting back against/or protecting themselves against sexual violence.

We are harmed and exploited when cops/state continue to surveil our communities, and incarcerate our communities and make them work in essentially slave labor in jails and prisons. We are harmed and exploited when housing stability is continuously ripped from our communities to be given to those richer and gentrifying our communities. Wellness and liberation are synonymous to me. Many of our communities will not be well until these systems are dismantled and we create new systems that are founded on the values of our wellness.

Self care to me is....

Self care is collective care!!! We must see the need for healing, justice and liberation as interconnected to one another. It is not something any of us can reach on our own but through collective practices of healing, collective visions of justice and liberation; we move together towards care that holds everyone in their complexities and needs. That is what self-care means to me and how it was taught to me by Black women who embodied that understanding that caring for community; making sure that people are fed, that families/people have a safe space to sleep at night, that our radical history is passed down to understand why we need healing. Katrina, Bridget, Linda, Lorraine, Yvette, are my teachers are what self care means to me.

How do you prioritize self-care while doing this work?

I won't lie, this is a really hard question for me as it's something I am still working on! The importance of self-care while we are in an actively harmful and violent system is so vital to me but even harder in practice. I can say a kind of self-care that has really supported me in the past two years has been the collective care of self that I engage in with my friends and family. Whether it's small things like making sure we're all eating, dining and cooking for one another, to planning retreats with other Black and POC organizers, to cook outs with my dad, sisters and aunt to making safety plans with my close circles around how we want one another to support each other in harmful situations. I have seen how self-care for myself has to start with collective care that reaches to not only create spaces of healing for myself, but for my communities.

How can the community support you and the organization you are involved with?

While I think I can always talk about ways to share the work of Black Radical Reading Groups of Greater Boston Marxists or the Community Accountability Coalition we are doing For The People Boston. But honestly, for me it's also about the internal work of unlearning the current systems we live in. You have to work with your friends, family and spaces you feel most safe and begin to build towards better, more holistic practices from there. This is a culture of individualism and exploitation we are working to change internally and externally and it can't be done alone. We need everyone.