Supporting Community Through Mutual Aid
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I'm reaching out to ask for your support in helping a Brown woman in my community as she is sending her child off to college. We hope we can do that so the young adults had some savings. This is a mutual aid effort—a form of community care that takes many shapes, this one being financial.
Ways to contribute:
Every contribution, large or small, makes a difference.
My journey toward this work began in rural Tennessee in the 1980s. Growing up surrounded by fundamentalist Christianity and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, I remember my mother's handwritten list of church members' phone numbers taped inside our kitchen cabinet next to our yellow rotary phone. That list represented community—people who showed up for each other.
Today, I've created my own handwritten list of community contacts, though my spiritual path has evolved. For over two years, I've spent hundreds of hours in online meditation rooms with a community called "no big deal" (NBD). This practice, which we call "stillness intention training" (SIT), has transformed how I see the world.
NBD is a zen-based meditation practice lovingly curated by Rev. angel Kyodo williams. Our tenets are simple: "come as you are," "leave as you must," "mind your business"—it's "no big deal," yet it changes lives. We center People of the Global Majority (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) and create a queer-loving space.
As Rev. angel warns: "this deceptively simple practice space has been known to blow people's skirts up whether they are wearing one or not, break your brain, disrupt lazy or white supremacist-laden notions of practice, and generally undermine ordinary ways of thinking."
Through my racial justice learning since 2020, I've come to understand that, as I learned from the Community Reparations Coalition: all white wealth is stolen wealth.
This understanding has led me to redirect 10% of my income to People of the Global Majority. Liberation, in Rev. angel's words, means taking "responsibility for ourselves: our choices, our behaviors, how we show up in the world, and to insist that we show up AS ourselves."
As Cornel West said: "Justice is what love looks like in public."
All contributions are tracked publicly by date and initials: https://docs.google.com/document/d/106wux86qz5rtAlsym6Bf_rshdVJxIuH66b90GfLoUPs/edit?tab=t.0