Collective Care for Reece & Other Mvmt Organizers

Updated Fundraising Goal: Yay! We quickly reached our initial fundraising goal of $2,360 to cover the cost of the Air BnB where Reece had his radical peer respite. Given how many movement organizers have been reaching out to learn more about what we did and how burnt out so many of them are, we want to focus our time on planning how we can turn the collective care we offered to Reece into an ongoing program for BIPOC movement organizers.

To support the WildSeed team in doing that, we decided to increase our fundraising goal to $20,000. Please donate to help us develop a program for BIPOC movement organizers who want to be held in the collective care they need from being on the front lines of defense for our marginalized communities. 

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On December 28, 2021, I realized that I was having a mental health crisis and needed psychiatric care. While I wasn’t in a place to harm myself, I knew I needed to take time away to take care of myself with support from others. Or I risked dissolving into a wordless fog of black sand, as I had seen happen to my fellow movement organizers.

 

However all the local hospitals were full. As many of us know, our system has been breaking down with the pandemic and was not designed to take care of Black and brown people in the first place.

 

Thankfully, I’m a part of the WildSeed Society, which is a political, spiritual and economic community that’s creating portals to new worlds where we all got free. It’s grounded in trauma-informed collective care and we offer that collective care to movement organizers in our community.

 

In other words, I needed help so they came to help. Aaron Goggans and Sandra Kim from WildSeed showed up at my door and drove me to an Air BnB to help me get the rest and care that I needed.

 

We co-created our own version of a week-long in-patient program for me as a radical peer respite. With their in-person support and virtual support from my loved ones, psychiatrist, and doctors, I was able to stabilize and process some of the emotional toll of being on the ground in a racial uprising.

 

After this respite, I came home with much greater capacity to address the challenges in my life. Perhaps more than anything, as a loved one said to me, “it’s like you’re choosing you.” I had been putting everyone and everything else first in ways that were risking my mental and physical health. Now I feel more committed to taking care of myself than ever and have been aligning more of my life to be able to do so.

 

Since the system we’ve been told to turn to for help can’t help us, I’m grateful that I belong to a group that can and will. Aaron and Sandra dropped everything in their lives to come take care of me for a week. That labor of love was freely given since taking care of each other is what we do at WildSeed.

 

However, the Air Bnb cost $2,360. So I’d like to fundraise minimally enough to cover the cost of the Air Bnb that WildSeed paid for and hopefully much more in order to continue supporting the WildSeed team in providing trauma-informed collective care for movement organizers.

 

If you’re interested in learning more about what happened, click here to read my blog post.

If you're a BIPOC movement organizer who wants to learn more about the lessons we learned and how you may be able to apply them to your life, click here to let us know.

 

Thanks,

Reece Chenault