To myself, I rationalized,
“I know this toxic narrative is wrong about us.”
“My partner and I have a loving, supportive relationship.”
“The kids are alright.”
“Other people have it way worse.”
“We’ve been through this before.” 
“We know how to survive.”

It’s true. We do know how to survive…
When your rights are stripped away on repeat 
When the walls keep closing in tighter 
When they burn your documents and send them back to you destroyed
because they can. 
When it feels more possible to disappear than earn a doctorate degree, survival becomes the primary goal.

We know how to survive. A lot of us have been surviving our entire lives.
And I’m not just talking about raw survival against street and institutional violence. 
It’s the way the hypervigilance we carry in our bodies impacts our nervous system. 

It’s the increased prevalence of autoimmune diseases, cardiovascular issues, depression, and PTSD among trans people, particularly those who have also experienced racialized trauma.
It’s also the economic barriers to health care and discrimination within the medical-industrial complex. 
Being trans is beautiful, but the world makes it exhausting.

Path to Liberation

Trans people have saved my life time and time again. I came out in 1998. I was 14 and living in a town along the so-called U.S.–Mexico border. All we had was each other. In a time with few legal protections and next to no resources, we had to organize deep systems of care for ourselves. Over the past two decades, there have been many political and cultural changes, thanks to the labor of advocates (trans and otherwise) who have pushed tirelessly to implement pathways to better protect folks.

However, it is risky to become dependent upon incremental policy change. As important as these kinds of wins are, what is granted by colonial law can also be revoked by colonial law. When we become comfortable within the bounds of what is “given” to us (often crumbs), we settle for less than what we know we really need: real solutions to the root causes of the political and ecological crisis we are facing. 

False “solutions” and concepts like individual upward mobility or assimilation (when even possible) often distract us with temporary comfort and take us away from building up the collective care and self-governance muscle that will actually protect us. We need permanently organized communities that are rooted in values like radical care, collective governance, and mutuality. 

When we are not organized, the impacts of backlashes, such as the one we are experiencing now, are far more detrimental because when they come for us, what and who do we fall back on?  

Our autonomy is our power. Our long-built systems of survival and community defense are our power. There is so much to draw from in our collective DNA to guide us through this time. We know how to do this.

Trans people: Brown, Black, Indigenous, working class. 
So many beautiful stories. 
So much cultural wealth and lived wisdom rooted in the will to survive like hell against all odds.

From street economies to the people’s pharmacies
From houses for disowned youth to adopted queer parents
From Stonewall to Compton’s Cafeteria 
From our own designs of family to fierce love and solidarity
From prisons walls to asylum halls

Trans people have navigated a million plot twists—many steeped in violence—based upon a perception of us: 
How we exist in the eyes of others.
Be it the state, religion, our families of origin, or neighborhoods. 
And still they have no idea who we really are. 
Nonetheless, we remain. 
Our most prominent hxstorical rebellions powerfully led by Black and Brown trans women.

It Means Home…

I kept trying to understand why I was questioning my existence last month.
It might have had something to do with the right’s violent campaign to erase us while simultaneously hyper-visibilizing us, spending $215 million on anti-trans ads, to create another common enemy and boost votes.

“Take America back from pronouns and immigrants!”
Come on, we know they’re full of….

But it worked. Across our backs.
Not even 0.5% of the population posed a supposed threat so big it gave the right (and moveable center) a perfect point of unity: 
“Protect our kids.”

Protect them from what exactly?
Learning and embracing that all different kinds of people exist? 
A culture that teaches to not harm people for being different from yourself?
It is no surprise that those who see our Mother Earth and her life sources as nothing more than a dollar sign would despise a worldview in which we respect and revere life in all of its complex and beautiful intelligence. 

We will never understand all there is to this planet, but you don’t have to understand it to respect it. 

If we are speaking ecologically: Diversity is our best defense in the face of crisis. 
If we are speaking like my old timers: “Everything in its place.”  
Eradicating one thread in an ecosystem disrupts the entire ecosystem. 
Global traditional knowledge has carried that teaching since time immemorial. Everything is connected.

Humans are but one expression of nature. And yes, we are human.
Never mind the dehumanizing, ableist narrative that we are “imposing mental illness” by advocating for a right to a dignified life and basic respect.

Despite the long-overused weaponization of “nature” against queer and trans people (“Its not natural!”), sex and gender variance is reflected all across the natural world. 

From birthing male seahorses 
to split-gill mushrooms’ 28,000 different sexes 
to the female swallowtail butterfly’s “doublesex” genes that provide wing pattern camouflage from predators—
Biodiversity is a part of nature.
Adaptation is a part of nature.
Trans, gender-expansive, and two-spirit people are a part of nature.
Honor it.  

My comrade asked me: “What are your wildest dreams for trans relatives?” 
My dream is not just for us to survive, but that we come to know belonging. 
That we remember the truth of who we really are in a mess of endless projections and attacks. 
I pray that as we endure a war on our right to exist—we hold the deep knowing that we are not alone. 
The Earth and so many others, human and non-human, are also enduring profoundly violent disruptions. 
We struggle in solidarity with all those who persist on the side of justice, the side of life. 
Now more than ever, our interconnection mandates us to protect the living world. Yes, we have a right to be here, but more than that, we need to be here.

If we want to sustain life on Earth in the face of this crisis, we’re told to do everything from buying electric vehicles and taking shorter showers to avoiding plastic straws and shopping with reusable bags. The elites promote the idea that “technology will save us” with solar panels on every home, mirrors in space to reflect the sun away from Earth, and cloud seeding to make it rain during a drought. So-called tech “solutions” offer an attractive and compelling narrative, but these false promises crumble under scrutiny.

Movement Generation (MG) offers a different understanding of the climate crisis and how we should respond. In our analysis, the climate crisis is better understood as part of a larger ecological crisis, which can be described as a crisis of disconnection: We are disconnected from the land, and we are disconnected from each other.

The ecological crisis predates climate change. It did not begin with the burning of fossil fuels. It began with the trans-Saharan/transatlantic slave trade, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, and the taking of Indigenous lands through colonialism and imperialism. The magnitude of these events and the impact they had on humanity and our ecosystems are incomprehensible.

In the span of about 1,250 years, from 650 CE to 1900 CE, more than 50 million people of African descent were taken from their homes and forced into enslavement. More than 50 million Indigenous people in the so-called Americas were killed, and more than 1 billion acres of their land were stolen. Trillions of dollars were generated and circulated almost exclusively among people of Arab and European descent.

The forced labor was used to heavily exploit and extract natural resources all over the world. Entire landscapes and ecosystems were destroyed to create colonies that grew into countries. The tremendous amount of money that was created during the period of enslavement fueled the industrial revolution. Since the burning of fossil fuels would not have been possible without slavery and genocide, then the response to this crisis requires Black liberation and ecology. A global redistribution of power and wealth through reparations and Indigenous sovereignty will move land away from the few who see it as an object to exploit and transfer it to the many who long to care for it but have been violently denied the right to do so.

In 1970, Nathan Hare, Ph.D., the first coordinator of a Black Studies program in U.S. history, published “Black Ecology,” a peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Black Studies and Research. “The emergence of the concept of ecology in American life is potentially of momentous relevance to the ultimate liberation of black people,” Hare wrote. “Yet blacks and their environmental interests have been so blatantly omitted that blacks and the ecology movement currently stand in contradiction to each other.”

One year later, Marvin Gaye released his iconic album What’s Going On, with songs that played to the theme of Black liberation and ecology, including “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler),” “What’s Going On,” and “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology).” In 1977, Wangari Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in Kenya to empower African women and their communities to plant trees and think more ecologically. With just a handful of examples, we can see what our ancestors have long known: Black liberation and ecology go together like soil and water. 

So what does that mean for us today? I think about Black liberation as the process of obtaining safety, sovereignty, and self-determination for people of African descent. It is inherently revolutionary and the antithesis to the myth of white supremacy. Black liberation seeks to create a world where people of African descent can reach their full potential. It seeks to restore people of African descent to their traditional greatness—part of which includes being the original stewards of the Earth, the people who have an 80,000-year-old relationship with the Earth.

The evolution of Homo sapiens sapiens—the currently agreed upon ancestor of modern humans—occurred about 150,000 years ago on the continent of Africa, likely in central Africa. Our species lived exclusively there for the next 80,000 years, before the great migration out of Africa began. Therefore, for the first 80,000 years of our existence, all humans on Earth were exclusively people of African descent.

In that time, our ancestors created the building blocks of life as we know it today. They mastered the use of fire, created complex tools, developed languages, created art, engaged in trade and resource sharing, and advanced cognitive abilities like planning and problem solving. An instrumental part of their progress was ecology, the study of home. It was an 80,000-year study of animal behavior, human growth and development, plant medicine, seafaring, cartography, astronomy, and the relationship between earth, water, air, fire, and spirit.

MG understands ecology as the study of home/earth. (Eco comes from the Greek word oikos, which simply means “home,” while -logy is a word rooted in Latin meaning “the study of.”) Home can be as big as the planet or as small as a drop of water. It all depends on the perspective of the student. Ecology invites us to study the relationships that make up home, not just the container that is home. Through relationships of home, we can explore concepts like interdependence, reciprocity, dynamic balance, growth through conflict, zero waste, and regeneration. Ecology is a modern word for an ancient practice, and I believe it is vital to the survival of our species.

One of the most important and enduring teachings from our ancestors is the idea that humans are not separate from nature. We are all connected. What you do to the land, you do to the people, and what you do to the people, you do to the land. This overarching message has been a foundational belief of humanity from our earliest days on the African continent up to the present moment.

However, in the last few hundred years of our story, the dangerous myth of white supremacy has sought to eradicate this belief. This myth makes a delusive claim that white people are innately superior to other races (especially the Black race), animals, nature, and life itself. 

Human activities that would be considered atrocious to our ancestors are now celebrated as proof of white superiority: the construction of mega dams that disrupt entire ecosystems, the discovery and burning of fossil fuels that create climate disruption, the development of chemical pesticides and fertilizers that deplete soil and pollute groundwater, and the over extraction of rare earth minerals to power the information economy. All of this is made possible by the myth of white supremacy and its evil economic offspring, the extractive economy (more broadly referred to as capitalism).

If we are going to create a sustainable future with life-affirming, regenerative economies, then we must fight for global reparations—not only cash payments but also an opportunity to repair our relationships with the land and with one another. We must earnestly study our planet and develop responses to the crisis that are rooted in regeneration, care, and cooperation with the purpose of creating ecological and social well-being. Traveling the path of Black liberation and ecology will increase our chance to survive as a species in the face of catastrophic changes to our ecosystem that have just begun.

The court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson may have been designed to send pregnant people back to the 1950s, but the oral arguments surfaced an idea that could only be at home today. It was the idea that abortion was no longer necessary. Things had changed since 1973, one Supreme Court justice pointed out in their only question. There may have been a time when women needed the right to abortion, but not now. Today women were free.

The source of this “freedom” was about as ghastly as it gets. “Safe-haven laws” allow birthing people to abandon their newborns in places like fire and police stations without facing criminal prosecution. If it was so easy to abandon a newborn, wasn’t the ability of abortion restrictions to “hinder women’s access to the workplace” … “take[n] care of”?

Much of this argument—its erasure of the pregnant body and trivialization of the experience of pregnancy and the adoption decision—was straight out of the conservative playbook.

But what hit me was not the familiar misogyny. It was hearing a staunch abortion opponent claim that women were free. Since when were conservatives saying that women were free? And since when did they seem to be conceding that we should be?

The idea that women deserved freedom was decidedly not from the conservative playbook. The conservative side in the abortion debate had long been spouting versions of the idea that women needed to stay where we belonged, whether that meant accepting the “consequences of our decisions,” remaining in the kitchen, or as the alt-right would have it, accepting that “America belongs to its fathers and is owed to its sons.” But instead, here was an abortion opponent suggesting that “forced motherhood” (yes, she used that term, and yes, it was a she) was not something women should have to undergo.

The only way I could make sense of this seeming about-face was to think about the person who had argued that safe-haven laws respected women’s “bodily autonomy” in the first place. She was a pearl-wearing mom of seven, drafted to the Supreme Court from a Catholic law school, known for seeming to weave a very demanding form of motherhood seamlessly into a high-powered career. It was these bona fides of traditional white femininity that made her popular with her conservative Christian base.

But Justice Amy Coney Barrett and her supporters had long been presenting her as something other than traditional. Barrett, in the eyes of her supporters, represented a new kind of woman.

Barrett was the type of woman who made her own rules. She showed up to her confirmation hearing in a fuchsia-colored dress, as though to make a statement about how femme presentation belonged even in the halls of power. The conservative theater surrounding her confirmation hearing portrayed her as a gender warrior, someone who should be celebrated for not fitting into the conventional mold of what a Supreme Court justice looks like. Never mind that she had been part of a religious group that referred to women as “handmaids.”

Barrett’s embrace of freedom for women wasn’t from the conservative playbook. She was taking pages from the feminist playbook now. And any long-term strategy feminists were going to craft after Dobbs was going to have to face this fact.

Feminist ideas are powerful, perhaps more powerful than they have ever been. This means, on one hand, that my daughter gets to grow up in a world where there are children’s books full of women, including queer women of color, doing amazing things. It also means, though, that there are plenty of women who, like Barrett, are doing amazing things without my or my daughter’s interests in mind. Seemingly feminist ideas can be harnessed for causes like misogyny and white supremacy, and it’s not always obvious when that’s happening.

When Barrett argued that the illegality of abortion was compatible with women’s freedom, she was using a feminist idea to justify throwing the majority of women under the bus. When she portrayed herself as brave enough to defy sexism, and when her supporters painted her as the victim of regressive gender stereotypes, they affirmed the idea that “representation matters.” The price the rest of us have to pay for that representation is not just lack of control of our bodies, but also judicial decisions that have eroded protections for workers, immigrants, and defendants.

If we want to understand how we got here—to a world where abortion is illegal in 14 states, where the final nail in the coffin was hammered by the “ultimate dystopian girlboss,” and where public support for feminism is at an all-time high—we need to understand that lines of reasoning like Barrett’s are not so dissimilar from those advanced by actual feminists.

Feminism has always included more conservative and more radical strands. It has contained within it, at the same time, people who believed that a feminist reproductive agenda was about keeping the “unfit” from reproducing, people who believed it was about keeping the government out of the doctor’s office, people who believed it was fundamentally about wresting control of our lives from men, people who believed it was about the right to parent, and many, many other things.

There have been people who believed that specific work protections for pregnancy and childcare were politically regressive because they undermined the idea that women could do any job men could, and people who believed that they were dismantling the assumption that men’s work was the only socially valuable work, and all kinds of people in between. Feminists converge on the idea that there is gender injustice and that we should fight against it, but we have not always agreed on what this injustice consists in or what should be done about it.n

But sometimes we have to agree on some fundamentals about what feminism is, and this is one of those times. It is either a goal of feminism to demand abortion rights or it isn’t; it is either a goal of feminism to fight for choice alone or to fight for more; it is either a goal of feminism to tell individual women to dream big or to question the economic system that makes dreaming big so important to begin with. In all of these cases, and many more, what feminism is depends largely on what we decide right now. 

In this moment when we are finally talking about the fact that many feminists have been active supporters of oppressive systems, we should feel very keenly that we don’t get to pick and choose. Many of the same feminists most of us were taught about in history books were at some point allies of white supremacy, colonialism, capitalist exploitation, ableism, cissexism, and homophobia, even producing as feminist goals ideas that supported keeping these other systems of oppression in place.

From Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Carrie Chapman Catt’s very public statements that women’s suffrage was compatible with (and could perhaps even strengthen) white supremacy to Betty Friedan’s claims that women needed to free themselves from “biological living,” as though no one would have to pick up the slack of caring for children or cleaning houses, feminisms for the few have been with us for a very long time.

But freedom feminism is not our only option. We can think toward something else—a feminism for the many. If there have always been many strands in feminism, this moment is an invitation to pick up another strand.

Excerpted from Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop by Serene Khader (Beacon Press, 2024). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.

I am writing with an exciting update about this column. Since we launched “Murmurations” in 2021, we have collectively survived, witnessed, and lost loved ones, species, and land to floods, drought, fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, pandemics, genocide, a rise in fascism, and so many variations of cancer and disease.

We’re also enduring the ongoing violence of late-stage capitalism that shows up as institutional violence—denied health care, trigger-happy police, identity-based violence, and increasing economic disparity and insecurity. As all of these crises unfold around our precious globe, we are learning to persist in the work of living. We can simultaneously feel the end of the world as we’ve known it and the beginning of what will be shaped by us.

Though it’s looking dire, I am constantly reminded by friends, comrades, Octavia Butler, and historians that these are the conditions from which we have to make our way to lives worth living. We are at the beginning. Right now, I mostly feel a sense of devastating loss, but as the smoke clears, I know we will learn what is lost and where there are opportunities to survive. 

I began this column because I was feeling overwhelmed by what the pandemic had unveiled to us, about how hard it was to protect each other, and about how much we need each other. I wanted to call on the wisdom of murmuration: moving together, with adequate space and proximity, avoiding predation by being in right relationship. For humans to be in right relationship, we must practice accountability—being intentional about how we take up space and resources, attending to our role in the world and our impact on others, shaping what we can touch, and being able to repair and set boundaries, especially as conditions change.

After a year of exploring these themes in this column (also collected in Loving Corrections), I opened Murmurations up to other emergent strategists who are thinking about and practicing how we relate, change, grow, and hold each other through changing conditions. Those columns have been abundant and divergent, representing a healthy ecosystem of ideas and practices.

Emergent strategy is the only thing that makes sense to me right now. The Earth awaits our partnership, and we have to decentralize but move together to avoid the predation of this moment. We feel smaller and we may be smaller, but we—the workers, the makers, the parents, the birthing bodies, and the Earthlings who want a future on Earth—are still the majority. We need a place to keep learning how to flock together.

So, for our third iteration of the column, we are partnering with Movement Generation (MG), a group I worship. MG is shepherding a set of ideas that blow my mind every time I encounter them. I reference the organization often in conversation and interviews, and I included their “Shocks, Slides and Shifts” framework in Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. To me, MG feels like emergent strategy in action, and the thinkers who founded the organization were teachers in the soil of my own “ahas” about how the world works, what matters, and what we must do.

MG taught me that eco– comes from the Greek word oikos, which means home, and that home is what we always want to center, protect, and grow. That takes multiple forms: Ecosystem is all the relationships in our home. Ecology is what we know and understand about home. Economy is not money or markets, but how we manage the resources of our home. And ecological justice—a state of balance between human communities and healthy ecosystems—is rooted in and flows from home. 

MG also taught me about “the lag effect.” Without realizing it, I had developed a short-term way of thinking about the impact of humans on Earth, but the “lag effect” framing helped me understand the cumulative effect of human behavior on our planet. Did you know it takes between 40 and 50 years to fully feel the effect of burning fossil fuels? Our Earth is experiencing the effect of the fossil fuels humans were burning in the 1980s. Consider how much fossil fuel has burned in the decades since then, a climate impact that will shape our next half century. Understanding this can give us a clearer picture of what is to come and how to take the right action. 

MG taught me that everything is precious. One of their beloved founders, Gopal Dayaneni, often tells the story about how he and his daughter would brush their teeth together so he could simultaneously teach her about the preciousness of every drop of water. I took that practice into my own life. 

MG helped me understand the true web of our interconnectedness. Our Earth isn’t organized by the borders we have set on top of it. Instead, Earth is a single living system operating as a spider’s web, where all of us are connected and impact each other, and core webbing ties it all together. There is fragility and strength in all of this connection. 

Learning interconnectedness helped me understand there is no “over there.” There is no climate catastrophe that can actually be contained. If we hope to survive, then we have to think about how we cause impact and are impacted by others and how we can protect the meta systems—air, water, soil, and energy—that hold us all. 

MG’s “Three Circles” strategy helped me understand strategy in a way I could quickly use and apply. In this exercise, the three overlapping circles represent what we need, what’s politically possible, and what are false solutions. So often, our political system will hear us articulate what we need and return with a false solution, claiming it is the only option that is politically possible. MG helped me understand that our work is never to settle for the false solutions, but to instead organize, exert pressure, and educate ourselves to make what we need politically possible. This has saved me so much time and helped me determine where to expend my own precious life force. 

This is just a taste of MG’s incredible thinking and experimentation. The organization has also liberated land in the Bay Miwok territory of the San Francisco Bay Area and is building a Justice and Ecology Center for communities to gather, deepen, and learn in part of a larger shift to return land to Indigenous hands and those who will love and steward it. 

As we keep watching our government devolve, I am calling on MG to helm Murmurations in 2025 and offer a guide for how we can foster a just transition, even against the odds. Movement Generation is going to use this column to provide current ideas, frameworks, and practices that can help us navigate this storm. 

I am so excited to be their student again, and I am grateful for YES! Media letting us continue to iterate to make the best offer we can. We invite you to learn with us, grow with us, and change with us. 

Legal experts speculate that, in practice, it will be much harder for the Trump administration to actually pull back funding. But the IRA doesn’t just tackle climate; it represents a wide-reaching grab bag of progressive policies addressing everything from carbon emissions and health care to tax codes and the economy. (It’s worth noting that the link to the comprehensive overview of the IRA that I used for my reporting back in December has since been removed from whitehouse.gov.)

Often considered a landmark achievement of the Biden administration, the IRA includes, among other policies, an ambitious set of initiatives for clean energy jobs, funding for climate resiliency infrastructure and disaster relief, and more aggressive taxation for large corporations. But perhaps one of the most important, if under discussed, aspects of the IRA is its impact on prescription medication costs.

At a time when nearly 40 percent of Americans have opted to forgo prescription medication due to the expense, the IRA gave the government the ability to curb rising drug costs through a variety of strategies. Most notably, the law gave Medicare the power to negotiate prescription prices directly with drug companies for the first time, which could have a cumulative, long-term impact on drug prices. 

“[The IRA] has given the government for the first time the ability and also the tools through which it can negotiate drug prices” says Richard G. Frank, director of the Center on Health Policy at the Brookings Institute, a nonpartisan research organization. This ability ramps up over time, allowing a set number of additional drugs to be negotiated each year. “That really changes the ball game in an important way—not so much today or even tomorrow, but over time, you’ve equipped the government with a whole bunch of new opportunities to keep prices in check.” 

As far as immediate price reductions, the IRA also guarantees that many Medicare beneficiaries will pay no more than $35 out-of-pocket for insulin. This price cap is not only a practical win for people on Medicare, but a symbolic victory for many activists who have long lobbied to make predatory insulin and drug pricing a national concern for politicians.

In recent years, insulin has become a poster child for the broken health care system. By manipulating patent law and squashing competitors, a mere three pharmaceutical companies control an estimated 90 percent of the global insulin market—and this monopoly has given them free reign to crank up the price of insulin over the past few decades.

A recent study from the Health Care Cost Institute found that from 2012 to 2021, the price of a 30-day supply of insulin nearly doubled from $271 to $499. The estimated cost of manufacturing a vial of insulin, meanwhile, is only $2 to $4. When compared to international prices, insulin in the United States is eight times more expensive, per a 2020 report published by the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation. For many, these discrepancies are particularly outrageous; without insulin, people with diabetes can die within days.

It’s unclear exactly how Trump’s executive order will affect the IRA’s climate initiatives, let alone how or if it could have any effect on other aspects of the law, such as insulin price caps. But just a few years after Biden signed the IRA into law, it is clear that its benefits are under threat. Project 2025—a harrowing, authoritarian “wish list” published by the Heritage Foundation and meant to guide the next Republican presidency—calls for the repeal of the IRA. Republicans, too, are already pushing for a complete repeal of the IRA and its so-called “woke agenda,” including its climate provisions and tax increases for corporations. (Republicans’ continued distaste for the IRA is not surprising, however, as every single Republican in Congress voted against the bill. But that partisanship does not extend beyond the halls of Congress: The majority of Americans, regardless of political affiliation, support government-negotiated drug prices.) 

The main goal of Project 2025’s repeal is to strip Medicare of its power to negotiate with corporations, according to Andrea Ducas, vice president of health policy at the Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan policy institute. “To achieve that goal they’re willing to undo progress and throw prescription drug affordability into jeopardy for everyone in Medicare,” Ducas says. “By and large [Project 2025], this mandate for leadership, is grounded in a worldview that prioritizes profits, corporations, and business over people—full stop.”

In short, Project 2025’s IRA repeal would throw the baby out with the bathwater. In order to maintain corporate monopolies and profits, Americans would lose out on insulin price caps, health care savings, climate initiatives, clean energy jobs, and a whole lot more.

Yet even with the IRA currently in place—and a general consensus from voters that health care and insulin prices are simply overwhelming for most Americans—people with diabetes still struggle to afford their insulin on a day-to-day basis. In 2021 alone, more than one million Americans were forced to ration their life-saving insulin, with Black Americans, the uninsured, and those too young to qualify for Medicare being the most vulnerable to rationing. 

Clearly, the IRA represents only one step on a much longer journey toward equitable health care access. But health advocates, grassroots organizers, and people living with diabetes continue to lead the way in advocating for a future where accessible insulin is a reality for all.

Insulin Policies for All

While the IRA is an achievement, it’s important to understand its limits. The IRA grants a co-pay price cap for certain Medicare beneficiaries—not a holistic price cap. This difference is an important one, according to Shaina Kasper, executive director of T1 International, a grassroots nonprofit run for and by people with diabetes. 

The $35 co-pay limits monthly out-of-pocket expenses for certain people with Medicare, but it does nothing to regulate the actual list price of insulin, the initial price of a drug set by pharmaceutical manufacturers before any rebates, discounts, negotiations, or insurance kicks in. As a result, Kasper says people without Medicare, premium insurance plans, or any health care coverage are still left in the lurch. (It should be noted that the IRA initially did include a $35 co-pay cap for those with private insurance, not just Medicare recipients, but it was shot down by Republican lawmakers.)

“Our goal is an absolute price cap [and] lowering that list price of insulin to make sure that it’s affordable and accessible to all,” says Kasper. Together, Kasper says, lowered list prices and co-pay caps would impact the full spectrum of people in need, including those with private insurance, those without insurance, and those with Medicare benefits. (Even without a full price cap, however, the IRA did play an important role in pressuring all three insulin giants to announce their own price caps or reduced list prices for some insulin products—an important, if incomplete, step toward affordability.)

But affordability and accessibility aren’t always the same thing when it comes to medications. The fact that insulin and diabetes supplies need to be prescribed also means added barriers. Tracy Ramey, leader of the Ohio Insulin for All chapter and T1 International organizer, has recently helped pass an updated version of Kevin’s Law in her state, which grants pharmacists the ability to dispense an emergency supply of a chronic maintenance drug without a prescription. The law was named after 36-year-old Kevin Houdeshell, who died during the holidays in 2014 after being turned away from a pharmacy and unable to contact his doctor for an insulin refill.

The impact of Kevin’s Law is immediate—even for Ramey’s own daughter, who has Type 1 diabetes. While Ramey was between jobs and waiting for Medicaid to kick in, her daughter was still able to get her supplies, even after a prescription had run out. “I’m very proud that my daughter was able to benefit from that as well,” Ramey adds. 

Since 2016, 26 states have passed some version of Kevin’s Law, but Kasper says expanding the law is an important way to ensure equitable access to health care across the country. Taken together, these policies—universal price caps, lower list prices, and an expanded scope of practice for pharmacists—would add much-needed guardrails for people struggling to afford and access their medications.

Insulin Access on the Ground

However well crafted or impactful a potential policy may be, people urgently need insulin access here and now. To fill in the gaps, communities across the country are creating their own mutual aid networks.

“We can’t sit and wait forever for someone else to save us. It’s just not going to happen,” says Brandon Lopez, founder of the Embrace Foundation, a nonprofit, volunteer-run organization in Arizona that sends free diabetic supplies to people who need it. “Who knows, maybe a policy will pass or something will change where health care will be free, but until then it’s our job as a community to take care of each other.” 

The Embrace Foundation has its roots in Lopez’s own health care experiences. In 2017, Lopez was working full time, living without health insurance, and struggling to afford his insulin. 

“With bills, rent, cost of living, I had no money for diabetic supplies, [which] added up to almost $1,000 a month. I simply couldn’t afford it,” says Lopez, who has Type 1 diabetes. “For months I didn’t test my blood sugar once. I couldn’t afford the strips. I took insulin when I felt high and ate something when I felt low, completely in the dark. I spread out what insulin I had, skipped meals, took half doses, and reused the same bag of dull pen needles I had over and over, completely unsanitary and unsafe.”

To get by, Lopez described how he sold whatever possessions he could and spent days going from hospital to hospital, “practically begging for insulin.” Eventually, Lopez landed a better job that provided health insurance. But he continued building an ad-hoc insulin-supply-sharing network on social media, where he connected people experiencing insulin insecurity to a growing inventory of donated supplies.

In 2018, Lopez formally launched the Embrace Foundation, and nearly seven years later, says it has expanded to 19 volunteers, three storage units of supplies, and more than 2,500 people served across the country. According to Lopez, the majority of supply requests come from people who don’t qualify for insurance, college students who may have aged out of their parents’ insurance, and people who are out of work. But plenty of people with insurance still can’t afford their supplies.

“It’s either have insurance [with] a co-pay or pay [more than] $600 to live,” says Lopez. “This month we had a woman reach out that was a single mother with three children and was rationing her supplies so she could keep the power on and feed her family. We’ve set her up to where she will receive a package from us every month so that she can [have] one less thing to worry about.”

Lopez says the Embrace Foundation is meant to continue the legacy of Frederick Banting, the Canadian researcher and doctor who discovered insulin in the early 1920s. “Banting sold the patent for insulin for $1 … saying, ‘Insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world,” Lopez says. “We will always stay true to that.”

do you remember
all the times we’ve been right here
knowing exactly enough to thrive
but slowly surrendering the garden
to private cruelties, made loud

every split rock holds 
one mother bent over one precious child 
amethyst joy, ruby sacrifice
she blesses the fragrant crown
how dare you not worship?

don’t you remember
with time they always lose this war
nothing is cooler than true love
the darkness is canal and portal
and we can all be doulas

repeat after me 
crush supremacy in the palm of your hand
and then bite down on your fist
the new world is coming through you
breathe in, yes

now scream

“It does affect the dogs when they are caged like that, without getting walks, or exercise or any stimulation or any human contact,” the volunteer told NBC Los Angeles. “It’s not natural for them to live like that. It’s inhumane.”

Corea, who underwent three surgeries for the injuries she sustained in the attack, left the field after the incident, but the incident still highlights the consequences of the crowding crisis spreading through animal shelters in the U.S.—and as a geographically, culturally, and socioeconomically diverse state, California’s approach to this overcrowding crisis could be an incubator for other states facing similar issues.

“We are very overcrowded right now,” an animal control officer in Southern California who asked to remain anonymous tells YES!. “It’s resulted in a dangerous working environment, not just for staff but for the people who have to do business in the shelter, the public, the volunteers, our own animals. We’re having to jam them into cages with other animals. Sometimes there’s fights, or they’re not being cleaned as often as they should be.”

Data organization Shelter Animals Count estimates 256 shelters and rescues in California took in 391, 204 community animals in 2023, with 69,988 non-live outcomes such as euthanasia or unassisted death in care and 302,698 live outcomes, including adoption, transfer, and return to owner. The remainder are still in the care of shelters, rescues, or fosters.

Lisa Young, a veteran of animal welfare and executive director of Rescue Train, a Los Angeles–based organization, describes the current situation as “the worst I’ve ever seen.” It has been compounded by the state’s growing housing crisis, inflation of food and veterinary costs, a shortage of access to veterinary care, and the dramatic fall in spay/neuter services during the early pandemic.

A 2024 report from Hills Pet Nutrition looking at national trends found 43 percent of respondents cited costs as a concern for prospective adopters, with people making less than $75,000 annually experiencing increased financial barriers. Vet care in particular is a serious issue, according to the report, which identifies a growing number of veterinary “deserts” where care is not simply not available at any price.

“In East Valley,” a shelter Rescue Train partners with, “they have animals in crates in the hallways,” Young shares. “It’s disgusting, it’s inhumane. I’ve never seen animals in the hallways living in crates.” Young is quick to note that this is not the fault of shelter workers, who are “just here trying to clean up the mess of our community,” but is instead a symptom of how dire the issue is.

Nina Thompson, director of public relations at the San Diego Humane Society, which operates a shelter that also manages animal care services contracts from 13 cities in San Diego County, explains that overcrowding has serious consequences for shelter animals. “Any time that you have too many animals in kennels, there are disease outbreaks, and also the stress of sitting in a kennel for long periods of time increases with time.”

San Diego Humane is experiencing an uptick in upper respiratory illnesses and a rise in the number of “behavior dogs” who are not coping well with life in the kennels, especially young, large dogs with high energy who aren’t getting adequate exercise and enrichment. Length of stay for at least 100 dogs at the shelter was more than three months, and large dogs across the state and country are similarly lingering longer in shelters. Shelter Animals Count reports the median length of stay for large dogs has doubled since 2019.

Organizations such as Human Animal Support Services, founded in 2020 by Austin Pets Alive! and a coalition of animal welfare partners, propose investing resources in keeping animals out of shelters altogether. Shelter intervention programs, a relatively recent innovation in animal welfare, include pet food pantries, free and low-cost veterinary care, spay/neuter programs, help with pet deposits and landlord disputes, behavior counseling, and assistance with self-rehoming.

Models that approach animal sheltering as part of a larger community care program are working; San Diego Humane, for example, has managed to fulfill its pledge to “Stay at zero,” with no euthanasia of healthy, treatable animals. Pasadena Humane’s More Than a Shelter program has been similarly successful.

High-volume spay/neuter, which streamlines surgical processes to alter as many animals as possible while still maintaining quality, may also be a part of the solution. This approach involves coordination to keep animals constantly moving through the various stages of surgery, from initial induction to recovery. It’s particularly valuable for managing community cat populations and can be done as a mobile or pop-up event to eliminate barriers such as transport and travel.

Related community clinics such as that at Sonoma Humane can also decrease barriers to access to veterinary care; on a tour of the facility in August, staff highlighted the clinic’s critical role in keeping pets and people together by providing affordable vet care to families who might otherwise surrender their animals.

However, shelters are in critical need of more funding to reduce intake, administer these creative community programs, and safely house the animals who will inevitably need care. While there are some grant programs such as those offered by Maddie’s Fund or California for All Animals, a state-funded program administered by the University of California, Davis’ Koret Shelter Medicine Program, it hasn’t been enough to meet the need.

Increasing government contracts (which can seem large as budget line items—in San Francisco, Animal Care and Control received $10 million in the $14.6 billion 2022-2023 budget) could help shelters expand their services and capacity.

And, Young argues, more philanthropists need to open their pockets: Despite a growing awareness of the beneficial role pets play in our lives, a Giving USA report found that just 3 percent of philanthropy in 2020 went to the environment and animals, a small slice of the $471.44 billion donated by individuals, foundations, corporations, and bequests. “Of all the money donated in this country”—a nation of animal lovers with 90 million dogs and 74 million cats, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association—“and with all these foundations closing, it’s a scary time.”

Community buy-in is also key to any solution, says Lisa Kauffman, a campaign strategist at Best Friends Animal Society. She’s working on the We Are 90 for Riverside County campaign, which is pressuring county officials to improve conditions at three municipal shelters, including “one of the highest-intake shelters in the United States.” The grassroots campaign encourages residents to show up at community meetings and includes extensive Spanish-language outreach to connect with stakeholders who are sometimes overlooked.

An engaged community doesn’t just adopt animals and create more space in shelters for animals who vitally need it. It’s also more likely to foster, getting vulnerable animals such as neonates, seniors, and long-stay dogs out of the shelter and into homes where they can decompress and experience socialization. Large foster programs are especially valuable for rescues, which can serve the community without a physical shelter location. In addition to fostering, community members who volunteer also relieve pressure on underfunded, overcrowded shelters and their staff.

For California’s animals, this moment may feel bleak, but, Young says, “like any storm, it will pass.” They just need a helping hand, from lawmakers drafting policies that help animals such as AB 2216, which would restrict “no pets” housing policies, to the workers who creatively utilize resources for the animals in their care, to the volunteers who show up every day, rain or shine.

Many of us are experiencing election grief, defined by psychotherapist Pauline Boss as an “unresolved grief” that shows up in “the loss of hopes and dreams and plans that [people] thought were coming from the other candidate, a loss of certainty in the future that was what they wanted, loss of trust in the world as a safe place, loss of feelings of freedom over your own body, the loss of support for people who have lesser means than the rest of us do, the loss of support for your neighbor and people who are different from you.”

Election grief has a tendency to debilitate us, leaving us in a frozen or shutdown state. This information is worth paying attention to, especially when it is critical to stay focused and mobilized as the state of democracy is increasingly threatened. As we participate in more collective actions, we need to find places of retreat to sustain our commitments to social justice.

With their instinctive sense of community care, Filipinos in the diaspora have been co-creating places of healing and restoration. Three of these community spaces have been actively seeding and tending cultures of both rest and solidarity. Who are they, and what can we learn from them?

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Centering International Solidarity

Pinay Collection is a feminist brand with a team of 15 Filipino members from both the homeland and the diaspora. The social enterprise helps diasporic Filipinos reconnect with Filipino culture by selling merchandise, hosting educational events, and writing articles about the struggles in the motherland, including state-sanctioned violence, workers’ rights, and the complexities of faith and colonization.

Founder Jovie Galit created Pinay Collection in 2019 to “amplify [the] voices of the masses” and to “rethink [the] ways we tell stories [about Philippines-based Filipinos] that resonate with the people of the diaspora so that they [take] action.” Galit dreams of using Pinay Collection to create a more grounded form of reconnecting in which diasporic Filipinos do not neglect the struggles of the exploitation and state violence in the homeland.

“There’s so much urgency in the work,” Galit shares. “Doing this work with Pinay Collection, I’ve come to understand how activists back home [in the Philippines] do their work. I see the need to be out there [on the ground].”

Galit, who was raised in the Philippines, migrated to Canada at 19. When she relocated, she noticed some diasporic Filipinos were reclaiming Filipino culture and identity without developing an awareness about systemic issues within the Philippines.

“There’s beauty in [decolonization], [but] there’s also the privilege of being able to reflect on who we are, our identity, and our connection to Filipino culture versus Filipino people [in the Philippines] who are organizing to survive,” Galit says. “As much as it’s important to understand who we are, it’s also important for us to [turn] that understanding into mobilizing and organizing.”

Galit believes international solidarity is essential to reclaiming Filipino identity, especially for those living in North America. As the archipelago country faces incessant climate catastrophes and human rights violations, Galit says it becomes “dissonant not to address [these] real issues.” That’s the reason Pinay Collection has an emergency fund for typhoon relief as well as political prisoners, farmers, impoverished people, and other marginalized groups in the country.

Galit hopes for a time when Pinay Collection doesn’t need to exist because the work of liberation is more realized. “That means we created a more sustainable structure for community organizations to thrive or maybe that means that communities of the diaspora are really honed in doing international solidarity work with Filipinos back home.”

Ultimately, A Resting Place, the Reimagination Lab, and Pinay Collection are offering spaces that, as Rodriguez explains, are “less in the space of a resistance and dismantling an unjust system but really in the space of creatively imagining, manifesting a different kind of future.”

When I played for the first time, the feeling was transcendent. For a brief moment, the oil masquerade granted anonymity to engage in bacchanal and revelry, a direct chat back to the expectation of respectability and decorum demanded specifically from women. J’ouvert strips back the fanfare and glamor of feathered costumes, compelling participants to surrender themselves to the collective prerogative of the mas.

J’ouvert restored me. When I finished playing, I hopped into a motorboat water taxi and headed to Grenada’s Grand Anse beach. The sands were lined with people washing off themselves with water after an energizing morning of marching on the road. It was a shedding—and I reemerged feeling revived.

Connecting to the Past

Though J’ouvert is commemorated across the Caribbean—particularly in countries subjected to French colonial rule—the celebration is unique in Grenada because its participants transform into the Jab or Jab Jab character. The procession is creolized with elements inspired by African spirituality and satirical performance of pre-Lenten celebration, but playing Jab during J’ouvert also has roots in enslavement.

According to the Grenada Cultural Foundation, “[t]he Jab Jab portrays the spirit of a slave who met his [death] when he accidentally fell (or may even have been pushed by his white master) into a copper vat of boiling molasses. His ghost comes back every year during Carnival to torment his former master.”

Prior to Grenada’s emancipation from slavery in 1838, enslaved Afro-Grenadian people were referred to as devils. As an act of satire, the enslaved rubbed any substance that would blacken their skin—molasses, tar, mud, or soot—over their bodies, made helmets emulating the devil with cattle or goat horns fastened onto a construction helmet (early iterations of the helmet were made from found materials such as the large posey bowls found on plantations), and walked around with chains. The Jab turned any descriptor deemed to be transgressive—being Black, being in chains, being the devil—into a symbol of rebellion, resilience, liberation, and freedom.

Now, on J’ouvert morning, Grenadians of all ages gather right before day break—“J’ouvert” is a combination of the French words jour, which means “day,” and ouvert, which means “open”—to march through town to a percussive beat (in St. Georges, Grenada, it is often paired with sound systems) and remind themselves of who they are and what their people have overcome.

For Kered Clement, a United Kingdom–born journalist currently residing in Grenada, Jab is a structured ancestral practice. When she moved to Grenada 10 years ago, she attended J’ouvert with her cousin. But it wasn’t until she played Jab with a family friend that she realized the ritualistic nature of the procession. “There were rules I didn’t even know [when I played] with my cousin,” she says. “As Jab Jabs, we don’t laugh, we don’t smile. We’re having fun, but this is serious business.”

Outside of its ancestral heritage, J’ouvert is also accessible: Costumes aren’t required, so participants are encouraged to wear old clothing. However, as Carnival in Grenada has become more popular and attended by celebrities and influencers, the once-insular celebration is now a shared experience with those who aren’t native to the island.

Given this expansion, Clement sees the importance of reminding people that their engagement with J’ouvert derives from a structured cultural practice. She describes her process of getting ready saying, “Everyone’s in the same place. Together, we put lard on, but we don’t apply the oil yet. We take our bucket of oil down Tanteen Road where the real Jab Jab band leaves off, and that’s where we put on our oil. We march through the streets with a band. When the sun gets intense, we depart. We walk through the streets back to the same location where there’s bakes and saltfish waiting for us.”

Clement’s reverence for J’ouvert extends to what she wears on the road. This year, the reigning Queen of the Jab, Temptress, released the song “Crocus Bag,” whose title references a burlap sack historically used throughout the Caribbean. Clement also decided to pay homage to the textile this year. “I’m gonna get a Grenadian designer [named] Ali Creations to design me a crocus bag dress,” she says. “Initially, [wearing the dress] was about the song and doing something different, but a lot of people messaged me and said, ‘Wow, I feel like you brought back the culture and the uniqueness.’”

For this year’s Spicemas, Grenadian band ORO Luxury also created a costume, Mecca, inspired by Grenada’s connection to Africa, Jab, and the Black women who play it. Nevlyn John, a representative with ORO, says Mecca is indicative of “the strength of women, and the appreciation of our African heritage and [its] influence in our Carnival and our society. So, when we speak about [Mecca] being the ‘queen of queens,’ it is about celebrating our womanhood where the Blackness and authenticity stems from.”

In the Land of 100,000 Jabs

Though J’ouvert’s visual economy of imagery is dominated by men, women also take part in the celebration. For Black women who play Jab, there are a variety of benefits that contribute to their overall cultural, mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual wellness. “When I talk to folks about Jab Jab, they felt that spiritual connection even more deeply,” says Sherine Andreine Powerful, DrPH. “It recruits so many different emotions for people that you can’t help but feel very present and even more connected in that moment.”

For her doctoral thesis, Dr. Powerful explored how the quarantine impacted the ability to play mas and what this meant for Caribbean people in the region and the broader diaspora. Ninety percent of her research participants were Black women who described their involvement as a “collective social self-care ritual,” she shares. “[Playing Jab mas] provides a space for catharsis, a space for joy, a space for release and space for healing.”

After Saharrah Green, who was born in Grenada, moved to Toronto at the onset of COVID-19 to pursue a degree, she felt disconnected from J’ouvert. But playing J’ouvert in 2024 helped her re-ground herself in her heritage. “You really get a chance to just be free,” she says. “I don’t have to think. I just get to be myself. I get to just be home, allow myself to fully be in that moment around people that truly get me.”

Tamika Nelson, who is based in the United Kingdom, agrees. She began playing J’ouvert when she was around 13. Now, she describes her participation in J’ouvert as a way to improve her mental health. “Playing mas, no one cares really what you look like,” she says. “You just go out there to have a great time. … You always find like-minded people on the road and without even thinking, you’re in a better mental state.” 

For Black women, Jab is something to look forward to that embraces body positivity. It is also an opportunity to reconnect with heritage or continue Caribbean cultural practices that celebrate individual expression. 

When Black women play Jab, it offers both great comfort and great power—an opportunity to free themselves. “Our ancestors have these healing practices that combine body, mind, and spirit,” Dr. Powerful concludes. “That connection has never been severed. From what I’ve experienced … Carnival brings us back to that ancestral body, mind, and spirit are all connected. People feel all of that on the road.”

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 12:23 p.m. PT on December 9, 2024, to update the honorific for Sherine Andreine Powerful, DrPH and correct the spelling of Kered Clement’s name. Read our corrections policy here. 

Just meters away stands a library where several men either watch an educational program on television or immerse themselves in books. In a nearby carpentry workshop, three men work on furniture and model ships, while another room serves as a textile workshop. 

These diverse activities are part of Liberté, a cooperative association operating within Unit Number 15 of the maximum security complex of Batán, located in Mar del Plata, Argentina. This penitentiary facility houses approximately 1,600 inmates. But many individuals here, deprived of their liberty, have found a way to reclaim some for themselves. 

At first glance, the entrance to Liberté may appear to be just another barred gate within the prison. Yet on the other side of this barrier, things feel distinctly different.

“When we cross that gate, we forget we are in a prison. We feel free,” says Ariel, who works in the textile workshop. (Incarcerated individuals are being identified by their first names only, for legal reasons.) 

This sentiment is common among the 80-some men who make up Liberté today. They don’t define themselves as prisoners. Instead, through work, education, sports, and cultural activities, they are people preparing to integrate into society.

“If the punitive model of punishment worked, it might be worth pursuing,” says Xavier Aguirreal, who founded Liberté. “But what truly works is restorative justice.” 

A Different Kind of Opportunity

“In prison, you either become dependent or beg,” says Aguirreal, 55, who is known to everyone as Pampa. “You come in with a couple of pairs of shoes and a shirt, but when those wear out, you cannot obtain new ones unless a family member or an NGO provides them. I didn’t want that for myself,” he recalls. So in 2014, two years after arriving at Batán, he asked permission from the Penitentiary Service to launch an entrepreneurial initiative. 

The head of the Work Department told Pampa that he needed at least two people to start, so he and his cellmate made a proposal to bring in materials and produce something that they could then sell outside the prison. “We started manufacturing wall clocks,” Pampa says.

According to official statistics, last year less than half of people incarcerated in Argentina were involved in an educational program. Only a third had paid work in prison. 

But, says Diana Márquez, a lawyer and the coordinator of Víctimas por la Paz, “Most prisoners want to leave their cells and desire to work or study.  The problem is that in prison there are very few educational options available—mostly just elementary school—and nearly no job opportunities, many of which are undignified.” 

The Víctimas por la Paz association was created by people who were affected by crimes and now works to promote restorative justice. This organization has supported Liberté since 2017, thanks to Judge Mario Juliano, who believed that model was the best route to restoration. 

Liberté operates on a self-management model, where each participant is responsible for doing their own work to earn their own money. “This fosters autonomy and self-esteem, essential values for successful integration into society,” Pampa explains. 

Liberté has launched various work projects, including leatherwork, carpentry, blacksmithing, radio programming, baking, beekeeping, and organic gardening workshops. There is even a small grocery store where incarcerated people can purchase their food and a restaurant named Punto de Paz. The meals prepared in Liberté’s kitchen have received official permission from the Buenos Aires government to be sold in supermarkets outside the prison. 

In addition to these ventures, Liberté has developed educational, cultural, and sports programs—such as soccer and karate—to support personal growth and promote teamwork. 

“Liberté offers something broader than just a single workshop or course. That’s its richness: Our lives consist of various interests and needs. Everyone has different preferences, and when I enter Liberté, it feels like a small neighborhood with diverse activities,” Márquez says.

An Effective Model for Change

“If you deprive someone of their rights for decades, what do you think they learn?” Pampa asks. “That human rights don’t exist.”

There are no official statistics regarding recidivism in Argentina. However, the Latin American Center for Studies on Insecurity and Violence at the Tres de Febrero National University estimates that seven out of 10 individuals who regain their freedom commit a crime within the first year after leaving prison.

“Prison should not be a place of punishment but of restoration. When we leave, we should be seen as people like anyone else—not as those deprived of their rights.”

Over the past 10 years, more than 1,000 people incarcerated at Batán have participated in Liberté. Of those, 104 have been released—none of whom have reoffended.

Moreover, Liberté’s vision of self-restoration involves recognizing mistakes and addressing the harm caused by those actions. This is why they created the Victim Support Fund: They donate part of their grocery earnings to organizations that assist victims of crimes. 

“Liberté has changed my life,” says Omar during a break in his carpentry work. While at Batán, he got married in a ceremony at Punto de Paz. “I’ve learned to value things I previously overlooked,” he says. “All of this will help me in the outside world.”

“Here, I can do things like I would outside; I don’t feel like a prisoner,” says Roberto, the current coordinator of Liberté. Before arriving at Batán four years ago, he worked as a cook and played soccer for a club. Now, he cooks in Liberté’s kitchen and coordinates a soccer team. He has learned new recipes and how to manage with limited kitchen utensils. “All of this will help me in the future; otherwise, it would just be wasted time in jail.”

More than that, Roberto says he has experienced personal growth that is not always available in the environments in which people grow up. “Liberté gives us the chance to depend on ourselves and appreciate every little thing. Outside, I used to be more selfish; here, I’ve learned about solidarity,” he says.

Carlitos shares a similar sentiment. He coordinates the library, which houses more than 5,000 books and offers opportunities for discussions and screenings of educational films. “Outside, we didn’t learn to love or respect one another or how to share. Here in Liberté, we’ve come to understand that dialogue through love is essential.”

Punishment vs. Restorative Justice

Marcelo spent the day selling religious ornaments in Mar del Plata. After work, he visits the homeless to distribute food with a Christian group. After that, he’ll travel to La Plata to visit his mother.

His life was very different two years ago when he was still at Batán. He arrived with mental health issues that led him to contemplate suicide. For a time, he felt guilty and worthless.

One day, Pampa invited Marcelo to lunch with other Liberté members and brought him a plate of burgers with French fries. “I started to cry. I couldn’t remember the last time I had eaten something like that,” Marcelo recalls. “I felt I was regaining my dignity.”

An engineer and teacher, Marcelo was drawn to Liberté by its library. He soon began participating in various cooperative activities, including restoring an old laundry facility into the current Liberté space. Eventually he became the cooperative’s treasurer, managing the accounts for Liberté’s grocery store. This role gave him a sense of worth.

“When my daughter and son visited me, they didn’t have to bring food for us to share. I could offer them a cake made by one of Liberté’s bakers or invite them to drink mate with my own yerba,” Marcelo says, referring to the traditional infused beverage that holds great cultural significance in Argentina. “I don’t know what would have become of me if I had spent all my time in the pavilion.”

That sentiment is shared. “Prison reinforces resentment and hatred, but Liberté fosters courage and helps us overcome those feelings,” explains Michael, a member of Liberté who runs the radio program. “In Liberté, you stop viewing prisoners as mere characters from movies; instead, you see them as individuals with new possibilities who can even find joy within prison walls. Because without joy, how can you move forward and experience change?”

Broader Cultural Change

Liberté’s innovative approach encourages a fundamental shift in how society at large perceives incarceration. To promote this model, Liberté launched a diploma program three years ago in collaboration with the Mar del Plata National University that focuses on restorative justice, social integration, and peaceful coexistence within prison contexts. The program is open to anyone who is directly or indirectly linked to the prison environment—from detainees to prison officers, as well as students and professionals in law, social work, and psychology. 

The program is conducted online using platforms like Zoom and a virtual campus, along with YouTube. Since the pandemic, people incarcerated in Buenos Aires Province have been allowed to use cell phones, which has also facilitated the program’s operation. The curriculum combines theory classes with practical workshops and activities, equipping participants with tools to understand and transform the penal system while promoting a vision of justice rooted in care, dignity, and reconciliation.

The program was initially designed for 100 students but has attracted more than 8,000 participants. “Preliminary data indicate changes in perceptions among those who held prejudices and stigmas. They have broadened their horizons by understanding the realities of prisoners and now see solutions as a collective effort,” stated Claudia Perlo from the Rosario Institute for Research in Educational Sciences in a 2023 interview with RED/ACCIÓN. She highlights Liberté as a model for policymakers regarding prison reform. And Liberté continues to innovate, now developing a Popular University based on a German model. 

Márquez attests to the impact of these programs: “Liberté has made me feel free too. It helps me shed my prejudices. When I come here, I see people—not prisoners or inmates.”

Ongoing Challenges

Despite ongoing legal blocks and bureaucratic hurdles thrown at them by the Penitentiary Service, Liberté persists. The group achieved legal status as a cooperative in 2021. “Every single piece of paperwork is difficult. For example, to create a bank account, a bank manager had to visit the prison, which took considerable time and goodwill,” Pampa explains. But the hard work is paying off.

“In 2021, the head of the Penitentiary Service told me he had received many calls from various places interested in replicating our self-managed model,” Pampa recalls. Prisons in Neuquén in southern Argentina and Rosario and Victoria in the north have expressed interest in Liberté’s work. Last year, Liberté began expanding its efforts into a prison in Rio Grande, Tierra del Fuego—the southernmost province in the country.

“We are convinced that ours is not the only model or even the best one. But it’s working, and we want to share it,” Pampa says. “If we do that, human rights and dignity will emerge.”

Sophomore Sophia Bugarim remembers taking the survey. To the first question—“Do you experience any of these climate emotions?”—Bugarim answered “fear.” The next question narrowed down the four core emotions into more specifics. This time Bugarim selected “worry.” 

“I feel worried that one day I’ll be in a situation where I have to leave my house, and I’ll come back and have no idea what it will look like,” says Bugarim, who recalled her survey answers on an October day when school had been canceled due to the possibility of storm water surge and high winds. While Miami was not in Hurricane Milton’s path, Bugarim wonders how soon the city will be in the path of another storm. “These storms are getting worse. There was a hurricane last week in Tallahassee. Next week gets me worried. It’s very unpredictable.”

Sebastian Navarro, who manned the table as sustainability ambassador during his senior year, thinks students at Maritime and Science Technical Academy probably learn about climate change more than others in the district due to the school’s focus on maritime sciences. He says students visit the reefs just offshore from the beachside school. But that classwork is focused on cognitive learning, not discussion about feelings. 

On the climate emotions survey, when given options for what worries them most about climate change, about one-third of students said sea level rise. Another third said biodiversity loss and coral bleaching. 

Sarah Newman, executive director of the Climate Mental Health Network, says climate change adds another layer of mental health risk for youth and can deepen existing inequities. In 2021, Newman founded the Network to provide solutions beyond traditional therapy, which can be cost-prohibitive and faces ongoing provider shortages. 

She sees the climate emotions wheel as a supplement to mental health therapy and believes schools are a key place to address mental health amid a changing climate. This is a stark contrast with the conservative Project 2025, which aims to erase climate change from public education and the federal government entirely. Newman sees the importance in grassroots solutions to support individuals and communities impacted by the changing climate, regardless of what’s happening in Washington, D.C. 

“Having climate anxiety is a normal response to the climate crisis, so if you respond to what is a societal issue with an individual approach, you’re isolating someone’s experience to a clinical setting,” she says. “Because it’s a collective experience, the process of navigating our climate emotions, managing them, and healing needs to be done in community with others.” 

A New Tool

Multiple reports suggest there is plenty of room for improvement to deepen climate content across subjects and add more social and emotional learning in public schools in the United States. On the National Center for Science Education’s 2020 report card, Florida received a D for its lack of climate change content in state science standards. The center graded 20 states at no higher than a C+, while 21 states, which all use the Next Generation Science Standards, received a B+.

Then in 2022, the North American Association for Environmental Education found only 37% of states included climate change in one subject in addition to science (usually social studies), and only 10% of climate change content addressed the socio-emotional learning dimensions of the crisis.

A 2023 report led by the American Psychological Association and others concurs that more school-based and health-system solutions are needed. Newman sees the climate emotions wheel as a tool that educators everywhere can begin using now. It’s a bottom-up approach that can skirt the obstacles being thrown up in institutions and governments at all levels.

Finnish environmental theologian Panu Pihkala, who popularized the idea that “climate emotions” is a more useful term than “climate anxiety,” consulted with the Climate Mental Health Network to create the climate emotions wheel. It is now available in 30 languages, including Spanish, Kiswahili, and Bengali, and used in a variety of settings.

“Everything about the school day is a learning experience. It’s not just the curriculum being directed by the teacher,” said Michele Drucker, who heads the Miami-Dade County Council Parent Teacher Association environmental committee.

Drucker also ran a sustainability ambassador program in local high schools, which Navarro completed during his lunch hours. Navarro invited students to enter a drawing for completing climate actions such as bringing a reusable water bottle, using share tables for uneaten food at lunch, and eliminating single-use plastics. This is also where Navarro shared the climate emotions wheel, which he says received a lot of engagement and seemed to bump up participation in the weeks that followed.

Navarro says the wheel helped generate hallway conversations about climate, too, as peers asked each other: “Which emoji are you?”

Climate Emotions in the Classroom

In other schools, teachers are adding the climate emotions wheel to their coursework.  

“One of the biggest problems with climate education is not a lack of knowledge,” says Kimberly Williams, a science teacher at Smithtown High School West on Long Island in New York. She began integrating emotional support into her climate change units a few years ago. She says her classes would start the year “discouraged and apathetic,” and that “it’s easy for the students to feel ‘there’s nothing I can do, so I should do nothing.’”

Williams tasked her students with using the paint tool on a tablet to shade portions in a circle representing the degree to which they were feeling a climate emotion. A guide then helped them describe their emotions and evaluate their own strengths and possible contributions to climate solutions.

Williams concedes that most science teachers do not include this kind of social and emotional learning into their lessons: “They don’t see the two as interwoven, and I don’t see the two as something you can separate.”

Williams says in her district, most teachers only “dance around the subject” in an effort to avoid the politics of climate change. To her, that indicates that teachers aren’t connecting it to students’ lives. “They’re showing a graph,” not saying, “‘Why do you think that is?’ or ‘What we can do about it?’”

In nearby New York City, 52% of teachers in a survey said they teach about climate change, but most only dedicate a few hours per year. A recent state bill, which died at the end of the 2024 legislative session, would have mandated that all grades and subject matters include climate.

This bill would have addressed mental health, as well, said Elissa Teles Muñoz, the K–12 programming manager for the Climate Mental Health Network, at a recent Climate Week NYC panel. 

“When there is climate education … it does need to include safeguards for youth mental health,” said Muñoz, who helped write the bill with the National Wildlife Federation. “It’s not responsible to drop a bomb on a child’s brain.”

Growing Support From the Grassroots

The climate emotions wheel relies on grassroots leaders—teachers, parents, or others—to find ways to implement it, which may limit its reach and impact.

Some teachers may not feel supported to include the exercise. Susan Clayton, a conservation psychologist who studies K–12 climate education, considered teacher surveys alongside local politics. She found that teachers from states where school or government leaders oppose climate education felt more anxious. For example, the 7% of teachers in Clayton’s sample who were from Florida reported significantly higher levels of climate anxiety.

But Clayton found that when teachers perceived parental support for climate education, they were more likely to talk to students about climate emotions. 

In Miami-Dade public schools, Drucker is bolstered by how the PTA can bypass some state or district politics with grassroots action at schools. She advocated for years for systems-level climate action, though Florida schools lack state support for fully embracing climate action. And that obstacle is only getting worse: Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill this spring that strikes the phrase “climate change” from state law entirely.

Newman also believes there’s power in hyperlocal action. One of the climate emotions wheel’s strengths may be that it empowers students. 

For Williams’ part, she includes the climate emotions exercise to help students move toward action. At the end of her courses, she asks students to complete the survey again and asks what they would modify from their earlier responses. One student updated the colors in the wheel and said she felt a little more empowered to take her own actions once she wrote them down.

Navarro says he is still working through climate emotions, but he feels encouraged by peer support in the environmental clubs at his school. “You have the opportunity to advocate for different causes,” he says. Recently, students acted on their concerns by advocating for and landing the district electric buses. Navarro says it feels good to know that “you’re actually making a difference.”

This is Patrick Blindauer’s last puzzle for YES! as he moves on to new projects. We would like to thank Patrick for all the engaging and thoughtful puzzles he’s contributed since our Spring 2018 issue. 

After the Dull Knife Battle in November 1876, a society of Cheyenne men sat down and documented their account of the events on a buffalo hide or robe—the traditional medium on which my ancestors told stories and kept records. The buffalo hide is where they memorialized important moments in the Tribe’s history, as well as their own personal achievements. And they did so using pigments they created from their environment with ingredients like ash, soils, berries, and plants.

The Dull Knife hide was kept in a camp at the foothills of the Bighorn Mountains. But this camp was a major target for the United States Cavalry, which was still in search of those tribes involved in the Battle of the Little Bighorn, which had taken place in June 1876 and left the U.S. military sorely defeated.

After scouts reported the camp’s whereabouts, the cavalry ambushed it. The Cheyennes put up a good fight but eventually fled deeper into the Bighorn Mountains in freezing conditions. As the cavalry raided the now-empty camp, a soldier stole the painted buffalo hide out of a tipi. And thus the beloved hide, and the story it told, began its journey away from its people.

Heartbreakingly, this kind of theft was all too common for us. It was part of the settler-colonialist effort to erase us from our homelands—and erase us altogether. Oftentimes when sacred objects were taken from camps, they were locked in private collections with no way to track or find them. Many were never seen again, and the Cheyennes had mourned the loss of this buffalo hide and accepted its fate to be gone forever. But after more than 100 years, this hide was once again seen by the descendants of the people from which it came.

On the 146th anniversary of the battle, the unveiling and honoring of this historical object took place at the Brinton Museum in northern Wyoming. Tribal Members and the Northern Cheyenne Tribal Historic Preservation Office were invited to view it. Many eyes filled with tears as our traditional honor songs filled the room. The sacred objects that surrounded us, caged in glass, hummed in their display cases. They, too, were excited to be a part of this honoring; it’s not everyday we as Indigenous people get to practice our ceremonies for pieces put into institutions. This was a raw and powerful experience for everyone and everything involved.

At this moment, in the presence of it all, I felt the importance of keeping our hide-painting tradition alive. I understood the impact this form of storytelling has on my own culture and on those who experience it from near and far. Although this painted retelling of the Dull Knife Battle now hangs in another non-Indigenous collection, it is closer to home than it’s ever been, and relatives are able to view it freely.

And so, in the winter of 2023, I began my renaissance of buffalo hide paintings, not far from where the Dull Knife robe was painted nearly 150 years earlier.

As a storyteller and an artist, I have painted with many different media before, on canvas, ledger paper, felt cowboy hats, and more. I had never painted on something like a tanned buffalo hide, though. Plastic paints like acrylics simply didn’t stick to the surface. Oil paints bled and left dark spots. This required me to use trial and error, as well as asking elders, scouring the internet, and reading historical books to figure out the best way to use modern materials for such a traditional technique.

To practice, I started with a vintage elk hide, which I hoped would behave similarly to buffalo, but was much easier to source. Black, white, blue, red, and yellow pigments sat in small vibrant piles of powder on my palette. While I wasn’t able to source everything the way my ancestors had, I gathered materials from far and wide to bring these pieces to life. Slowly, I began to add water and buffalo fat, mixing them with the powders until the consistency was smooth and even. The thinner the paint was, I found, the easier it was to push it across the surface of the hide.

I hung the elk hide from the wall, tacked along the top and pulled taut by gravity. I sprayed a layer of water and watched as the hide went from a bright off-white to a dark tan. Spraying the hide opens the skin’s pores and makes the painting process much easier. After a deep breath to steady my hand, I began with my first paint stroke. The nerves, the worry, and all other thoughts in my head went silent. I could feel my ancestors guiding my hands as I worked the earth pigments into the tanned hide. Almost like being in a trance, I brought paint to hide without feeling the passage of time, and the portrait of a woman appeared in front of me. She was an Arapaho/Cheyenne woman warrior who gave me the confidence that the vision I was seeing in my head was achievable in real life.

After I finished the elk hide, I was ready to move on to the much larger buffalo hide that was patiently waiting its turn to become a part of my story, the story of a modern Indigenous artist. I already knew who I wanted to paint next: I could see in my mind’s eye the contrasts of bright red and electric blue against neutral black and white, and the tan of the unpainted skin of the hide.

I chose to paint an Apsáalooke (Crow) medicine woman by the name of Pretty Shield. A strong matriarch revered for her knowledge of medicinal plants, Pretty Shield had influence that reached far beyond her own tribe. I chose to render her in black-and-white natural pigments, representing a time when reservations were fresh and photographers were documenting the foreign feelings throughout Indian Country in black and white.

Rising above her is a halo of medicinal plants. I chose to represent this aspect of her work in contemporary color to show its continued relevance and vitality in modern times.

Each aspect of the hide represents a different generation of storytelling and art. The first generation is the hide itself, the traditional material. The second generation is the black-and-white photography that captured the first accounts of reservation life. The third generation is the contemporary style of bright colors and stylized plants.

My own love for medicinal plants comes from another matriarchal figure in my life: my mother. Bringing wellness back to the reservation through healers, medicinal plants, and creative outlets, she provided opportunities for people to help themselves, much like Pretty Shield. These two women reflect each other’s energy and inspire me to see the medicine women of today.

Pretty Shield is the first in a collection of women I plan to pay tribute to with my paint. Each of them has impacted their Plains Tribe communities with their inspiring accomplishments and gifts. I want to honor our shared stories by continuing to push the boundaries of traditional materials and contemporary ideas. I want to uplift the generations surrounding me to live in their medicine, to live out their dreams, and to live how our ancestors dreamed for us.

While enslaved people were intentionally kept illiterate, the abolitionist movement still treated these pamphlets—and antislavery newspapers—as signposts, signaling that even amid their suffering, enslaved people were being fought for. Their human condition wasn’t being disregarded in favor of profit; instead, there was a growing movement advocating for their freedom and for their right to lead a self-determined life. 

In her new book, We Will Rest!: The Art of Escape, Tricia Hersey calls upon some of these same abolitionist tools, including pamphlets, hymnals, poetry, and imagery, to convey a similarly urgent message: If we do not take rest seriously and divorce ourselves from capitalism, we will die much sooner than we should. While that might feel alarmist, it’s a message Hersey has been conveying for years as the shepherd of the Nap Ministry. The “Nap Bishop” uses her own life as a model for how we can collectively escape “grind culture” and embrace rest as a spiritual practice. 

“I thought I would die,” Hersey writes in We Will Rest!, an unconventional manifesto and meditation about how she learned to care for herself in a world that doesn’t allow us to slow down. “I thought the exhaustion of capitalism would crush me. Rest saved my life.” As Hersey often reminds us: Rest is a matter of life and death. 

Rest is essential to our long-term survival as individuals and a collective. Birthing a creative renaissance requires rest that isn’t reliant on productivity. Hersey’s book calls upon our ancestors, including Harriet Tubman, the Underground Railroad conductor who helped people escape enslavement, to become escape artists ourselves—to help unchain our imaginations from the bounds of capitalism and embrace new possibilities. “Anyone in this culture who believes and feels they are enough right now has begun the escape artist transformation,” Hersey writes. “To know in the deepest parts of your soul that your birth grants you divinity, rest, care, and power is a seed planted in fertile ground.” 

Much like those abolitionist pamphlets, We Will Rest! serves as a guidepost for those who seek rest but are unsure if it’s available to them. The book begins with a thought-provoking question: “How do you find rest in a capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal, ableist system?” This system teaches us that rest must be earned through work, and received with humble gratitude. But Hersey offers an alternative: If we become “escape artists” or “tricksters” who defy systems that discourage us from rest, then we can prioritize our needs. 

For Black people, in particular, Hersey accurately argues that rest is our ancestral inheritance and must be protected at all costs. “The first step for morphing into an escape artist is belief,” she writes. “You must believe you have the power to refuse. You must believe you have been gifted with everything necessary. You must be a trickster. No matter what, you must not show fear. We are abundant.” 

Once we believe we’re entitled to rest and our ancestors have paved the way for us to claim this birthright, then we must imagine the life we desire for ourselves. “Create community,” Hersey writes. “Be community. Community care can seem impossible when you are exhausted. It is possible.” It is only through crafting this community— day by day, moment by moment, and person to person—that change can come. 

It’s not as complicated as we might make it out to be. The world we imagine will come to us through silence, through daydreaming, and through unwavering belief. “Every day, morning or night, or whenever you can steal away, find silence,” she writes. “Even if for only a few minutes.” 

We don’t need to have it all figured out to begin this personal and collective rest revolution. “Capitalism has a choke hold over our lives right now,” Hersey writes. “The next second, the next minute, the next hour, is ours to refuse the grind. We can craft and build temporary spaces of joy and freedom here now.” 

Like those abolitionist pamphlets, We Will Rest! offers encouragement in times of uncertainty—a reminder of our fundamental humanity, and affirms the truth that rest is ours for the taking. And we’ve already done all we need to do to “deserve” the freedom it brings. 

When I turned 18, one of my proudest moments was completing my voter registration application. I grew up in a politically aware household. My grandma, who was raised with Jim Crow laws, discussed the importance of voting and being politically informed with me from a young age. She grew up in a time where voting was not a right extended to Black people, especially those living in the South, as she was. She instilled that history in me.

My elders wanted me to be an informed voter and to know more than just the names on the ballot. I also knew which issues I cared about and where candidates stood on those issues. As I developed my own understanding of the world and the societal and political issues that mattered to me, being informed was imperative so I knew which candidates aligned or misaligned with the world I hoped to see and be a part of. 

I voted in my first presidential election in 2004. During that time, the U.S. was embroiled in wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, so I would attend campus events to better understand the concurrent conflicts and how we came to be at war to begin with. As I learned more about Islamophobia and colonialism, I began questioning our country’s role around the world.

Those events, coupled with the classes I was taking in African American Studies, broadened my worldview, allowing me to better understand how the U.S. interacts with other countries, especially those in the Middle East and Africa, and how political propaganda skews our collective perspective. I was already liberal about the “controversial” issues of that time, including supporting LGBTQ rights, but now my rose-colored glasses were off. I was no longer buying into the propaganda that the United States is the “greatest nation on Earth,” so I knew I would be more prepared when the next election rolled around.

In January 2008, I learned about a Black man who was running against Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. I didn’t know much about him, but I knew he was gaining attention among the other students on campus. When he planned a visit to my alma mater, I knew I had to attend. 

I had no idea I would be wowed by then Senator Barack Obama. I was mesmerized by his charisma, his intelligence, and his ability to work the crowd as he explained how his background led him to run for president. By the time the event concluded, I knew if he secured the Democratic nomination, I would be voting for him. I wasn’t the only person excited by Obama’s potential; my elders, all of whom were widows, never thought they’d see the day a Black man could be elected as president.

I haven’t been enamored by a candidate since Obama’s first presidential election. He imbued me with a sense of hope after living through George W. Bush’s disheartening presidency. We were electrified. And yet, the political veil I’d begun removing during Bush’s presidency came completely off during Obama’s tenure.

I began organizing in 2013 around policies that impacted the lives of disabled people and, more specifically, disabled people of color, including police violence, which disproportionately impacts disabled people. Through that organizing, I learned that the “trainings” police departments were using to better understand disability weren’t stopping them from harming and killing us, though these trainings were being heralded as “groundbreaking.” 

I came to better understand that laws that should protect disabled people are in desperate need of an overhaul in order to be truly significant in the times we lived in. All of these truths hit me and kept me from being omplacent with the mere presence of a Black president; I want a president that fully supports the people who do and don’t look like me.

“When you know better, you do better” has been a guiding light in my politics, but now, I know when we know better, we demand better. As I entered my 30s, my political understanding was not just shaped by my worldview but also by those I was now in community with. Finding and learning about candidates throughout the country who not just cared about the issues that mattered to me but had a strong track record of supporting them became pronounced. This view was the reason I dived deeper in supporting candidates whose values and politics aligned with mine.  

In 2020, I had the opportunity to be a consultant on the disability policy plan for Senator Elizabeth Warren’s presidential run. Being a part of the movement to ensure every Democratic candidate that election cycle had a disability policy plan reignited my commitment to connecting with candidates who don’t overlook disabled people and figuring out what accountability looks like for me as a voter.

Now, as we face another presidential election, the awakening of Gen Z, many of whom are voting in their first election, has given me an extra boost of energy. Gen Z’s excitement is infectious. Even as they are watching a Black and Indian woman running for the most coveted position, they’re not losing sight of the issues that matter most to them—a reminder to me and others that we can and should demand better from our elected officials.

Nothing is perfect, and it never will be. But this election is pivotal for people in the United States and abroad. Every position on the ballot matters—school boards, city councils, state representatives—and it’s on us to use our votes to push for the causes we’re passionate about. As voters, we must remember that whoever is in office works for us; if we don’t like what they’re doing, then we can vote them out when their term is up. Gen Z is learning this reality and voting for the future they deserve to have, including one without genocide and without gun violence.

I hope Gen Z knows their presence at the polls matters and their work doesn’t end after they’ve dropped off their ballots. We the people have the ultimate power, and it is critical to remember that the government is much bigger than the White House. Know who the treasurer, sheriff, and coroner of your city is—it’s just as critical as knowing who the president is. Learn what policies are being enacted and blocked that will either improve or hinder the quality of life for yourself and those more marginalized than you. You are the adults now, in charge of ensuring Gen Alpha and the generation after them will live in a world where their rights are protected.  

And, most of all, keep that hopeful energy. Don’t dive deeper into the belly of despair. Hope and joy are our birthrights as humans to hold onto and find when we need them, and they are essential elements when organizing for the world we desire to live in. Use history as a guide. Even amid the most unimaginable circumstances, people still found ways to push forward, build community, and fight for a more just world.

If we don’t believe things can and should be better, then what will motivate us to not back down when beaten down (literally or metaphorically)? Every movement has had people who believe, are hopeful, and find joy among each other—and we need that in this moment, no matter who is elected president. Having hope is not a sign of disillusionment; it’s a reminder that every storm eventually runs out of rain. While we are in a storm right now with so much at stake, let us all do our part to demand more so that when this storm breaks, we will not be more broken. We’ll be as strong as we can be. 

Meanwhile, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance seem to be recognizing that a campaign whose gendered messaging has consisted almost entirely of overt misogyny is not doing them any favors with women voters. The last few weeks have seen the Republican ticket making a host of promises to women: to “protect” them, to give them “choices” that will help them withstand “cultural pressure,” and to ensure a world where they will “no longer have anxiety.” 

This women-specific messaging from Trump and Vance reflects an important shift in our political culture. Feminism has achieved an unprecedented level of popularity. In a time when 61% of women in the United States identify as feminists, it has become difficult to reach women without making some kind of claim about understanding their plight.

Yet Trump and Vance—who oppose abortion rights, have no plans to raise the federal minimum wage, and who seem to think tariffs will solve the nation’s childcare crisis—cannot present themselves as advocates for women without undermining their own policy positions. Yet they are now addressing what have traditionally been thought of as feminist issues, such as sexual assault, Title IX, and the struggles of moms. Their gloss on the issues is, unsurprisingly, racist, transphobic, and indifferent to economic inequality. But they seem to be banking on the idea that elite women will mistake the candidates’ investments in oppressive systems with investments in the fate of women.

There is a preexisting reservoir of arguments available to help Republicans accomplish this confusion, and it comes from a surprising place: from within feminism. As I argue in my new book, Faux Feminism: Why We Fall for White Feminism and How We Can Stop (Beacon Press, October 2024), feminism has always had many strands within it, and some of these have sought to advance the interests of privileged women at the expense of less privileged ones.

Trump has, in recent weeks, repeated the message that he will be women’s protector. This position has been roundly criticized for being condescending to women, and for being creepy coming from an alleged rapist. But less has been said about which women Trump and his surrogates claim to be protecting, and whom he claims to be protecting them from. 

Trump’s original protector comments were embedded within a set of dog whistles about men of color. His specific promise was to make (presumably white) women feel “safe at the border” and on “city streets.”

This is part of a longer-running theme in which Trump has repeatedly attempted to associate rape with Latinx and undocumented people, in spite of the fact that the prevalence of sexual assault is high among all racial and ethnic groups, and in spite of the fact that many rapes of migrant women are perpetrated by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol. 

This strategy of associating Black and Brown men with rape also has a longer history within white feminism. Feminists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries actively argued that “other” men’s treatment of women was a reason that countries in the Global South need to be colonized. The dominant feminist response to rape in the U.S. until quite recently was what is known as “carceral feminism,” an approach that proposes widening the reach of a racist criminal justice system as the solution to gender-based violence.

Trump’s and Vance’s borrowings from white feminism extend to another domain in which they are using the language of “protection”: women’s sports. Vance recently claimed that excluding trans women in sports would prevent his daughter from being “brutalized,” repeating a false image of the trans woman as a violator of women’s “safe spaces.” This concept has recently resurged since its initial popularity in feminist separatist circles in the 1970s. Feminists of color were vocally critical of the idea of “safe spaces” at the time, because it assumed that there was one way to be a woman—usually, implicitly, the white way.  

Vance’s recent rhetoric around family and childcare draws on another, “softer” side of white feminism. The sarcastic tone of his “childless cat ladies” comments and his participation in banter about the “whole purpose of the postmenopausal female” seems to have vanished, replaced with a man who wants to defend moms from “cultural pressure” and judgment, and instead give them “choices.”

The idea that feminists are enemies of stay-at-home moms has its roots in the “mommy wars” of the 1990s. Conservatives of the time managed to block feminist efforts to secure free childcare by portraying the feminist as a judgmental career woman who looked down her nose at motherhood. 

The legacy of this period endures in the popular feminist claim that the aim of feminism is to respect individual women’s choices—that women should be able to make decisions about their lives without fear of judgment. Yet a feminism focused on non-judgment continues to serve only the most privileged women, since the “choice” not to work outside the home has only ever been available to the well-off. Across a range of issues—childcare, abortion, and sexual harassment—what women actually need is not the false guise of options, but also material support.

Whether these strategies of appealing to privileged women will win Trump and Vance the election remains to be seen. But the lessons from these appropriations of seemingly feminist arguments extend far beyond what happens this November. Unless we achieve greater moral clarity about the goals of feminism, it will remain easy for privileged women to confuse their interests with the interests of women and gender-expansive people as a group.

Fortunately for feminists, arriving at this clarity does not have to mean starting from scratch. White feminism, and its sister ideologies such as neoliberal feminism and femonationalism, have never been the only games in town. These ideologies, I argue in the book, are united by an understanding of feminism as a movement to increase women’s individual freedom. 

But feminism should really be understood in the way bell hooks famously described it in 1984—as a movement against oppression. Oppression is not the same thing as restrictions on what individual women can do; it is a set of social structures that brings down women as a group. It is only by reclaiming this heart of feminism that we can fight against the proliferation of faux feminisms that serve the interests of the powerful.

Let me make it clear at the outset that this is a family affair; the whales about whom and on whose behalf I write are part of said family, as are you. I’ve been building relationship with the community of whales who migrate from Bahia, Brazil, to Antarctica for the past seven years and sharing that process through my project, Whale Whispering. It is from the depths of our shared oceanic origins that I bring you this offering.

Whale Whispering is an ancestral commission, an ode to water, a work of interspecies translation and co-creation between me, humpback whales, and other cetaceans and people. It is a diasporic healing quest, an exploration and transmutation of the legacy of transatlantic enslavement through music. Based in Praia do Forte, Bahia, Brazil, it is a soundtrack for personal, communal, and global transformation, a love song for whales, for Bahia, for Earth, for the ancestors, and for life. 

I’m listening to and singing with the whales to tap into the echoes of the Middle Passage contained within their songs, to bring forth sounds that honor Nature’s prescription for this time of reckoning and share water’s wisdom as it is relayed to me. Through underwater and studio recordings, filmed documentation, blog posts, and community gatherings focused on collective singing and water blessing rituals, Whale Whispering serves as a way of dreaming forward via the lens of the so-called past.

As I address the womb sickness that has affected my own womb and those of so many Black womb-carriers due to generations of sexual trauma, I’m learning to wail with the whales as a form of curative release, just as the Africans who crossed the Atlantic in slaving vessels surely did. This siren call, summoning awareness of the unity of all being(s), and resonating with the movement in support of planetary healing, is a vibrational antidote to the violence that threatens to engulf the planet right now. These messages, shared through waves of water and sound, affirm that, for those who are listening, Love’s song is stronger. 

“We Are One” has emerged as the central theme of this collaboration. With this echoing phrase the whales affirm that there is no reality in which we are not all connected to every other being, every other particle in existence—through our breathing, our intake and transpiration of water, our dreaming. Among their many offerings to the human members of their extended family is the gentle nudge to ask ourselves if we are dreaming big enough.

This is a question adrienne maree brown and I were exploring during one of our Instagram Live chats near the end of the Pandemic Pause, just as the wheels of the global economy (i.e., racial capitalism) were starting to churn back into gear. Via that conversation, I first relayed the whales’ message from the 2022 season. Clearly, the reduction in sonic, vibrational, and chemical interference in the oceans as a result of diminished shipping traffic had proven beneficial to them, and their perception of the retrograde slide toward pre–COVID-19 levels had moved them to make their most forceful, emphatic declaration thus far: “We Will Run This World.”

It is not lost on me that whales everywhere have proceeded to occupy increasing amounts of space in international news, asserting and claiming visibility and acknowledgement, demanding to be seen and heard. While I’ve repeated their declaration a few times publicly since that interview, I’ve mostly been listening and observing, wanting to be sure that any further details I bring forth about that statement are rooted in the clearest and sincerest point of connectivity between me and the whales. In my experience, this clarity requires time. Given their size, lifespan, and range of movement, it’s no surprise that the whales have their eyes on the long game with regard to guiding their human kin, as they watch what, to many, looks scarily like our imminent self-destruction.

Speaking of eyes, anyone who has had the rare and singular experience of gazing into the eye of a whale can attest to having met with a being of far vaster intelligence, sensitivity, and wisdom than most human minds can begin to fathom. Since living that wonder myself, I’m convinced that whales are capable of feats that would qualify as miraculous in any context. In considering the meaning behind the declaration that they will run this world, I’m compelled to lead with miracles. They could be as fantastical as the whales adjusting and accelerating their evolution in the blink of one of those knowing eyes, making them suddenly capable of living on land, communicating through language with humans as a whole, and deconstructing and restructuring the systems that have brought us to this point of global upheaval through direct intervention. My sense though, is that, per their nature, the whales intend something more nuanced and easily absorbed. 

Looking to the “uprising” of orcas (technically dolphins, but whales by association) in the Strait of Gibraltar as an example, I see their capsizing of yachts not as some type of revenge or retribution for human destructiveness, but as intentionally headline-grabbing activity drawing our attention to the rudders they have consistently disabled. They are pointing out faulty steering by humans, the ones who have been driving the planet to destruction, suggesting that a new way is needed. As far as I know, no one has died as a result of these encounters, but they have definitely put whales on many people’s minds.

By overturning boats, swallowing a few people then spitting them back out unharmed, leaping onto and stealing the scene during an Olympic surfing competition, among other shenanigans, the whales are impressing themselves upon collective human awareness. They are infiltrating our conscious and subconscious minds with suggestions to listen to their subaquatic songs and sounds. Through both our listening and the vibrational reverberations that result from playing their songs above water, the whales can infuse us with massive doses of compassion, pour into us and other species from the fount of grace to which they have access. 

Based on what the whales have shown me, their songs have the capacity to reverse so much of the damage caused by humans—they could dissolve microplastics and oil spills, deactivate the harmful properties of chemical and other pollutants threatening the world’s water supply, and perhaps most importantly, soothe the indignation of our mothering planet, preventing her from wiping us out completely. But because fear, doubt, and subjugation to the nightmare spell of our current moment are so pervasive, and because most humans are living unaware of their own psychic impact, there has been a block on the extent to which the whales can wield their miracles—and to which we can wield our own. From our fitful slumbering, the whales are calling us to lucidity, on behalf of all the species smaller and thus more easily ignorable than they are. They have visions of healing technologies that they can float into our imaginations, infusing them with solutions to such pressing issues as how to ensure safe, viable water for all, for example. Like so many plant spirits and human stewards, they are calling us to exalt the connective practices that Indigenous peoples worldwide have been preserving: to gather at and with water, joining our sung voices as sources of generative and regenerative force, engaging the Oneness that is the origin of all possibility.

It’s unlikely that every human will hear or answer this call. Only a critical mass of deeply engaged, genuinely receptive and open-hearted individuals is required to make way for the whales to steer us into a new dream. This whale-sized waking dream is one in which life on this planet is more balanced, healthy, just, and sustainable. It is one where the expansive generosity and compassion of these ancient beings have permeated the modus operandi of the planet’s powerful problem children—humans. 

While people will continue to hold—and debate—a diversity of beliefs about spirituality, divinity, and the supernatural, everyone can agree that whales exist. And each one who opens themselves to imbibe the medicine the whales pour forth can taste the truth, can become imbued with the knowing that there is indeed a Higher Love, one that scales beyond what this current, shared reality suggests is real. Each one who receives that medicine and deepens into that knowing becomes a conduit for that Love—one among the countless channels through which it flows, hydrating them with real magicalisms that have only awaited the acceptance of their own sublime potential in order to come true.

Are you One?

A sus 19 años, se dirigía a Canadá. Ella sería la primera de su familia en ir a la universidad en el extranjero. Todos sus familiares vinieron al aeropuerto para la despedida. Ella recuerda el adiós como un momento desgarrador. En ese momento, a Chavan y a su familia les resultó difícil comprender plenamente el sacrificio que implica migrar. “No teníamos idea de lo que significa dejar tu hogar,” dijo.

Una nota de los editores: Esta historia ha sido traducida al español por Kristina Fullerton Rico. Puede leerla en inglés aquí.
(Editor’s note: This story has been translated into Spanish by Kristina Fullerton Rico. You can read the story in English here.)

Pero inevitablemente, el duelo llegó a sus vidas. Casi doce años después de la partida de Chavan, mientras se encontraba sentada en su departamento en Winnipeg a principios del 2020, Chavan sintió un nudo en el estómago cuando su mamá le llamó por teléfono para compartir la noticia. La abuela de Chavan, quien vivía en Sidney, Australia, se había enfermado y, tras unas cuantas semanas, había fallecido. Su abuela había sido una de las personas más importantes en su vida, pero Chavan no tenía manera de ir a Australia para llorarla en persona. Además del costo de los boletos de avión, no contaba con la visa necesaria para ingresar al país, ni con el presupuesto necesario para solicitarla. Ante esta situación, Chavan se apagó emocionalmente. “Me sentí congelada por un largo tiempo,” explicó.

Los expertos en temas de migración y psicología usan los términos “duelo transnacional” o “luto transnacional” para describir esta experiencia, la cual se refiere a la pérdida de un ser querido estando en otro país. Aunque el duelo en sí es un proceso difícil, los inmigrantes que experimentan el duelo transnacional frecuentemente enfrentan sentimientos adicionales de culpa, negación y sufrimiento, ya que les es imposible asistir a los rituales de luto de sus seres queridos. 

La imposibilidad de ver a sus seres queridos en persona complica lograr una sensación de cierre, y el doliente puede sentirse incapaz de procesar la pérdida y seguir con su vida de una manera sana. En años recientes, esta experiencia se ha vuelto más común, ya que el COVID-19 acabó con millones de vidas, y simultáneamente causó que aumentaran las restricciones fronterizas. La pandemia resaltó la importancia del apoyo comunitario y los cambios a las políticas migratorias para ayudar a aquellos que enfrentan sus duelos desde lejos.

El Dolor de la Pérdida a Larga Distancia

Desde hace mucho tiempo, experimentar el duelo a larga distancia ha sido la realidad de muchos inmigrantes. Cualquiera que deja a su familia atrás también corre el riesgo de estar separado de sus seres queridos durante tiempos de pérdida. Esto frecuentemente conlleva un torbellino de emociones complicadas.

“Hay un fuerte sentimiento de culpa. Hay un fuerte sentimiento de arrepentimiento de no haber podido estar con su ser querido al momento de su muerte,” explicó Zohreh Bayatrizi, una investigadora del duelo, de la Universidad de Alberta. Ella recuerda una conversación que tuvo cuando entrevistó a un inmigrante Iraní-Canadiense, quien había perdido a su hermano durante las cuarentenas de la pandemia del COVID. Porque no le fue posible viajar a Irán, o siquiera ver su cuerpo antes de que fuera enterrado, se negaba a aceptar la muerte de su hermano.

Chavan recuerda experiencias similares que sufrió al estar separada de su familia por fronteras después de la muerte de su abuela. “Sentía que no tenía derecho a llorar su muerte, porque no había estado ahí,” dijo.

Sin este espacio para llevar luto, el duelo puede volverse difícil de superar; especialmente para los inmigrantes indocumentados. Kristina Fullerton Rico, una socióloga en el Center for Racial Justice de la Universidad de Michigan, trabaja con estas comunidades, y contínuamente escucha sobre cómo el duelo afecta la vida cotidiana. “Las personas describen estas experiencias de duelo y luto a larga distancia como una de las partes más difíciles de estar indocumentado en Estados Unidos,” explicó.

Por ejemplo, mientras estudiaba el duelo transnacional entre el 2017 y el 2023, Fullerton Rico conoció a una mujer a quien llama Florencia (un pseudónimo usado para proteger su privacidad), quien dijo: “Era algo que no había de qué manera poderlo arreglar. No queda de otra más que aceptar que no puedes hacer nada.” Fullerton Rico también comparte una conversación que tuvo con un hombre a quien llama Felipe: “Felipe me dijo que el duelo te cambia profundamente.” La distancia aumenta el dolor del duelo porque es imposible decir adiós o asistir a un funeral, y esto impide obtener una sensación de cierre. “Hay un capítulo que no se cerró, que está como abierto,” explicó Felipe. 

 El peso del duelo transnacional frecuentemente es una carga soportada en soledad, lo cual agrava la situación. “No es algo que se suele reconocer abiertamente,” explicó Fullerton Rico.

Acortando la Distancia

Los rituales sociales, en cualquier cultura, son una parte importante del proceso del duelo. Los velorios y otras conmemoraciones pueden ayudar a la gente a pensar activamente en la persona difunta, dice Zoe Donaldson, una neurocientífica que estudia el duelo en la Universidad de Colorado en Boulder. “Pensar en estas memorias le permite a tu cerebro como… remodelar y pensar en cómo encajan esas memorias ahora en tu vida,” dice ella. Pero para aquellos quienes están lejos al momento de la muerte y no pueden asistir al funeral en persona, este proceso puede ser mucho más difícil o quedar inconcluso.

Gabriela Encina, una psicóloga que trabaja con expatriados, ayuda a sus clientes a crear sus propios rituales para que cada uno pueda conmemorar su relación con su ser querido de una manera única. Ella los guía a través del proceso del duelo a larga distancia, usando acciones como escribir cartas, comer la comida favorita de un ser querido, o participar en una actividad que solían hacer juntos. El proceso toma tiempo. Frecuentemente son necesarias varias sesiones de adioses y rituales para que alguien haga las paces con una muerte repentina, dice Encina.

Similarmente, durante la pandemia, Chavan encontró su propia manera de enfrentar el duelo a través de la escritura. Ella había perdido su trabajo en ese tiempo y decidió asistir a una clase de escritura. Así inició un proyecto de “no-ficción creativa” que le permitía sumergirse en sus experiencias con el duelo transnacional. A través del proceso de escribir, Chavan lentamente rompió el hielo que había encerrado a su corazón por ocho meses. Sollozaba mientras recordaba todos los detalles de su abuela: los debates enérgicos que juntas tenían, cómo dominaba los lugares a pesar de su pequeño tamaño, cómo reforzaba los lazos familiares con su amor.

“Fue horrible. Fue devastador. Se sintió como perderla de nuevo,” Chavan dijo.

Pero fueron estos actos de escribir y recordar los que le permitieron reconectarse a sus memorias… Y empezar a sanar.

Soluciones Sistémicas

Apoyar el duelo transnacional requiere que reconsideremos la forma en la que pensamos acerca de la inmigración y la pérdida. Actualmente, pocos inmigrantes indocumentados pueden ajustar su estado migratorio en los Estados Unidos. Los pocos que son elegibles típicamente reciben una autorización de trabajo antes de tener la opción de viajar de visita a su país de origen, y toma años para que obtengan la residencia permanente legal, explicó Fullerton Rico.  Es así que la oportunidad de visitar a sus seres queridos se vuelve una espera alargada, incluso mientras ellos envejecen o fallecen. Para muchos, es una espera sin fin.

“Si aprobamos leyes que le den prioridad a crear un camino rápido hacia la ciudadanía, podríamos evitar que las personas tengan que vivir estas experiencias,” dijo Fullerton Rico.

Muchos inmigrantes indocumentados también tienen trabajos inflexibles y de salarios bajos, lo cual los presiona a tomar decisiones dolorosas, como ver los funerales de sus seres queridos a través de su celular mientras ayudan a los clientes o preparan comidas en un restaurante. “En lugar de estar ahí en persona, ellos tuvieron que escaparse al baño, o esconderse en una cámara frigorífica para tener vistazos de uno de los rituales más significativos en la vida de una persona,” dice Fullerton Rico.

El permiso remunerado beneficia a las personas que están procesando un duelo. Esto les permite a los dolientes tomarse tiempo libre de sus trabajos sin tener que asumir las consecuencias potenciales de perder un cheque de pago o sus mismos trabajos. Chavan recuerda la presión de continuar su trabajo en medio de su duelo porque no tenía la flexibilidad financiera para perder horas de trabajo pagadas, lo cual gradualmente degradó su salud mental. En la actualidad, solo cinco estados de los E.E.U.U. requieren que los empleadores den permiso de faltar a causa de duelo, dice Fullerton Rico, y solo dos de esos estados requieren que los empleados sigan siendo pagados durante este periodo.

También es crucial “hacerle saber a las personas que no están solas en este dolor,” dice Fullerton Rico. Ella considera que es necesario que más organizaciones que apoyan a los inmigrantes reconozcan esta realidad y brinden apoyo para lidiar con el duelo transnacional. Por ejemplo, podrían ayudar a los inmigrantes a tener acceso a terapia, ofrecer otros recursos de salud mental, o ayudar a organizar rituales religiosos para que puedan conmemorar a sus seres queridos desde lejos. Así, los dolientes enfrentando el duelo transnacional correrían menos riesgo de condiciones como la depresión clínica. Ella comparte el ejemplo de un sacerdote católico que entrevistó en la ciudad de Nueva York, quien ha ayudado a realizar misas memoriales para dolientes transnacionales desde los 1990s. Hoy en día, estas ceremonias funerarias son transmitidas a través de Facebook Live, YouTube o Zoom, ayudando a las familias a sentir algún grado de cercanía.

Los expertos coinciden en que la formación de este apoyo social es un factor clave en el proceso de duelo. “El duelo es algo así como una experiencia social,” dice Bayatrizi. “Es una experiencia emocional que es formada a través de nuestras interacciones sociales.”

Chavan dice que la única razón por la cual ella finalmente se sintió lista para afrontar las emociones fue gracias a que su pareja y sus suegros fueron solidarios, proveyéndole una comunidad pequeña pero fuerte en un tiempo aislante. Tras escribir acerca de la experiencia, ella también comenzó a tener más conversaciones con familiares y amigos alrededor del mundo quienes habían leído su artículo, sobre el dolor del duelo a larga distancia y cómo lo habían afrontado ellos.

“Esencialmente, llegué a tener una comunidad, una comunidad global a la cual yo podía recurrir,” dice ella. “Comprender que no eres la única persona que ha pasado por una situación difícil puede ser una gran ayuda.”

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 3:29 p.m. PT on Nov. 11, 2024, to correct a few translation and production errors. Read our corrections policy here.

At first, getting in this much of a tizzy over what to wear to an abortion might seem silly or frivolous. But as Bracey Sherman talked to more people about their abortion experiences, she found that worrying about what to wear was quite common. It is the manifestation of uncertainty that stems from near-constant abortion stigma and lack of knowledge and expectations.

“I wish I had known” is a common refrain. Despite abortion being a near-universal experience, it can be hard to find advice that resonates. That’s the reason we believe a critical part of sharing our abortion stories and changing the narrative is sharing abortion wisdom.

Somatics coach, artist, and abortion storyteller Nik Zaleski taught Bracey Sherman about abortion wisdom—the advice that those of us who’ve had abortions impart to one another to try to make the path forward a little easier for those coming after us. These are the little tips and tricks we’ve learned from experience or that someone passed along to us—the little touches of care that we know to provide when showing up for one another, because we’ve been there, too.

We hope you can create an abortion experience that’s meaningful for you based on the advice of those of us who’ve been there. Although we can’t pick out your appointment outfit for you, we hope you’ll pick out clothes you feel confident in as you begin this next chapter of life.

Confirm What You’ve Suspected

There are a lot of reproductive conditions that mimic pregnancy symptoms, so first and foremost, confirm your pregnancy with a test. Pregnancies can be confirmed through a blood test at a clinic or hospital or by using a urine sample with an over-the-counter pregnancy test at least one week after missing an anticipated period.

Also, despite what the marketing suggests, the cheap pregnancy tests from the dollar store work just as well as the expensive ones at the pharmacy or grocery store, so grab whatever feels right for you and your budget. You may want to pick up more than one in case you don’t believe the positive result of the first one, which is quite common, or in case you take the test too early after your missed period and you need to test again in a few days.

We suggest picking up at least two—one to confirm the pregnancy now and another to confirm you are no longer pregnant a month or so after your abortion. But if you don’t believe the first positive test, get as many as you want. They’ll all say the same thing: It might be time to schedule an abortion.

You should be wary of free pregnancy tests. Anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers love to advertise free pregnancy tests to entice you to stop in, only to use the opportunity to proselytize, slut-shame, and misinform you. A lot of really wonderful community organizations, clinics, and abortion funds give out free pregnancy tests because they know tests are expensive—so free isn’t always bad. But if you’re looking for a free test, be mindful about who is giving it out.

Cover Your Tracks

Depending on whom you live with, where you live, and a whole host of other factors, you should be careful about whom you text with, what you search on the internet, and what information about your condition and decision you share.

As Texas-based organizer and We Testify storyteller Nancy Cárdenas Peña explained, it’s often the people who are closest to us who put us at deeper risk. She knows this from experience: “I wish I could have had more time to disclose my abortion story in the manner I felt comfortable with just as anyone should be able to share their story on their own terms.”

Surveillance is a reality of life now and can lead to criminalization for people seeking abortions. Even if you end up not having an abortion, you should be careful about your digital footprint throughout your process.

Talk to people on the phone or in person rather than in writing. Try to use messaging apps with encrypted or disappearing messages or those that don’t allow screenshots. Delete your call log history. Clear the browser history of the search engine you use, or use a private browser that doesn’t save or track your history. Use a lock on your phone and computer so that others can’t look at your messages or browser history when you’re not watching. Protecting your communications can help keep you safe.

Get Your Money Right

One of the most challenging aspects of obtaining an abortion is paying for it. The cost of an abortion (depending on how far along you are and the method) can range from $150 to well over $15,000. If you’re seeking a first-trimester appointment at a clinic in the United States, the average cost is $500. On top of that, you may have to pay for short- or long-distance transportation to and from the clinic, a multi-night hotel stay, meals, childcare, and pain medications. Some state and federal policies ban private and public health insurance from covering abortions. If you are going to a clinic, ask if they accept insurance—some do not.

Prepare for Your Abortion

It’s common to feel scared or embarrassed about asking questions during a medical appointment, even when it’s not an abortion. But the answers to your questions can put you at ease, so muster your courage and ask questions so you can feel as comfortable and informed as possible.

Travel Planning

If you’re traveling for your abortion, save all important phone numbers, including the numbers for the clinic, abortion fund case manager, practical support volunteer, or any other emergency contacts. Download maps to your phone so you can access them offline if cell service is slow or unavailable. Familiarize yourself with directions to and from the airport or train station so you know where you’ll need to go to catch your ride smoothly.

Getting to Your Appointment

Arranging a ride to your abortion can be complicated, because you have to trust someone else with your experience, and they may need to travel across state lines with you. If you trust a friend enough, this is a good opportunity for a bestie road trip. If you have the cash, you can always take a cab or use an app service to book a car, but remember there may be a digital history of your ride to the clinic. If you need to enter a destination digitally, instead of using the clinic’s address, try choosing a spot nearby.

Local abortion funds and practical support organizations can arrange volunteers to drive you from your home, work, airport, or train station—truly wherever!—to your appointment and back.

Be vigilant for police outside of the clinic or Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, who set up traps on thoroughfares and near clinics, schools, and hospitals to detain and arrest Black and Brown people, undocumented immigrants, and other marginalized groups. This step is critical if you’re crossing checkpoints or borders or if you live in or near heavily policed communities. The morning of your appointment, you might want to check with your community and trusted immigration organizations that document ICE checkpoints.

When you arrive for your appointment, double-check to make sure the place you’re headed to is indeed the clinic. Anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers often set up next door to abortion clinics, or an anti-abortion clinic may have a name similar to the name of the exact clinic you’re trying to get to. There are often anti-abortion protesters outside of clinics who scream and yell at anyone walking near the abortion clinic, in hopes of scaring people out of going inside or disorienting them so they walk into the wrong place.

Call “Your Person”

In the first season of Grey’s Anatomy, Dr. Cristina Yang (Sandra Oh) sits at a bar with Dr. Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) as they grieve their failing love lives over snacks. Cristina is pregnant and has an abortion scheduled, but according to clinic policy, she needed to designate an emergency contact on her form, so she wrote down Meredith’s name. “That’s why I told you I’m pregnant,” Cristina tells Meredith. “You’re my person.” Meredith hugs her friend, who receives the hug reluctantly. “Shut up. I’m your person,” Meredith replies.

This short scene in the iconic long-running television show created a beloved shorthand for best friends who promise to show up for one another, no matter what. That it grew out of a supportive abortion decision is just the icing on the cake for us. 

Like Cristina, you may want to identify “your person” to check in on you, hold your hand in the waiting room, or sit with you as you pass the pregnancy while binge-watching Grey’s Anatomy. Ask your clinic whether you can bring a friend or loved one with you. 

You might be a little dizzy after the sedation or cramping a bit if you have an in-clinic procedure, so we recommend having someone else drive you home. We Testify abortion storyteller Cazembe Murphy Jackson suggests finding someone who can attend the procedure with you and be with you in the days following. “Maybe plan out some restful activities that you really like to do or that will keep you happy—shows you want to watch, stuff like that. I think that would have been really helpful for me,” he explained.

If you’re having your abortion at home, you may want to call on someone from your community to sit with you through the process. They can help you get to and from the toilet, clean up, make food, and dote on you as you deserve.

Ask for What You Need

As wonderful as abortion providers are, some are still learning how to better care for patients with disabilities, those who are fat, survivors, or nonbinary or trans people, to name a few identities. Be ready to tell your provider what you need in order to have an abortion experience that is right for you. If your body doesn’t move in a particular way or you do not like body parts to be touched or referred to in a certain way, tell your providers during the counseling conversation.

You may also want to remind them your body requires a different dosage of pain medication compared with other patients. Good providers will be accommodating of your needs. While it is unfortunate you may have to be the one to initiate, you deserve an abortion experience that centers you.

Adapted excerpt from Liberating Abortion: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins. Copyright © 2024 by Renee Bracey Sherman and Regina Mahone.

When Harris appeared on The Drew Barrymore Show in April 2024, Barrymore referenced that nickname. “That’s a great segue to say that I keep thinking in my head that we all need a mom,” Barrymore said. “I’ve been thinking that we really all need a tremendous hug in the world right now. But in our country, we need you to be ‘Momala’ of the country.”

I thought a lot about that moment while watching Harris debate former President Donald Trump in September. At the start of the debate, Trump appeared apprehensive before shaking Harris’ hand, which continued throughout the night. Harris was poised, standing firmly on her policies, while Trump struggled to directly answer questions and made racist claims about immigrants and poor Americans.

As Trump made silly faces and referred to Harris as “this one” instead of her name and title, I was reminded of the ways Black people, especially Black women, have long been called upon to be the adults in the room. Thanks to both the adultification of Black girls and the mammy-fication of Black women, Black people are required to be above reproach, emotionless, and with a heightened understanding of the feelings of white Americans. In many ways, Harris had to embody the role of “Momala” during the debate to assuage the fears of fragile white Americans, and some Americans of color, who were looking for her to be well-behaved, respectable, and unrattled.

Despite Trump’s overt disrespect and disregard for Harris’ station, many voters in the United States were interested in how Harris handled his childishness, his antics, his attacks, and his reactions, rather than judging her debate performance based on her expertise and preparedness for the role.

As I write in Black Women Taught Us: An Intimate History of Black Feminism, Black women who seek political office are often expected to be hypermasculine superheroes with the ability to save white Americans from problems they themselves have created. These expectations play into the stereotype of the unsexed, unattractive, obsequious mammy, whose only desire is to care for white families, nurse white children, and relieve white women of their household duties. When Barrymore asked Harris to mother the country, that is the stereotype she was referencing—and that’s what white Americans hoped to see at the debate.

This isn’t the first time we’ve witnessed a Black presidential candidate withhold their emotions during a debate while their white male opponent displayed uncontrollable bouts of anger. When then Senator Barack Obama debated the late Senator John McCain in 2008, I distinctly remember McCain referring to Obama as “that one” and refusing to make eye contact with his opponent.

It’s a level of disrespect seemingly only tolerable when it’s exhibited by white men. But these behaviors are deeply rooted in anti-Blackness and the belief that Black Americans do not deserve the same level of regard and honor white Americans receive. We call that white supremacy.

And yet, in the face of impossible expectations, Harris managed to be pensive, thoughtful, clever, funny, and above her opponent’s demeaning critiques of her as a person. Regardless of your opinions of Harris, there are many people who will find safety and solace in her embodying the role of the country’s mammy, and they will care more about her performance of this insidious stereotype than anything she said on that debate stage.

But if we ever want to move past a political imagination limited to gender binaries and racial hierarchies, we must hope for more from anyone who stands to represent us. As such, it’s likely that those of us who believe in the fullness of Blackness and Black life have largely been left under-satisfied by Harris’ approach to this campaign.

Being white America’s “Momala” may win Harris the presidential race. It might even win her reelection in 2028. But it won’t challenge the expectations of those who see Black women as caricatures and reflections of their darkest fantasies. Being white America’s “Momala” won’t get us any closer to freedom—and it certainly won’t pave the way for the radical liberationist politics we need at this moment and moving forward.

But in the words of Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah in their 2019 book Unsettling Truths, “White America could not perpetrate five hundred years of dehumanizing injustice without traumatizing itself.” 

On the night of December 31, 2015, I learned about my ancestors’ long-standing history on this land. The next day, January 1, 2016, the process of unraveling our family’s amnesia began. As I began sharing my ancestral discoveries with my white friends and family, I encountered blank stares and shrugging shoulders, accompanied by a quick change of subject to something more timely, relevant, or entertaining. I was often told reassuringly, “Well, that was a long time ago. Everyone thought differently then. You shouldn’t feel guilty about that.” Far from being placated, I wanted to scream. People literally could not hear what I was saying. I felt isolated in a process that was rewiring my core identity.

What I had discovered in my own family history posed a threat to the person I thought I was, and to the person I was taught to be. Looking back now, it felt like I was receiving an ancestral push toward truth and healing after many generations of silence. The process went far beyond a tidy phrase like “white guilt.” Over time, I began distinguishing guilt from accountability. Staying stuck in guilt is not helpful. Moving into accountability catalyzes necessary change. I was rapidly becoming someone I did not recognize. 

What was now glaringly obvious and “in my face” all the time was being actively ignored by well-meaning white people all around me. Overwhelmingly, I felt pressured to calm down, behave, and just stop talking about it. Why? Talking about the shadows of colonialism and enslavement contradicts the heroic American mythology that we learned as children. Within the Euro-American diaspora, our capacity to deal with our ancestral legacies is compromised. We are part of a culture that is more invested in maintaining a narrative of innocence and denial than in embracing truth and healing.

I imagine this work to confront our collective amnesia will continue for the rest of my life. I hope it will persist into future generations as well. Over the years, I came to see our amnesia as a complex response to wounding that happened long ago.

When our European ancestors carried to Turtle Island their diseases, poverty, disrupted communities and families, severed cultures, and violence, it did not expunge their own historical trauma. Establishing dominance over the unique civilizations that were already thriving on this continent did not make us whole again. Kidnapping African leaders, healers, holy people, Elders, mothers, fathers, and children to build us a wealth-accumulating economy did not bring us peace. 

In her book Inherited Silence, Euro-descended Elder Louise Dunlap shares how she perceives the suffering of our settler ancestors: “…a nightmarish, button-your-lips suffering that warped the mind, closing it to compassion for other humans and encouraging brutality against perceived enemies and the Earth itself. These ancestors struggled with a punishing legacy that still afflicts us.”

Our ancestors’ punishing legacy went into the underbelly of our society. Today, it hides out behind a polite mask of denial. Almost everything in Eurocentric culture conspires to keep us asleep. Amnesia is the path of least resistance. 

I am grateful that the ancestors have shown me the unpopular truth: Unleashing their tears and reviving their memory might just be the messy, raw, healing balm for the wounds our people sustained and perpetrated so long ago. If we muster the courage to traverse these shadows, who might we become on the other side of all that pain? Who are we underneath the denial, amnesia, grief, guilt, and shame? 

Let’s find out.

This essay is excerpted with permission from Becoming a Good Relative: Calling White Settlers Toward Truth, Healing, and Repair by Hilary Giovale (Green Writers Press, 2024).

“Over [two] months ago, I decided to permanently stop treatment for my autoimmune illnesses,” Alexandria wrote. “The side effects were absolutely horrendous and the treatments only provided a temporary fix that has to be administered again and again for the rest of my life to stall the illness, which isn’t a cure.” She ended the post by naming her dual diagnosis, which she had been largely private about aside from a post she made in 2021.

For people with rare diseases—estimated to be between 263 and 446 million people worldwide—finding the right doctors and treatments can feel like a Herculean feat, a reality Alexandria knew all too well. “There is no long-term cure,” she wrote. “I’m very very very sick, things are progressing fast. I’m wheelchair or bed bound most of the time. I had 16 seizures yesterday and over 30 stiff person attacks.”

In the United States, rare-disease patients often go into significant medical debt to pursue treatment, even traveling to different states to see specialists with months-long waiting lists. In addition to the monetary burden, those seeking treatment for rare diseases also face a mental, emotional, and spiritual toll. 

“I wake up with excruciating pain,” says Samantha Jade Durán, a disabled adaptive fashion influencer and one of just a few hundred people in human history to have been diagnosed with Maffucci syndrome, a cancer disorder that causes bone tumors and vascular lesions most often in the hands and feet. “There’s not a moment that I don’t have excruciating pain, which is awful for a variety of reasons. It obviously takes a toll on your mental health and your social and interpersonal and professional life. The first thing I have to do in the morning is wake up, take my opioids, and then wait an hour just to be able to get out of bed and do anything at any capacity.”

In the face of these obstacles, rare-disease patients like Durán must relentlessly call insurance companies and medical offices, create and share resources, and form care networks to lift some of the burden—and help keep them alive.

Routine Misdiagnosis

As a baby, Durán was misdiagnosed with Ollier disease, which similarly causes bone tumors in different parts of the body. When her father sought a second opinion, she was again misdiagnosed, this time with fibrous dysplasia, which occurs when scar-like tissue replaces healthy bones.

“They ran with that diagnosis until I was 18,” Durán says. “The treatment is similar in that I still got leg lengthening, but I was also supposed to get annual cancer screenings with full-body MRIs or full-body CT scans with radiation, and they weren’t doing that.” The Cleveland Clinic notes that Maffucci syndrome patients are more susceptible to all types of cancers, with up to 50% of Maffucci patients developing chondrosarcoma, a bone cancer that begins in cartilage cells. (Durán estimates her odds of getting cancer at 55%.)

Just before Durán graduated high school, her doctor misdiagnosed her with cancer and referred her to orthopedic oncology. However, when she showed up for her appointment, she learned she’d been kicked off her childhood disability benefits when she turned 18. To continue treatment, she had to apply for adult benefits or find other insurance, which would severely delay care.

In 2017, Durán was officially diagnosed with Maffucci syndrome. “[Maffucci syndrome] is so rare that when I was diagnosed, they didn’t even know what gene caused it,” Durán says. Unfortunately, Durán isn’t the only rare-disease patient who’s been misdiagnosed more than once.

Miranda Edwards, a.k.a. Pheo Vs Fabulous, was dismissed by multiple doctors for “anxiety” when she had a malignant tumor in her adrenal gland. Due to the delay in care, her tumor became untreatable. She has been “terminal and thriving” since 2014, sharing each step of her journey online as well as resources she’s created herself—like a medical résumé template—so others can advocate for their health.

In 2023, Edwards asked for help raising thousands of dollars to pay for life-saving molecular testing of her thyroid after she was outright denied surgery to remove a Grade 5 tumor because of her existing condition. Edwards, who is based in Canada, said her health care would have paid for the testing if the tumor had been Grade 4 or lower; essentially, she was once again put at extraordinary risk because of doctors dragging their feet with the “watch and wait” approach.

Tools for Progress

In many cases, rare-disease patients are forced to become the foremost experts on their conditions, putting them in the position of educating the medical professionals who are supposed to be treating them. “I think a lot of health care professionals give up on finding answers beyond our rare diseases,” Durán explains. “I was at a Maffucci syndrome and Ollier disease patients summit at Johns Hopkins last year, and my researchers told us that when doctors see a rare-disease patient, they often focus on the rare disease and forget [the patient] can have common diseases too.”

Durán describes seeing multiple doctors, independently researching her test results, and persistently asking questions of her care team, particularly when they didn’t have an immediate answer for symptoms that didn’t line up with her Maffucci diagnosis. Eventually, she was diagnosed with both hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and Hashimoto’s disease. “We already deal with a lot of health issues,” Durán says. “Stress is a notoriously bad thing—for lack of a better word—for pain, for chronic pain and energy levels and mental health. I think having an advocacy group to help patients navigate the system would definitely improve the quality of our lives.”

Since 2008, the last day of February has been celebrated as Rare Disease Day, a patient-led effort coordinated with more than 65 global organizations, including the European Organisation for Rare Diseases (EURORDIS), to raise awareness for lesser-known diagnoses and the people living with them. Stanislav Ostapenko, who’s been director of communications at EURORDIS since 2021, says rare-disease patients must have strong support networks, including online, to effectively navigate their illnesses.

“We know that patient populations are very scarce,” he explains. “We know that for certain diseases there are just a handful [of] patients across the globe. So it is very important to know that you belong to a community and you can be accepted, you can be understood, and you can also speak to people who have the same condition as you do and that you can find support.”

A major component of Rare Disease Day is translating and adapting tool kits for multiple languages and impairments so anyone can use them, even if they lack expertise. EURORDIS uses this tool to encourage us all—those with rare diseases and those without—to be good patient advocates.

The Significance of Burnout

A 2024 study from the physician network MDVIP and online random-probability panel Ipsos KnowledgePanel indicates that 61% of polled patients see the U.S. health care system as a hassle and that one in three are “burned out.” One-third of patients reported deferring care in the last five years because they couldn’t get a timely enough appointment to address their concerns or they had a bad experience with a provider. The survey also states that at least one in four Americans who did seek care suffered a negative impact on their mental health, had worsening symptoms, or were misdiagnosed.

All of these factors lead to patient burnout, with chronically ill, disabled, and rare-disease patients facing these issues on a more frequent basis because of how often they are forced to seek care for symptom management, procedures, and medications.

In her 2022 book The Future Is Disabled, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about the importance of learning both one’s own and their loved ones’ “care languages” to create inter-abled care webs in which everyone can get what they need without harming others and getting caretaker burnout: “When I think of the care webs I am a part of that mostly work, they are a complex moment-by-moment dance of figuring out what we need that is a lot like consent negotiations in sex,” Piepzna-Samarasinha writes. “Raw embarrassment, messiness, confusion, working through shame at needing something (or anything), figuring out what I might need to even begin to ask for.”

Piepzna-Samarasinha also writes about the necessity of employing “a diversity of care tactics” so people can, for example, seek help chasing a referral from a doctor to another doctor to the insurance company and back again, or assistance applying for financial aid from organizations such as the National Organization for Rare Disorders (NORD) to help offset the costs of medication, diagnostic testing, travel assistance, and caregiver respite.

When the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, mutual aid and collective care became even more important for people with disabilities, including people with rare diseases. Whether it’s nondisabled people offering rides, helping call doctors or email insurance companies, or assisting with documentation and organization, advocacy networks—no matter how small—have become essential for rare disease patients.

In 2022, disability-justice activist Alice Wong wrote about a traumatic, two-week ICU experience that ended with her family expending great financial and personal resources to prevent her from having to move to an inpatient facility: “The safety net is not a net!” Wong wrote. “It’s a big fucking hole.” Without Wong’s family advocating for her, she would have had few choices for continued care: “The system drives people toward institutions,” she wrote. “It is designed to segregate expendable and ‘non-productive’ disabled and older people like me. Out of sight, out of mind.”

Advocacy networks can help patients fight for their needs with insurance companies, which are often quick to dismiss medications that are “too expensive” or treatments that are “not medically necessary.” They can work with NORD to launch local registries, promote or host funding drives for patient-focused drug development, and work directly with existing disability-rights organizations to streamline processes and/or build out their volunteer base.

Durán, like Wong, relies heavily on her nondisabled family members for help with daily tasks, which can include bringing her food and water or cleaning her room (the latter which she pays them to do). “As disabled people, we’re already grappling with our health and it already bleeds into every aspect of our lives,” says Durán. “If we had nondisabled allies caring about accessibility or ableism at any capacity and advocating on our behalf, or just calling out ableism or inaccessibility even when we’re not in the room, I think it would make a world of a difference, especially because I think a lot of disabled people already face a lot of burnout because of our health or lack thereof.”

Highly visible advocates like Durán and Edwards use their platforms to educate their followers, but ultimately they shouldn’t be tasked with radicalizing nondisabled people into confronting and seeking to improve the medical system. “No one is immune to becoming disabled,” Durán points out. “It can happen to quite literally anyone.” If that doesn’t radicalize nondisabled people, perhaps nothing will.

Since the 1960s and the election of President John F. Kennedy, younger voters have supported Democratic candidates, while older voters leaned Republican. But that dynamic has been evolving, and now, in 2024, large numbers in both groups are bucking traditional assumptions about their political affiliation.

This shift challenges the age-old political adage that youthful idealism gives way to conservative pragmatism with age. As pollsters and pundits scramble to explain the phenomenon, one intriguing theory emerges: It may come down to happiness.

The Unhappy Vote for Change

I am an interpersonal communication researcher and the co-founder and co-director of the Florida Atlantic University Mainstreet Political Communication Lab. Our lab investigates and analyzes public opinion and political trends nationwide. With the upcoming election, I’ve been specifically examining the potential influence of happiness on voting patterns.

Research worldwide indicates that happy people prefer keeping things the same, and they tend to vote for the incumbent in political elections. Voters who aren’t as happy are more open to anti-establishment candidates, seeing the government as a source of their discontent.

These findings may help to explain the Democratic Party’s waning support among young people.

This group is still reliably blue. Vice President Kamala Harris has an edge among voters under 30, with 50% favoring her over former President Donald Trump’s 34%. U.S. voters ages 18 to 35 mainly prefer Democratic views on issues like abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. Yet they are more likely to vote Republican than they have been in the past, especially young men.

Youth Are No Longer Carefree

Declining life satisfaction and happiness levels among young Americans may help to explain their changing political preferences.

Our March 2024 poll found that 55% of respondents ages 18 to 34 reported dissatisfaction with their lives, compared with 65% of the general population.

These findings, as well as other national polls, challenge the common belief that young adulthood is one of life’s happiest periods.

Recent polling data suggests that older voters, long a Republican base, are trending blue in 2024. As of September 2024, Harris leads among older voters, with somewhere between 51% to 55% favoring her over Trump.

These happy seniors appear to be concerned about sweeping changes that could occur under another Trump administration, like ending even more abortion rights. The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022 erased what was seen as a major milestone and accomplishment for that generation.

Older Americans are also focused on retaining Social Security benefits, a Democratic priority that Trump has wavered on, and maintaining lower prescription drug costs. Both of these programs help keep older Americans happy and healthy. They barely register for young people.

Polls are notoriously slippery, and they’ll keep changing. But, increasingly, age is no longer a very good indicator of party affiliation.

Happiness Matters at the Ballot Box

I am not suggesting that happiness drives all voting behavior or explains changing political preferences in the United States. But I am saying that it should not be ignored.

My research indicates that to understand why people vote the way they do, it’s essential to examine happiness alongside other key factors like the economy and personal experiences. By studying how happiness connects with age, life experiences, and engagement with social media, researchers can gain clearer insights into the changing voting behavior of both young and old voters.

The 2024 presidential candidates seem to have intuited this. The Harris campaign is all about “joy” and celebrating happiness and community. The Trump campaign adopts an angrier tone and a grievance-filled approach.

Ultimately, happiness is more than just a mood. Just as much as ideology, the literal pursuit of happiness may be shaping decisions at the ballot box.

This article was originally published by The Conversation. It has been republished here with permission. 

As both a facilitator and a participant in group experiences, I’ve witnessed firsthand the transformative power of well-held containers. I remember one particularly memorable session when I unintentionally triggered traumatic memories for some participants. That was a wake-up call for me. It underscored the importance of taking people only as far as I’ve gone, and being mindful of my social location and privileges and their potential impact on group dynamics. It reiterated and the need to create resilient and supportive spaces for all, in ways that honor everyone’s identities and prioritize their well-being.

I’ve also experienced the profound benefits of well-held containers. A guided visualization that asked me to imagine saying final goodbyes to loved ones was particularly transformative. In that session, the facilitators created a sacred space among us participants and gradually increased the risk we took while building trust. This showed me the power of building trustworthy relationships, facilitated rituals, and consensual boundaries in fostering deep exploration and growth.

Creating a transformative container—a space where magic can unfold and meaningful change can occur—is something I approach with deep intentionality, wisdom, and an understanding of the principles that guide such a process. For me, it’s not just about setting the stage; it’s about cultivating an environment where individuals can safely explore, grow, and transform. Here’s how I approach this work:

1. Set a Vibe—and Keep It Going

The energy I bring to a space sets the tone for everything that follows. Whether through lighting, music, scent, or even the way I greet participants, I am creating an atmosphere that signals what’s possible. Setting a vibe isn’t a one-time act; it’s an ongoing practice throughout the experience. I work to maintain that energy, ensuring that it aligns with the goals of the session, and I adapt as needed to keep everyone in the right headspace and heartspace. For instance, I’ve found that a carefully chosen playlist can guide the emotional flow of a session, from energizing participants at the start to creating moments of introspection and reflection later on.

2. Reveal the Context and Beware of Assumptions

Transparency is critical in creating a container for transformation. I make it a point to reveal the context—why we’re here, what the goals are, what’s at stake—to help participants understand the bigger picture and feel more connected to the process. This helps to minimize misunderstandings and assumptions that could lead to tension or disengagement. I strive to be clear about my intentions, the purpose of the session, and any background information that could influence the direction of our work. The more context I provide, the more equipped participants are to engage fully and authentically.

3. Containers Need Boundaries to Be Able to Contain

A container without boundaries can’t hold the energy, emotions, and transformations that occur within it. I believe boundaries define the space—physically, emotionally, and energetically. They create safety by delineating what is acceptable and what is not, allowing participants to explore and take risks within a defined framework. Clear boundaries prevent the container from becoming chaotic or overwhelming, ensuring that the energy within is focused and purposeful.

4. Consent Is Key 

For boundaries to be effective, there must be mutual consent. Everyone involved needs to agree on the rules of engagement. I usually start sessions by co-creating explicit agreements, where participants commit to respecting the space, each other, and the process. This ensures that everyone is on the same page and feels respected, which is essential for maintaining trust and safety within the container. Without consent, boundaries can feel imposed and restrictive rather than supportive and empowering.

5. Face the Tensions in Justice-Loving Ways

Transformation often involves surfacing tensions—unspoken conflicts, buried emotions, or systemic injustices. I see these tensions not as obstacles but as opportunities for growth and healing. To navigate them effectively, I prepare myself to face them with love, justice, and a commitment to liberation for all. This means creating space for difficult conversations, acknowledging power dynamics, and addressing issues in ways that honor the dignity and humanity of everyone involved. Justice-loving practices ensure that the process of transformation isn’t just about personal growth but also about collective liberation.

6. Shape Change and Be Changed

I’ve learned that transformation isn’t a linear process but an emergent one. It evolves as the group evolves, adapting to new insights, challenges, and opportunities. I draw from the principles and elements of emergent strategy, which emphasizes the importance of being responsive and flexible in the face of change. Rather than imposing a rigid plan, I allow the process to unfold organically, shaping change as it happens. This requires me to be open to being changed myself—learning from the process, adapting my approach, and growing alongside the participants. It’s about co-creating the path forward, guided by the collective wisdom of the group.

7. Bring Everything and Everyone With You

When I’m creating a transformative container, I bring all of myself—my knowledge, experiences, skills, and even my personal quirks. This includes everything from my outfit selection to my playlist, my understanding of feng shui, my knowledge of Indigenous circle practices, and my love of Latin root words. Each element I bring adds richness and depth to the space, making it uniquely mine—and uniquely capable of holding the transformation that needs to happen. By bringing everything and everyone with me, I create a space that’s not only authentic but also inclusive, where every aspect of the self—both mine and others’—is welcomed and valued.

8. Be Trustworthy

Trust is the foundation of any transformative container. Participants need to know that they can rely on me to hold the space with integrity, care, and consistency. Being trustworthy means showing up fully, honoring my commitments, and being transparent about my intentions and limitations. It also involves creating an environment where participants can trust each other, fostering a sense of safety and mutual respect. Trust allows participants to take the risks necessary for deep transformation, knowing that they are supported and held throughout the process.

9. Practice Till Presence

Presence is the ability to be fully in the moment, attuned to what is happening within the container. It’s about listening deeply, observing closely, and responding authentically to the needs of the group. Achieving this level of presence requires practice—cultivating mindfulness, grounding myself, and honing my ability to stay focused and connected. The more I practice, the more naturally presence will come to me, allowing me to be fully available to the group and the process. Presence is the key to facilitating transformation with grace, fluidity, and impact.

As I reflect on these principles, I encourage you to think about how you can incorporate them into your practice—whether you’re creating formal containers for group participation, or informal ones as you build and co-create community. What unique elements do you bring to the table? How can you cultivate a sense of trust, presence, and adaptability in your work? By integrating these principles, we can create containers that not only hold space for transformation but actively foster it, allowing magic to unfold and change to take root in profound and liberating ways.

self-portrait as the ocean or Fofie’s wisdom 

study the tides of
the ocean shored by your skin 
each ripple each wave

know not all water 
is meant to quench dry throats or
to be waded through

know not everything 
that is left in the waters 
is an offering

reminders for my (impatient) selves 

don’t force what won’t come
what is for you is either
coming or waiting

closed mouths (and full ones) don’t get fed

ask for what you need
ready yourself to receive
as well as release

a lesson learned from June 

i been wrong…and still
wrong ain’t never been my name
pronounce me correct

pronounce me (w)hol(l)y
won’t answer to all i’m called
act accordingly

train your timid tongues
sound out all my syllables
i been a mouthful

you are your own 

because you were both 
the cost and the one who paid
a terrible price

What she was looking for wasn’t an accountability process for her abusive ex-boyfriend, however, but a means of addressing the trust broken by her friends who didn’t believe that the abuse was real.

Space for Change is a collaborative program that aims to hold community members accountable for domestic violence, provide education to prevent future violence, and offer healing circles that bring the survivor together with loved ones who were not supportive when the survivor needed them. It was this last option that Trixie needed.

Trixie’s case is not a rare phenomenon. Because social isolation is such a common side effect of domestic violence, and because loneliness is one of the most cited reasons why people end up returning to unsafe relationships, we advocates saw a great need for ways to heal the harm that can ripple out from these situations. Often, friends and family who don’t believe survivors, who side with the abuser, or who walk away when they are needed most can lead the survivor to feel like they do not have the emotional or logistical support to leave the relationship.

Several of Trixie’s friends didn’t believe her when she first told them about the abuse in the relationship. She was “just overreacting,” they said. Her boyfriend was “such a great guy.” “How could he be responsible for the things she claimed he was doing?” they asked.

Now that she was out of the relationship—and without any support from those friends—she wanted to know if there could be a way to salvage those friendships, or if she should give them up as a casualty to the abuse so that she could move on.

How to Set Up a Healing Circle

Our Space for Change program is a collaboration between our domestic violence organization and the Conflict Resolution Center of Santa Cruz County, another local nonprofit. Using restorative justice approaches to domestic violence is relatively new for social service nonprofits, so we’ve found that having our domestic violence advocates work alongside experienced mediators in general restorative justice programs, neighborhood courts, and juvenile re-entry programs is an effective partnership. Each organization is able to fill in the gaps of the other’s knowledge and skill sets.

Space for Change offers three avenues for restorative justice that participants can choose from: a community accountability process for the person who caused domestic violence, which is common in many restorative justice programs; community education, which aims to teach allies and loved ones of survivors about the dynamics of domestic violence so that they can be safer, more effective support people for their survivor; and healing circles.

When setting up a healing circle like Trixie’s, there’s a lot of initial work from the service providers long before any meetings take place. Either a mediator or an advocate meets individually with the people involved to see where that person stands in regard to the situation at hand. Does everyone have the same understanding of what occurred? The timeline of events? The material facts of the case, setting aside personal emotions and interpretations about those events? A Walnut Avenue advocate might also be present at some or all of the meetings to address domestic-violence-specific concerns, such as correcting a misunderstanding about coercive control or offering peer emotional support for a moment of processing.

The purpose of so much work prior to actual group conversations is to gauge each person’s willingness to participate, their openness to having their perspective challenged, and whether their goal for a facilitated conversation (or series of conversations) is something both realistic and within our scope of service. Otherwise, we run the risk of inviting people with conflicting needs and agendas into a space where judgment, defensiveness, victim blaming, and re-traumatization are high possibilities.

A Path Forward

Trixie’s case is still ongoing. Unfortunately, some of her friends have chosen to side with her ex-boyfriend, and although it’s been painful for Trixie, she’s also expressed relief that at least she doesn’t have to wonder about those friendships anymore. She can grieve them and, eventually, move on. Other friendships appear to be salvageable, with time and careful communication. Although she has not found everything she’d hoped for, Trixie has expressed gratitude for the healing circle and how it has helped her clarify what she needs to receive from her loved ones to move forward and identify which people she wants involved in that healing process.

In crisis intervention, our focus is on the survivor and the person causing harm, and rightfully so. But this view doesn’t include the ways in which domestic violence ripples out into those two people’s family, friends, and community—and this is where restorative justice could be one of the most useful tools we have for addressing the casualties of other relationships, mitigating isolation of the survivor and encouraging accountability for the person who caused harm.

I’ve found restorative justice to be one of the most challenging approaches to domestic violence, but also the most rewarding when the people involved are participating with genuine desire to find a path forward. It allows personal autonomy and a tailored approach to justice that historically has not been a common experience with the legal system. This allows survivors, families, and communities to strengthen their own relationships together. I’ve been honored to be a part of that process with survivors like Trixie.

This story was originally published by California Health Report, and is reprinted here with permission.

It was a hot summer day in 2007 when I wrapped filming for a documentary about women and children’s organizing and leadership in a refugee camp in Ghana. As I was saying my goodbyes, a woman approached me and said, “You know, Sis, the same AK-47s in child soldiers’ hands in Liberia’s civil war are in your children’s hands [in the United States]. You need to do something about that.”

The comment stuck with me, and ultimately shaped the subsequent decades of my life, when I volunteered to teach sociology courses inside prisons in Washington state, then spent 12 years filming inside those same prisons—and in the neighborhoods, homes, and communities from which those incarcerated people came. I became deeply concerned with how the culture of punishment impacts the lives of children.

Our 2020 documentary, Since I Been Down, is a love letter to those children. 

Our film invites viewers to take an in-depth look at incarceration in order to better understand the processes that led a person to prison, their resilience, and prisoners’ ultimate role as models for all of us. Set in Tacoma, Washington, the film bears witness to an “everytown” urban neighborhood’s fight to stay alive in the face of racial profiling by police, gangs, drugs, and gun violence.

The film brings to life statistics of racial and gender disparity in housing, education, employment, and incarceration, and shows viewers the real impact of gentrification through stories from community members impacted by it. Viewers get a window into the ways that incarcerated people are organizing to bring education, healing, and compassion to one another and those who have been harmed—both in and outside prison walls. 

In 1993, Washington state voters were the first to pass a “three strikes” law ostensibly designed to discourage “repeat offenders” by implementing increasingly severe sentences for each conviction, including mandatory minimum sentences for specific offenses. Washington is also one of 17 U.S. states that does not offer parole (including for life sentences) and is among the few states that incarcerates youth as young as age 12. It was also among the first cities to set up surveillance cameras in poor and Black communities. 

This combination of policies, influenced by the frenzy of the war on drugs and perceptions of escalating crime and gang activity in the fear-mongering political climate of the late 1980s and early 1990s, led Tacoma voters to sacrifice their most vulnerable children, discarded as irredeemable “super predators.” This culture of punishment, combined with the city’s lack of social services, disinvestments in early education, and increasing inequality in housing and employment, stained the Tacoma landscape and destined these children to live their lives out behind bars.

Yet even when thrown into prison for punitive removal from society, these children, now adults, could not be silenced. Together they built a prisoners’ community of healing, anchored in restorative and transformative justice that extended beyond prison walls. 

The film chronicles the impact of two prisoner-led groups that have been critical to growing efforts to dismantle the culture of oppression that permeates Tacoma and countless other cities nationwide.

The Black Prisoners’ Caucus (BPC), established in Washington state prisons in 1972, and BPC TEACH (Taking Education and Creating History) in 2013, offer blueprints for repair within the communities they once harmed. Two members of TEACH describe the organization as “a communal learning environment that’s not physical but mental, spiritual, and emotional.” The experiences of BPC and BPC TEACH members illuminate the essential roles of activism, compassion, love, and self-forgiveness in personal and community transformation.

The culture of punishment that groups like BPC are working to dismantle is unfortunately a pervasive element of our shared reality in America today. Especially in these times of legislated violence and fear of difference, who better to show us the triumph of the human spirit than those caught behind bars for life?

The film introduces us to Kimonti Carter, who grew up in Tacoma. He was convicted in 1998 at age 18 of aggravated murder connected to a drive-by shooting. He was sentenced to 777 years, without the possibility of parole. Carter became not only our protagonist but the spine of our film. His story embodies the triumph of the human spirit—even when faced with social forces that attempt to define the margins as a place of deprivation, never of possibility.

In 2021, the Washington Supreme Court ruled that mandatory minimum sentences are unconstitutional for 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds, pointing to “a rethinking of the culpability and punishment for young people, as science has revealed more about their developing brains,” according to The Seattle Times. This ruling opened the door for Carter’s July 2022 resentencing, when a judge determined that Carter, having served 25 years in prison, must be released. 

He now serves as a community outreach specialist with the Washington State Office of Public Defense and continues to work with BPC Community Group and other formerly incarcerated peers and youth in schools, education, health care, prisons, and juvenile facilities. Carter’s goals are reflected in the film, as we see him—then and now—deeply committed to policy change, youth activism, and support for prisoner-initiated programs.

Carter’s leadership was essential to the 2013 creation of BPC’s TEACH program, where incarcerated people teach each other ways that they can create history. TEACH brings together incarcerated people across race, ethnicity, and gang lines, and provides them tools to question oppression, and the violent behavior that oppression perpetuates among and between people. 

While filming, I was able to bear witness to a TEACH classroom where a prisoner wearing swastika tattoos spoke with a Black man and a man from Central America about the need for respect; the men questioned their own ideologies and practices, and how they each face similar oppression, despite their differences. We travel this journey with them through candid conversations of scenes fired in a kiln of cinema verité, and cinematically rendered through Krump dancing and masquerade as we bear witness to the nuances of reflective voice, trauma, contemplative silence, fear, and unbinding love. 

Our humanity is nudged—and at times ambushed—while watching the film, because the men and women who seem to have an answer to our societal problems have been convicted of violent crimes. The film does not question their innocence or guilt, but rather our own preconceptions about humanity and the tensions between compassion, punishment, crime, and justice. Distinct Black women’s voices provide the tenderness, rhythm, and urgency of this compelling story.

Since I Been Down is dedicated to broadening conversations across significant differences to inspire all of us to become visionary, liberatory thinkers. Our film bears witness to the triumph of the human spirit, allowing us to take a long look at our humanity. As Carter reminds us, “We can never be someone different—but we can be a better version of who we are.”

To request a screening of Since I Been Down, reach out to the filmmaker at info@sinceibeendown.com.

Yet, when we focus our attention on the data that describes Black maternal mortality, we run the risk of obscuring what many birth workers are doing every day to reduce these disparities and deliver tailored care.

Broadly speaking, birth workers are using data collection tools that fail to meet privacy standards, struggle to perform vital functions, and put patients and workers at risk of colliding with carceral systems. But that snapshot does not tell the full story. “Establishing Vigilant Care: Data Infrastructures and the Black Birthing Experience,” a report I authored, offers a birth-worker-led analysis of how data collection impacts Black patients.

I argue that doulas, midwives, and physicians who center Black patients’ experiences in their approach to care are uniquely attentive to these harms, and use their knowledge about how data collection is implicated in obstetric racism to protect themselves and their patients. In doing so, birth workers’ vigilant practice of adapting their data collection strategies is offering an effective model for protecting pregnant patients’ reproductive rights. 

Across the board, pregnancy and childbirth involve comprehensive data collection. Providers gather patient data through conversations and medical instruments during clinical encounters and enter it into electronic health records. Doulas and midwives collect data about patients’ holistic needs through methods that range from handwritten notes to digital records. Insurance programs, most notably Medicaid, gather demographic and population health information. At home, patients can collect their own data using femtech apps and devices.

For Black pregnant patients, data collection carries gendered and racialized consequences. Data gathered during clinical encounters and on personal devices can be made available to government agencies and law enforcement in ways that criminalize and discipline Black birthing people—leading to imprisonment, child separation, and other forms of surveillance.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, these risks are even greater, as patients and providers fear prosecution for receiving or delivering abortion care. In this environment, efforts to identify and prevent entanglements with carceral systems are even more vital.

Black-centered birth workers provide care designed to address the specific needs of Black birthing people. Rooted in Black American traditions connected to the African diaspora, these experts remain vigilant to obstetric racism and engage in protective strategies. They evade carceral data collection systems by teaching their clients how to navigate clinical encounters, compromise with faulty data collection systems and engineer work-arounds to ensure they can still provide holistic care, and refuse to collect information that can harm themselves or their patients.

Beyond the tech itself, policy changes are shaping how birth workers approach data infrastructures. In response to the Black maternal health crisis, many advocates have called for Medicaid to register doulas as covered providers. The doulas I spoke with expressed trepidation about these efforts, explaining that while they welcome the ability to provide more affordable and accessible services to their clients, the process to become an enrolled provider through Medicaid puts a strain on their practice. 

Doulas typically use low-tech methods to gather data about their patients, opting to use handwritten notes or other forms of basic data collection. In contrast, Medicaid requires providers to meticulously document their care and interface with an online portal that doulas called “a complete utter nightmare.” This clash between traditionally low-tech doula care and the high-tech demands of Medicaid speaks to the larger disconnect between data-intensive approaches to care and the need to protect and better care for Black pregnant patients.

As they manage and deliver care to Black patients, birth workers are contending with the challenges and dangers posed by these different forms of data collection. “This is the future that our current data-driven understanding of the Black maternal health crisis gives to Black birthing people—a sociotechnical imaginary defined by death, dying, violence, incarceration, and mistreatment,” I write in the report. “This is also the future that birth workers and other advocates for Black birthing people are tirelessly working to prevent.”

Rather than a simple case demonstrating the value of Black physicians treating Black patients, when Black-centered birth workers care for both Black patients’ bodies and their data, all pregnant patients benefit. If we hope to improve care for the most vulnerable, preserving the agency these birth workers demonstrate is vital. Rather than turning toward increased or automated data collection, we should follow Black-centered birth workers’ lead as they identify and fight against pressing risks to Black pregnant patients’ right to joyful pregnancy, data privacy, and freedom of choice. 

Harris is pro-Israel and pro-punishment. Recently, at a campaign event in Detroit, she showed attendees how she feels about pro-Palestinian protestors when she shut them down by saying, “If you want Donald Trump to win, say that. Otherwise, I’m speaking.” A week later, Harris offered a more conciliatory tone when protestors interrupted her in Arizona, stating, “Now is time for a cease-fire in Gaza.” So, while I am heartened that Harris’ team seems to be listening to the cries of those demanding an end to this U.S.-backed genocide (maybe), her politics have never thrilled me. Despite that, a part of me found the possibility of a Black woman POTUS exciting. Another part of me grew uneasy as I considered how her elevation would be fuel for blowback against Black women all over the country. 

In my book Black Women Taught Us, I explain how many Black Americans were concerned about President Barack Obama’s safety after his election. Obama began receiving death threats as early as 2007 when he was still a junior U.S. Senator in Illinois, prompting the Secret Service to place him under protection. Many Black Americans are similarly concerned today, not only about Vice President Harris’ safety, but also for the safety of Black women and femmes everywhere as the election has already revealed the deeply racist and misogynoiristic ideas many white Americans, including Donald Trump himself, hold about Black women.

In this social moment, when self-care has become such a central focus for many Black, Brown, disabled, queer, and trans communities, many people have emphasized rest, manicures, massages, and other activities that are physically restorative. While these are habits we should all prioritize, they are insufficient in addressing the underlying effects of exhaustion, stress, emotional burnout, and mental distress that typically stem from the burden of white heteropatriarchal capitalism. We are actively fighting fascism. Many of us are doing so in our personal and professional lives simultaneously. We also have to contend with the fact that the Black woman the left has chosen has not proven that she will protect those most vulnerable among us. The political environment has only heightened the daily violences that many Black women and femmes are expected to endure just to survive. We can’t control any of the ephemera around us. But we can absolutely build safer spaces around us that protect us from the wear and tear of everyday life under this white heteropatriarchal capitalist nation state. 

One of the most important steps I took in creating a healthy space between my mental and emotional life and the violence of the world was enacting boundaries. Nedra Tawwab’s path-breaking book, Set Boundaries, Find Peace, has been an essential handbook for me along this journey. What I learned from Tawwab’s book was not just that we should have boundaries with others, but also that some of the most difficult boundaries to set and keep are the ones we create with ourselves. At this moment, I am fortifying my boundaries with my social media usage, my engagement with toxic people, and my commitment to healing and personal growth.

In 2022, I was in a toxic relationship with a woman who frequently used social media to monitor my behaviors and control me. During that time, I had a major anxiety attack after I found out that her friends and family members would monitor my social media posts and report back to her, creating storylines that linked my comments to our relationship, and instigating ideas that our relationship was struggling. After being harassed by racist trolls in 2021, I realized that people’s actions on social media frequently reflected the ugliest and most violent internal narratives they held about others and often about themselves. It also helped me realize that I could simply remove these people’s access to me permanently. While I had “purged” my friend lists before, I came to the conclusion that these removals of toxic people would have to be a regular occurrence. Annually, in fact.

Every year since, I examine who I am connected with on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (now known as X) to ascertain whom I am allowing to shape my thinking and enter my psychic space each day. I agree with a writer at Salon who suggests that if anything on social media makes you feel bad, it’s OK to eradicate it. But, beyond that, I learned from therapy that any relationships I maintain out of a sense of obligation may potentially be unhealthy. Keeping people around who never interact with me, don’t show any interest in my work or interests, or whose content makes me uncomfortable just because we sat next to each other in 11th grade trigonometry is one way I inflict stress on myself. Cutting my Facebook friends list from nearly 3,000 strangers to 470 friends and colleagues was one of the best things I did for my mental health.

To protect my psychic energy, I have also refrained from engaging in political conversations with people who are committed to misunderstanding me. I put this into practice years ago when I realized that, while I had always assumed that these people would always be angry, racist, white people, there are also, in fact, many people committed to misunderstanding me who look, love, and believe just like me. 

There was a time when I felt drawn into confrontations with other Black and queer people. I felt obligated to teach them, to offer them grace and kindness even when they had extended none toward me. I allowed myself to be controlled by other people’s emotions and their insecurities, mainly because I had successfully convinced myself that I was responsible for soothing and pacifying other people. I finally set a boundary that I would no longer be performing emotional labor for others from a place of guilt and a sense of duty. That energy, I have decided, should be reserved for me.  

Taking personal control of my life and my choices rather than living in response to the whims of the world around me has created the safety and protection I deserve. It has also opened up space in my life for study. I have found in my own Black feminist work and journeying that reading and meditating on the words and works of other Black feminists and queer thinkers has served as both a balm and a site of training. 

This election cycle, I want Black women and femmes to create personal and professional boundaries around themselves that allow them to be their best selves each day. It’s our birthright. And it’s time for us to claim it.

We Tlingit have been harvesting herring eggs for thousands of years. In late March or early April, the herring return to the inlets of Southeast Alaska to lay their eggs in the moss and kelp along the shore. Their arrival heralds the coming of spring—like a door opening into the cold, dark room of winter. The Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian people step out of the darkness and into the light of a world awash with renewed life. Returning salmon feed on the herring, as do many other creatures including halibut, tuna, cod, and seals.

“This place is really, really magical when the herring come,” Khasheechtlaa Louise Brady, head of the grassroots Sitka-based group Herring Protectors, tells me in March. “It’s magical all the time, but when the herring come, it’s amazing. Like right now, the eagles start coming back, and I’m able to go, ‘Ahh … the herring are around the corner. I can make it.’”

This cultural lifeline extended all the way to Seattle when I was a boy. My Aunt Betty or Aunt Amy would bring herring eggs when visiting from Alaska. I didn’t know much about these eggs, except that they were delicious and they were Tlingit. So when I heard the herring egg harvests were being endangered, I set off on a quest to help save this one thread of my mother’s culture that had survived my relocation.

The Herring Egg Dilemma

At its root, the problem is a clash between two worldviews. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game manages the herring fishery using a method called Maximum Sustainable Yield.  According to Thomas Thornton, professor of environment and society at the University of Alaska Southeast, this method measures the physical size of herring population, called the biomass, to determine how much can be safely harvested without endangering the survival of the species.

Commercial fishing boats with permits are allowed to catch between 12% and 20% of the allowable harvest, depending on the state’s yearly biomass estimate. Tons of herring are scooped up in seining nets in Sitka Sound, then transferred to processing boats where lines of workers slit each fish open, remove any egg sacs present, and toss out the herring carcasses. These egg sacs are sold to markets in Japan to make kazunoko, a high-priced delicacy that became popular during that country’s economic boom of the ’90s. The result has been overfishing of the herring fishery.

Thornton has written several books, articles, and reports on the Tlingit connection to the environment and has become an outspoken critic of the state’s method of managing the herring fishery.

“We need a more ecosystem-oriented model to manage herring, not a single-species population model,” Thornton explains.

The current method doesn’t take into account the effect of the herring population on King Salmon, for example, or other species who rely on them.

“You have to think about them in an ecosystem perspective and all that they’re providing to all of these other species, instead of just saying, ‘Oh, well we figure if we catch this many, we’ll be able to sustain this population.’”

And, of course, one of the “species” of this ecosystem are Tlingit people like me who rely on the herring and their eggs to sustain our culture.

We Are All the Same

From her home in Sitka, Alaska, Brady gives me a Tlingit teaching about Raven, the trickster, who once released daylight from a box where his grandfather had been hoarding it. This famous story, commonly known as “Raven Steals the Sun,” has been depicted in Tlingit art for millennia. But most people leave out the ending, in which the sunlight scares everyone, causing them to run away in different directions.

“The people who escaped to the ocean became the fish, and the people who escaped into the air became the birds, and the people who escaped into the forest became the four-leggeds, and so on,” she explains. “So we all started out in the same place, all together, in the dark.”

“This story is like the Tlingit version of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species,” Brady continues. “We’re really all the same, when it comes right down to it.”

Reflecting their worldview, the Tlingit method for harvesting herring eggs is much gentler and more respectful. The Tlingit prepare nice, comfy places for the herring to spawn, securing rows of hemlock boughs in the water, and then waiting for the fish to come and coat the branches with fresh herring eggs. Thornton explains how special this method of harvesting is.

“The herring have a choice,” Thornton says. “They can choose to spawn in your area, or they can go somewhere else. You cultivate them to choose the area where you want them to spawn. You do that materially with your hemlock branches but also another way is with your songs, your prayers, your invocations. And that’s another idea that’s pretty foreign to science.”

In a sense, the herring and the Tlingit share a culture during the spawning season. We rely on each other, in a way that could be termed a “covenant.” When this covenant is broken or damaged, life goes out of balance as it did for me.

The Pain of Losing My Culture

In 1960, my family moved from Juneau to Seattle to escape the racism my white father and Tlingit mother experienced in Alaska. Two months before my third birthday, we moved into a house in a poor Seattle neighborhood called Georgetown, not far from the industrialized Duwamish River and Todd Shipyard.

I was too young to understand what had happened. Juneau is a lush, green town hung as if in a hammock of protection between Mount Juneau to the east and Gastineau Channel to the west. The town was slow-paced when I was little and filled with round, brown faces, many of whom were related to me.

But Seattle was huge and noisy and filled with unfriendly people. At first, I thought we were only visiting and would eventually return to Juneau. I hated Seattle, and waited for the day when we would return home.

On my third birthday, as my mom placed a birthday cake in front of me, I finally understood. We were never going back. If we were, we would have returned before my birthday. With this realization, I blew out the candles and ran off to hide under the front porch.

I didn’t have the ability to express what I was feeling or process the enormous grief. I shoved my anger and sadness deep down inside me, like holding a beach ball underwater. Every once in a while, the beach ball would slip from my unconscious grasp and pop up into the real world, causing me to create a crisis or a catastrophe for no apparent reason.

This put a wedge between me and my parents, in particular between me and my father. No one understood at the time, not even me, that what I craved was a Tlingit elder, an uncle to teach me the way of my clan.

A Tlingit Elder Speaks Out

In 1997 testimony before the Alaska Board of Fisheries, Tlingit elder Mark Jacobs Jr. of the Dakl’aweidi (Killer Whale) clan explained the problem of the commercial sac roe industry in a uniquely Tlingit way.

“I’ve never seen anything worse than sac roe fishing,” he testified. “I would say that, allegorically speaking, it’s worse than taking a whole herd of deer and killing them all and taking only the liver, and from the doe only.”

Jacobs told the board of fisheries how he had monitored a spawning ground the previous year. The spawning activity looked robust. When the fish dissipated a few days later, he went to inspect the area.

“There were no herring roe on the beach,” he told the board members. “That’s what you call ‘false spawn.’ In my early days, those things were never known. When the herring spawned, you were sure to get what you’re after, herring roe on branches, herring roe on all the kelp and on all the rocks.”

Commercial fishermen at the meeting had already given testimony that they saw plenty of herring swimming around Sitka Sound. They believed the Native subsistence harvesters were overreacting.

But Jacobs explained that the fishermen in their boats and the board of fisheries members in their offices in Juneau had no way of knowing what was really going on. To know that, you have to get close to them and become an intimate part of their life cycle, just as the Tlingit have done for thousands of years.

The board of fisheries had no idea or concern that sac roe fishing during the spawning season stressed the herring population and removed the vital herring elders, the “experienced spawners,” from their schools right at a time when their knowledge was most needed.

The loss of this herring cultural wisdom must be devastating for the herring, just as it was for the Tlingit, Haida, and all Native people.

Returning to My Mother’s Homeland

My mother’s family originally came from Sitka. As members of the Kaagwaantaan clan, our roots there go back farther than anyone can remember. The community is the center of traditional herring egg harvesting, which is why my aunties always brought some when they visited. It was part of our family’s heritage.

As I recall, my mom blanched the herring eggs while they were still attached to the branches. I devoured those eggs off the twigs, picking the hemlock needles from my teeth as my mom and aunties talked, laughed, and drank tea.

According to Alaska state law, subsistence herring eggs cannot be bought or sold. They can only be shared, gifted, or bartered. Free from the taint of money, they take on a spiritual quality for most Tlingit people. I intuitively understood as a boy that eating herring eggs is being loved.

So when I heard in December 2023 that the Sitka Tribe of Alaska had lost its final appeal in a lawsuit against the state of Alaska for mismanagement of the herring fishery, I traveled to Sitka to attend the annual Herring Honoring Ceremony put on by the group Herring Protectors. On Saturday, April 6, 2024, I stood with my Tlingit brothers and sisters in Totem Square on the shores of Sitka Sound and sang—or tried to sing—a song in Tlingit honoring the herring people, the Yaaw. One verse went:

Aa hei Yaaw hei Yaaw hei
Aa hei Yaaw hei Yaaw hei
Yee xhatulatseen (We cherish you)
Hei Yaaw hei Yaaw hei Yaaw
Hei Yaaw hei Yaaw hei Yaaw

A line of people wearing beautiful ceremonial robes with form line depictions of the herring and of the mythical Herring Woman on them turned to the water and sang the song to the herring while waving little hemlock branches. They then turned around and sang the same song to the people gathered.

The singing, the robes, and the branches became a liminal space between the Tlingit and the herring, where the two groups of relatives blended. The boundary between us dissolved as our identities flowed back and forth.

Brady, a member of the Kiks.adi clan and the main coordinator of the Herring Protectors, told the story of the Herring Woman, Kaxátjaashaa, who would sit on a large rock on the shoreline and sing to the herring. The little fish came and danced in the water before her. Kaxátjaashaa then lowered her hair into the water and the herring laid their eggs in it, thus forming the bond between the two tribes.

Later, about 50 of us boarded a catamaran and traveled to two pieces of land that had recently been donated to the Herring Protectors by allies Rachel Myron and Stephen Lewis. On the way we sang Tlingit songs, offered tobacco to our ancestors, and blessed the land by offering a sacred copper Tlingit shield, a tináa, into the waters offshore of it.

A young man offered me a bowl of herring egg salad, and for the first time in years I felt the eggs crunch silently in my mouth. Suddenly, I was 10 years old again, back at our old kitchen table listening to my mom and aunts talking. They occasionally used Tlingit words when they didn’t want me to understand something. Then they would cover their mouths and burst out laughing.

I was roused from this memory by a Tlingit elder named Harriet, who was in her 90s. She came and sat by me and asked if I was related to so-and-so, because I looked just like him. She told me about her family’s past and about the history of our tribe. When the group sang, she joined in and danced, bouncing and rocking back and forth, still full of the joy of life and of being Tlingit.

That’s when I saw that being Tlingit isn’t something that can be taken away. I have been separated from my homeland, but part of it is always with me. I never lost it. My father never took it from me. The herring kept hold of me. Across all the years and all the miles, they held onto me.

As the catamaran filled with us Tlingit people zoomed through the waters of Sitka Sound, I felt like a herring swimming with my school to a spawning ground.

The herring do not have voices. That’s why people like Khasheechtlaa Louise Brady and the Herring Protectors must speak for them. All the herring can do is wiggle and jiggle when they spawn, creating a vibration that harvesters can sometimes feel, that speaks in an ancient language, a vibration that we Tlingit from Sitka carry and feel in our hearts.

But as the older couple drove in circles around the suddenly unfamiliar streets of Fresno, California, Singh feared they’d be spending the night in their car. 

Singh, 72, had struggled with bad eyesight for years. At the meatpacking plant where he works the night shift, he strained to see the hooks for hanging chickens and worried he might trip over stray pieces of meat on the floor. His wife’s eyesight was even worse. Kaur, 69, fell frequently because she couldn’t see obstacles and uneven ground in front of her. She once had to go to the emergency room after hitting her head and spraining her wrist in a fall.

Neither could see street signs well enough to read them. Singh had memorized the routes to work and the supermarket. But on this Sunday, a few months ago, road construction blocked the exit to Walmart. Signs directed drivers to an alternate route. At one junction, a sign said turn right. Singh turned left. He soon realized he was lost.

“I was worried,” Singh said through a Punjabi translator during a recent interview at the rental apartment he shares with Kaur. “I didn’t know what to do.”

Singh and Kaur are among an estimated 50,000 immigrants and their descendants from the Indian state of Punjab living in Fresno, and one of the largest ethnic groups in the Central Valley. They’re an important part of the region’s agricultural workforce, laboring in fields, packing plants, and the trucking industry. While some Punjabi residents own farmland or other businesses and have built successful careers, others—particularly older and more recent immigrants working low-wage jobs—struggle to access critical health services and basic necessities. Like Singh and Kaur, they sometimes live with ailments such as poor eyesight and tooth decay, or diabetes and kidney disease without getting the care they need.

Into the void left by a health care system that doesn’t offer sufficient translation services and an economy that demands grueling labor from low-wage agricultural and meatpacking workers, Punjabi residents have created an organization to help each other. The Jakara Movement, a nonprofit founded by local Punjabi Sikh residents, has a team of five community health workers who visit Sikh temples (known as gurdwaras), community events, and Punjabi-populated neighborhoods to talk about ways to better manage health challenges and assist in accessing health care and other services. Since launching the program in 2020, the workers have organized over 41 health resource fairs, shared information at dozens of community events, taught more than 90 workshops on health-related topics, and helped at least 4,000 people with issues ranging from enrolling in Medi-Cal to obtaining nutritious food to understanding how to ask for an interpreter at the doctor’s office.

Punjabi people trace their lineage to the Punjab region of modern-day India and Pakistan. For more than a century, Punjabi residents have lived in California’s Central Valley, often laboring as farmworkers and sometimes establishing farms themselves. More recent Punjabi immigrants often settle in the Central Valley because of family ties and work opportunities. A majority of those living in the region are members of the Sikh religion, although some practice other faiths, including Hinduism or Islam. The Jakara Movement’s community health worker program is led by Punjabi Sikh residents but assists people of other faiths and ethnicities too.

Like other immigrant communities in California, Punjabi residents face numerous barriers to achieving and maintaining good health. Those in low-wage jobs often struggle to afford healthy food and adequate housing. They may not have money to pay for medical care or transportation to get to doctor’s appointments. Some don’t have health insurance, or the coverage they get through their employer is inadequate. Stress from working long hours or multiple jobs can also take a toll on their physical and mental health.

Language is another obstacle. About half of Punjabi speakers in California don’t speak English well, according to Naindeep Singh, Jakara Movement’s executive director. (Naindeep Singh uses the same last name as Nirmal Singh but is not related. Members of the Sikh faith often use the last name Singh if they are male and Kaur if they are female, as a rejection of the Indian caste system and a symbol of unity and equality.) Information on state and federal programs such as Medi-Cal, Covered California, and USDA farm worker relief grants isn’t offered in Punjabi or is poorly translated, Naindeep Singh said. Health insurance letters and bills are often sent in English, requiring the recipient to call a helpline if they need translation. Even when writing is in Punjabi, which uses a different writing script than English, some community members can’t make sense of it because they do not know how to read or the language is too formal.

Finding Punjabi-speaking medical providers is also difficult. Community members often don’t realize they have the right under state law to request interpretation for medical appointments or ask for translations of health documents, said Mandip Kaur, Jakara Movement’s health program manager. Even calling to ask for interpretation can seem daunting.

Some rely on English-speaking family members to help them navigate medical care. But not all community members have access to this kind of help. Many also feel ashamed to ask for assistance from people outside of their community or fear they might be scammed or face discrimination, Mandip Kaur said.

“When you talk about overall health and knowledge, the biggest, biggest [barrier] is language access,” she said. “It’s one of the reasons we have a lot of community members come to us to make phone calls for them, dispute billing for them.”

For Nirmal Singh and Daljit Kaur, not speaking English makes many aspects of life difficult. On the day they got lost on their way to Walmart, they drove around for two hours trying to find a Punjabi person to ask for directions because they didn’t know how to communicate their predicament to an English speaker.

It was one of the reasons they hadn’t sought help in Fresno for their vision problems either. How would they find an optometrist, they asked, let alone communicate with an English-speaking provider? The other problem was financial. Nirmal Singh’s employer-sponsored health insurance doesn’t cover dental or vision care. He couldn’t afford to pay for an optometry visit out of pocket.

That Sunday in the car, the couple did eventually stop an English-speaking passerby because it was getting dark and they couldn’t find a Punjabi resident. Nirmal Singh pointed to his address, which he keeps written on a piece of paper in his car, for just such a situation, and the passerby drew them a map. Ten minutes later, the couple pulled up to their apartment. Their vision problems, however, remained unresolved.

By and for the Community

The Jakara Movement’s community health worker program began during the pandemic. Before that, the organization, founded in 2000, focused mainly on youth leadership and development at high schools and colleges throughout the state.

But the pandemic pushed the organization to expand its focus. Fresno County hired the Jakara Movement to help with contact tracing of Punjabi residents exposed to COVID-19 and to educate people about the virus and how to protect themselves. Later, the Jakara Movement helped organize and translate at vaccine clinics. With support from the city of Fresno, the nonprofit also assisted community members in signing up for rental assistance and government aid for people working in the food industry. At the height of these efforts, the organization had about 20 community health workers.

But there were community members still waiting for help. People began coming to Jakara staff members with questions about non-COVID health concerns, how to access medical care in Punjabi, submit medical bills and paperwork, and resolve labor issues. Many didn’t understand their health care rights or were misinformed because there was so little reliable information available in their language.

“COVID brought up this whole other world of ‘How do we help our youth if we don’t help their families as well?’” Mandip Kaur said.

With a grant from the city, the Jakara Movement launched a health literacy program. Community health workers set up tables at local gurdwaras where they offered information in Punjabi about managing ailments such as diabetes and hypertension, translated health documents, signed people up for Medi-Cal and other government programs, and answered questions about finding medical care, dealing with wage theft, and resolving immigration issues. They held workshops in Punjabi on navigating the health care system, healthy eating, asthma, heat illness, and mental health.

Word of the assistance soon spread. Inderjeet Singh Brar, 55, got help signing up for rental assistance and Medi-Cal, allowing him to stay housed after he lost his job and get treatment after a heart attack. Soon he began bringing his neighbors to meet with the health workers too.

“Jakara helped me when I really needed help, so that’s why I trust Jakara for other community members,” he said through a translator. “When I was drowning, they threw me a lifesaver.”

The community health workers also began organizing health resource fairs for Punjabi residents and provided translation and information at events held by other organizations. The fairs bring in medical providers to offer free health screenings and local agencies such as the Department of Social Services and Area Agency on Aging to sign people up for Medi-Cal, Medicare, and other social safety-net programs. Community health workers also regularly go door-to-door in Punjabi neighborhoods to offer their services and tell people about upcoming events.

“We’ve learned we have to go to people. We have to go to where they’re at; they’re not going to come to us,” Mandip Kaur said. “When someone has so much on their brain and so much on their shoulders, it’s a task” to seek out health resources.

On one recent visit to an apartment complex, Mandip Kaur helped a man understand a letter he’d received in English from the local Medi-Cal plan, CalViva Health, telling him he’d lost his benefits. She promised to help him resolve the matter the next day. She also pulled out her phone to show a visiting neighbor how to get to a local food bank and information about an upcoming job fair.

Also at the apartment complex, resident Manjit Kaur, 58, expressed thanks for the Jakara Movement community health worker who helped her quickly get an appointment with a Punjabi-speaking dentist after she became bedridden with tooth pain. Her friend, Kulwant Kaur, 62, said the Jakara Movement had helped her obtain rental and food assistance after her husband died. 

“Thank God they’re there to help us,” said Kulwant Kaur, whose adult children live in India. “They’re like our daughters and kids that we have here.”

A Trip to the Optometrist

One regular event the Jakara Movement organizes is a monthly farmers market at a park on the west side of Fresno, where many community members live. Named after a Sikh human rights activist, Jaswant Singh Khalra Park is within walking distance of several housing complexes where many Punjabi residents live. On a given day you might see older men in turbans playing cards, women in saris pushing strollers, and young people playing cricket on the baseball field. The farmers market caters to the community with fresh produce such as mustard plant that can be used to cook traditional dishes like saag. And it provides another opportunity for Jakara Movement workers to connect with community members.

It was at the May farmers market that Jakara Movement community health worker Harjit Kaur spotted Nirmal Singh and Daljit Kaur, who live nearby. She’d met them at one of the Jakara Movement’s health fairs earlier in the year, where they’d mentioned their need for eye exams. There was no optometrist at that health fair. But Harjit Kaur had just heard about a free, mobile vision clinic run by a nonprofit organization in another part of town. Would Nirmal Singh and Daljit Kaur like to go?

Harjit Kaur spent the rest of the day with the couple. Because Nirmal Singh’s vision made him hesitant to drive and his wife doesn’t drive at all, Harjit Kaur drove them to the clinic herself, stopping by their apartment to pick up an old pair of Nirmal Singh’s glasses. She interpreted during the eye exams, which took several hours. The next day, she picked up the couple’s new prescription glasses and dropped them off at their apartment.

This ability to spend time with the people they’re serving and understand their needs is what makes community health workers so valuable, said Andrea Mackey, who oversees a community health worker coalition on behalf of the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network. These workers are from the communities they work with. They understand the lives, culture, and language of the people they help and are passionate about the work they do. This allows them to build trust and serve as a bridge between underserved communities and mainstream systems. In fact, community health workers have been shown to improve people’s health, lower health care costs, and reduce health disparities.

“It’s an anti-racist strategy, shifting power to the people who experience health care inequities,” Mackey said, although she acknowledged “bigger structural problems” such as the cost and complexity of America’s health care system, particularly for people of color who don’t speak English or are low income.

For Harjit Kaur and other Jakara Movement health workers, helping the community is just as much a calling as it is a job. Selfless service to others, or seva, is a key tenet of Sikhism. The workers do everything they can to assist people, whether that’s driving them to doctor’s appointments, accompanying them to the DMV, or translating during a medical visit. Harjit Kaur and Mandip Kaur said they also donate a portion of each paycheck back to the Jakara Movement, their temple, or people in need. 

“When I came to Jakara, I found the purpose of my life,” said Harjit Kaur, who became a community health worker after raising three children and leaving a difficult marriage. “Helping my own community, speaking my own language, and getting paid—it’s a blessing.”

The work is also an extension of what some of the workers were already doing for family members and neighbors. Mandip Kaur, for example, grew up translating and making phone calls for her parents, who arrived in the U.S. when she was 3.  Community Health Worker Gurpreet Singh, 25, who lives in nearby Madera, is the go-to translator for his parents and their Punjabi-speaking friends. He’s seen firsthand how language, information, and transportation barriers prevent people from getting help.

“I think the role that community health workers play is super important,” he said. “Sometimes it’s as important as a doctor. A doctor’s visit is scheduled for 15 minutes, 30 minutes max. But what we do as community health workers is really listen to the community members, take our time, and build that trust.”

California has around 8,700 community health workers, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, although Mackey says that’s likely an undercount because not all people doing the work classify themselves as such. Like the Jakara Movement, many organizations pay for these workers with grants and donations. But in July 2022, California began paying for community health worker services for Medi-Cal enrollees. The rollout of this benefit has been bumpy, due to administrative challenges and low reimbursement rates. A pay increase next year for workers providing services to Medi-Cal enrollees is expected to provide some relief.

The state needs more community health worker programs like the Jakara Movement’s, particularly for Punjabi residents, said Simranjit Mann, a graduate student in public health from California State University, Fresno. Mann did her master’s thesis on barriers Punjabi residents in Fresno face in accessing diabetes care. She said she was surprised at the scarcity of research on the health care needs of Punjabi people living in the U.S. and culturally effective interventions. Expanding these types of programs will require more research to understand what works best so it can be replicated, she added.

The Jakara Movement is currently preparing to do its own research on how to best help Punjabi families achieve and maintain good health, Naindeep Singh said. Later this year the organization plans to launch a three-year program that will serve 500 Punjabi-speaking families in Fresno and hire additional community health workers to visit them regularly, conduct basic health screenings, and survey them about their health needs and challenges. The goal is to help these families access the resources they need and, by analyzing the results, build a better understanding of how to best serve them.

“At the most basic level, I hope the families have an immediate benefit in terms of what they thought was possible,” Naindeep Singh said. “And I hope there’s a larger story to tell about how we should be doing health in Fresno and California … reaching out to people where they live, appreciating and recognizing them and their autonomy to make choices, and just helping them reach the goals they set.”

Meanwhile, Nirmal Singh and Daljit Kaur are already benefiting from the existing community health worker program. They both have up-to-date prescription glasses. Nirmal Singh can see clearly at work, and he’s no longer afraid to drive. Daljit Kaur isn’t falling as much as she used to. But the optometrist said she will need cataract surgery to fully restore her eyesight. Mandip Kaur and Harjit are looking into low-cost options for her.

“I’m very, very thankful,” Nirmal Singh said.

This story was produced in collaboration with the California Health Report. Aallyah Wright with Capital B, Emily Schabacker with Cardinal News, Claudia Rivera Cotto with Enlace Latino NC, and Jenny Stratton with CatchLight contributed to this report. This story is part of a collaborative reporting effort led by the Institute for Nonprofit News’ Rural News Network. Support from the Walton Family Foundation made the project possible.

This is one of my deepest truths: If we are in relationship, no matter how scared or unskilled I may be, I want to repair with you. Part political commitment, part survival strategy, part just essence of who I am, holding out hope for repair is at my core.

Rupture is a given. We will disagree. We will hurt each other. We will sometimes find ourselves facing the irreconcilable. And we will need ways to make ourselves—and each other—whole in the aftermath of rupture.

I have grappled with the dynamics of repair throughout more than 20 years of practice with transformative and restorative justice. In this age of deepening cultural and political divides, facing the election of our lifetimes and whatever comes after, it is more critical than ever that we learn how to be in principled conflict and repair with each other. Three things stand out to me in this high-stakes historical moment: We have much to learn about the possibilities of genuine repair, our unrepaired places are where we are most vulnerable to ongoing harm and domination, and the human capacity for repair is vast and stunning—when we are given the support to move toward it. 

The Possibilities of Repair

This seems to be a principle of dominant society, often internalized and acted out by our communities and families: You will live wounded, unrepaired, and you better not expect anything more. Yet this grim promise is juxtaposed with an evolutionary drive toward relational healing. I believe each of us comes from a lineage—no matter how buried—that knew how to heal, how to repair with each other. Throughout history, we have survived by bringing our harms to the circle of community and quite literally humming and drumming through them together. It is by design that most of us have no living memory of these possibilities. And still, they are there. We can find them. 

We don’t have to repair in every possible direction in order to have a meaningful experience of repair. The criminal legal system, especially in the United States, has limited our imagination to a zero-sum game: There’s a victim and a monster, and punishment is the only healing anyone gets. While this system may not have room for the possibilities of repair, our communities do. Sometimes we can’t repair with the person who hurt us most, but repair is possible within ourselves, with our close people, and with our larger community, which can offer us the medicine we need.

The Unrepaired

Those organizing systems of supremacy exploit our unrepaired wounds for their gain. They use them to split us, to co-opt us, to draw us to their ranks. They understand that without repair, the trauma they unleash will create cycles of violence in which our survival strategies will never get us to freedom. And despite our critique of these systems and strategies, many of us have internalized the carceral logic that tells us our best shot at healing requires separation from and disposal of those who have hurt us. How many projects have you seen fall apart, how many coalitions are under strain, because when conflict happens, we quickly choose sides, close ranks, and tell each other the story of how impossible and unworthy repair is?

It is time for us to tell each other new stories. People change differently than systems do. The strategies we use to push back on systems, to force them to change through shame and blame, do not produce life-giving change in people. The work of repair requires us to risk beyond our righteousness and bridge across narrow notions of identity, allegiance, and whose pain “counts.” When we can hold the pain of multiple, divergent truths and lived experiences, we can remember our wholeness, our shared humanity, and let it guide us towards the mass-based people power we need to win.

Our Stunning Capacity

I will never forget sitting in a basement courtroom as Jonathan read his survivor impact statement, for the first time seeing the face of his shooter. He told in excruciating detail how the random shooting, as he was gardening on an early spring evening, had paralyzed him for the rest of his life, putting him in daily unrelenting pain, taking his career as a carpenter, his love of movement in sports and outdoors, and leaving him to answer his newborn daughter’s questions when she someday soon asks, “Why can’t Papa walk?” In the midst of all this, Jonathan told the court, “A longer sentence will not help me heal, and I don’t believe that more time will help my shooter. My shooter can’t undo what he did on June 6th, and locking him away for longer will not enable him to heal. I believe he deserves a chance to do better.” 

I’ve found that the degree to which people can be open to the humanity of those who have hurt them is directly related to the degree to which they have been held well in their own wounding. Facing and feeling the immensity of our losses, the dignity of our rage, the depth of our sorrow, grows our capacity for connection beyond what we can imagine. I’ve seen it while holding circle with Jonathan and so many other survivors of profound violence, with everything they’ve lost, still reaching across the chasm of excruciating pain for repair. 

The Irreconcilable

And then, there is that which is irreconcilable. This word has often felt like the truest thing in the aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023. I was sitting in a grief ritual, surrounded by safe, imperfect humans, looking at an altar full of things we love and have lost, and I could not reconcile the images in my head of what was happening in Gaza at that exact same moment. I looked out the window at the trees blowing in the breeze, my child playing, warm food in my belly, and I couldn’t make sense of it. Why are we here and not in the midst of a genocide? How can life be like this and like that? Marching and organizing and sitting on bridges and still, this terrible ache, this desperate feeling of complicity and helplessness. And so I fell down and wept, screamed and flailed with all that is unreconciled, irreconcilable. 

Facing the irreconcilable is part of repair. It is the part where we get really honest about the things and the people that we cannot change—at least in this lifetime. It requires the vulnerability to surrender into the limits of our agency, to know that we tried as hard as we could and still did not get what we wanted, what we needed, what we deserved. When we cannot face the irreconcilable, we often try to destroy each other instead. Our grief and rage get directed at each other, as we cannot tolerate the contradictions we live within—and which live within us. 

Rather than annihilating those with whom we can’t repair, we can draw close to our trusted people and grieve what we do not know how to resolve. In this way, we can repair with ourselves and each other, even when accountability and justice are not possible. Repair is to make whole, not to make perfect. Not even to make right. Some things will never be made right. In accepting this and finding ways to live together with it, we expand our capacity to repair in the places where the openings are.

And so, I want to learn to repair with you. I want to sit in the circle with you, tell you in the rawest detail about how I’ve been hurt, even by you, and hear in the rawest detail, how you’ve been hurt, even by me. I want to hold it all, together. Witness the carnage, grieve it in the loudest and quietest of ways. Face the irreconcilable. Agree not to annihilate each other, even when we are heartbroken. I want to try and try again. It’s the place I’ve found the most palpable hope, in the face of all that we are up against. I believe you can find it there too. We can find it together.

It’s past time that a woman—and especially a woman of color—occupied the Oval Office. In a nation as multiracial as the United States, it makes sense to have racial and gender diversity in the halls of power. On that point alone, Harris’ candidacy is exciting. But politics is about much more than demographic representation.   

It is a strange, new phenomenon for women of color like me to see a brown-skinned woman come this close to the highest office in the country. Many of us hate the idea of elections as popularity contests and are genuinely turned off by the emotional attachments that some voters form toward candidates, lifting them up as saviors. But we live in a nation where Harris’ racial and gender identity are deeply politicized. Republicans have already rushed to dismiss her as the “DEI candidate” (based on the acronym for diversity, equity, and inclusion), a telling opening salvo in an election that will inevitably be framed as a referendum on whether women of color are full human beings, rather than which issues and policies best meet the country’s needs. 

As people of color in the U.S., we live with the ugly racial politics of respectability: the idea that if someone who looks like us fails to meet dominant white culture’s standards for “propriety”—if a person of color is deeply flawed or if they commit a crime, for instance—all people of color are to blame. Harris’ inevitable missteps and human imperfections will be weaponized and used as justification to further deny women of color political power and agency. Of course, as the prior two presidential administrations have demonstrated, the shortcomings of white male leaders are rarely seen as negative reflections on all white men. 

In other words, for women of color, Harris is us, and we are Harris, whether we like it or not. And I, for one, don’t like it one bit. I want demographic and political representation. After all, wealthy white men have had both for generations. 

The attacks on Harris were ugly enough in 2020 when Biden picked her to be his running mate. Every right-wing internet meme, every racist and sexist insult emerging from Trump’s mouth, felt as though it was aimed at women of color as a whole—a sector of U.S. society that still has the lowest democratic representation in federal government. And while we work to withstand this escalation of hateful, often violent rhetoric, we must simultaneously find ways to focus on—and assess for ourselves—the policies she actually espouses.

What I want to know is whether Harris will disavow herself from the Biden administration’s enthusiastic financing and arming of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Will she pull back U.S. support from the apartheid state?

I’d love to know whether her domestic economic policies are going to be as progressive as Biden’s—or more so. How much will she improve on “Bidenomics”?

Indeed, what will Harris do on climate change, prisons and policing (a particularly salient question given her history as a prosecutor and California attorney general), the Supreme Court, LGBTQ rights, reproductive rights, gun laws, immigration reform, or education? 

These are the issues that matter. 

Meanwhile, celebrating the fact that Harris will face off against Donald Trump as a former prosecutor against a convicted felon is not helpful. The deadly toll of policing and prisons in the U.S. has been felt most seriously in Black and Brown communities. Think about the fact that those attending the Republican National Convention (RNC) held up pro-police and anti-immigrant signs saying “Back the Blue” and “Mass Deportations Now.” 

Although Harris ought to be viewed as “blue” in such a context—not because she’s a Democrat but because she is California’s former “top cop”—the RNC’s attendees likely understood that policing and immigration enforcement are white supremacist institutions, regardless of whether their enforcers sometimes have non-white faces. 

Ultimately, the right will make Harris out to be far more aggressive than she is likely to be as president. The left will expect she’ll do nothing right, while those in the center might project their wildest dreams on to her as the savior of the nation. Most likely, if she becomes president, she’ll be a complicated version of all three. 

Savvy voters understand that elections—especially in a system designed to dilute our vote through the electoral college—are about making strategic choices that get us closer to realizing the world we want to live in. Seasoned activists, keen political observers, and most people who have paid attention to modern history, know that the real work of accountability happens between elections. And the 2024 election is about all that—and dealing a death blow to fascism and white supremacy. 

Thinking dispassionately about the election in such a manner is going to be harder than ever for people who look like Kamala Harris: South Asian women like me, Black women, and those who are the beautiful products of both South Asian and Black ancestry. 

Many of us want Harris to be held to the same high standards that we held Biden, Obama, Clinton, and other politicians to. It’s likely that she will be no better or no worse on issues than her Democratic predecessors, except that the expectations on her will be higher by virtue of her demographics. By the same token, the pressure on her to prove she won’t be biased toward people of color will be high too. Already, media pundits are advising her to tack toward the center. 

In the end, a president is going to allow themselves to be pushed on some issues and not on others. For example, a centrist such as Joe Biden moved to the left on domestic issues, largely because he felt grassroots pressure to do so. Yet on arming Israel in its genocide in Gaza, he refused to budge, no matter how high the political cost. Harris will likely be similar, except she’ll face the added pressures of embodying the sort of person the hard right fears and loathes.

If Harris becomes president, women of color will lead movements to hold her accountable. At the same time, we will become proxies for her, and the racist and sexist assaults she faces will impact us as well. 

So here’s the main memo: Your brown-skinned sisters are not going to be OK between now and November. We neither want you to fawn over Harris and uncritically throw your support behind her, nor do we want to allow Trump to retake office. Rather, vote as though your life depends on it—because ours does. And then work to hold accountable whoever occupies the White House next January.

Within a month, Dismer’s body began changing in painful and traumatic ways. Their chest grew larger, triggering gender dysphoria, and their preexisting health conditions quickly threatened both their health and the health of the pregnancy. “It was miserable,” they told WeTestify, an abortion storytelling organization. “After a month of contemplation, I knew I needed an abortion.”

It isn’t uncommon for nonbinary people to seek abortion care: A 2023 analysis by the Guttmacher Institute found that as many as one in six abortion patients do not identify as heterosexual women. But too often, the language used by abortion clinics, abortion funds, and abortion advocacy organizations don’t reflect that reality.

“We’ve been the sole statewide abortion fund for 32 years, and we’ve prided ourselves on supporting folks from all backgrounds,” Sam Woodring, communications manager for the Abortion Fund of Ohio, said in an email. The fund, which used to be known as Women Have Options, intentionally changed its name in 2022 to be more inclusive of abortion seekers who don’t identify as cisgender women.

“When we use gendered language, the implicit message is that folks not included are unworthy of that care [and] support,” Woodring says. “To need support getting an abortion, and the only option available to you is also deeply gender-exclusive can be yet another barrier to accessing the care they [trans and nonbinary folks] want, need, and deserve.”

Moving Beyond the Battle of the Sexes

When freestanding abortion clinics and abortion funds emerged in the 1970s, many deliberately branded as being women’s-health focused. This was the age of second wave feminism, when activists tried to assert and establish women’s rights at every level of government. In 1970, Title X provided federal grants for contraception; Roe v. Wade established the constitutional right to an abortion in 1973. At the time, these were considered to be “women’s health” services.

But 50 years later, our understanding of gender has moved beyond the binary of “man” and “woman”—and it’s well past time for abortion care organizations and clinics to reflect that.

The Abortion Fund of Ohio is one of many organizations and funds that have rebranded in an effort to become more gender inclusive. Previously known as the Gateway Women’s Access Fund, the Missouri Abortion Fund rebranded in 2020, well before Roe was overturned with the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The Abortion Liberation Fund of Pennsylvania changed its name from the Women’s Medical Fund in 2021. Hope Clinic, the independent abortion clinic where Dismer works, was known as Hope Clinic for Women until early 2023.

Unfortunately, this tidal wave of change has been criticized for “erasing women.” Apparently, changing our language about abortion to be more inclusive and ensure access for everyone who wants, needs, and has an abortion is unfair and discriminatory to those who have fought “this long and this hard only to be told we [can’t] call ourselves women anymore.”

Rebranding an organization to be gender inclusive and using language like “pregnant people” does not mean that someone who identifies as a woman can no longer call themself a woman. Woodring of the Abortion Fund of Ohio sums it up well: “Making the switch to gender-inclusive language hurts no one, because, as we like to remind folks, women are people too.”

Rebranding to Reality

Trans and nonbinary people have always existed, and while the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s may not have had the language or understanding to contextualize abortion rights within a gender-inclusive framework, we do now. Refusing to do so, continuing to say “women’s reproductive rights,” and specifically spelling out in the name of a clinic or fund that it serves “women” are all ways that deny the very existence of trans, nonbinary, and gender-expansive people.

And, since research now shows that one in six people who have an abortion don’t identify as a heterosexual woman, it’s harmful to continue to insist that abortion or reproductive health care is a “women’s issue.”

Some clinics, like Boulder Valley Health Center (BVHC), have been providing gender-affirming care and other health care services to people of all genders for years. BVHC, previously known as Boulder Valley Women’s Health, dropped “women” from its name in 2023, the 50th anniversary of the Colorado-based clinic. The clinic’s choice reflected the expansive care it had long been providing.

“We’ve always actually served anyone,” director of development Jennifer Johnson told the Colorado Sun. “It doesn’t matter what people’s gender identity is; we’re here to serve the whole community … we really wanted to make sure that everyone in the community knows they’re welcome here for their health care, however they identify.”

For other clinics, pivoting to gender-inclusive language reflects the stark reality that it’s illegal for some of them to provide abortion care at all.

Once Roe was overturned, abortion became illegal in the state of Alabama. Robin Marty, executive director of WAWC Healthcare (formerly West Alabama Women’s Center) in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, knew she needed to keep the clinic open to provide other types of reproductive and sexual health care. 

WAWC shut down for more than a week in the wake of the Dobbs decision. When it reopened on July 7, 2022, the clinic had revised its entire model. “We were then officially a nonprofit, sliding-scale health care center,” Marty says. “We built our new services around all of that, and that included HIV testing and treatment and prevention, as well as doing gender-affirming health care.”

In 2024, West Alabama Women’s Center became WAWC. The clinic waited to change its name because it was uncertain if it would be able to remain open at all. It took nearly two years for “us to feel that we were actually going to be able to stay open permanently,” Marty explained. “Before that, it didn’t make any sense to try to put into place an entire branding change if we thought we were only going to be operating for another month or two.”

Now, more than two years after Dobbs eradicated the constitutional right to an abortion, WAWC is still open and serving patients. WAWC doesn’t provide abortion care, but, true to its new gender-inclusive name, it does perform a wide range of reproductive and sexual health care options.

“We provide gender-affirming care across the state,” Marty said. “It’s not just those [in Tuscaloosa] who are coming to the clinic. We’ve been able to do a telemed program … We’re actually able to provide medication to people regardless of where they are in the state.”

It’s unclear whether WAWC will ever be able to provide abortion care again, but if it does, its gender-inclusive name will signal its willingness to accept abortion patients of all genders. Even if abortion remains illegal in Alabama, WAWC’s rebrand, as other clinic and fund rebrands, hold an important lesson for clinics and funds nationwide: Changing a name to be gender-inclusive isn’t a rhetorical exercise. 

Being gender-inclusive is about reflecting the many genders a clinic already serves. It’s about welcoming patients of all genders, no matter how they identify. It’s about signaling to the broader culture, to the entire country, that access to safe abortion care is for everyone.

The past few years have felt like a sequence of disappointments as political leaders, celebrities, large corporate brands, news outlets, and political parties have leaned further away from truth-telling and the bravery of accountability and instead toward profit margins and easy ways out. If the Band-Aid brand had an era, it would be the period between 2020 and today. This has only become clearer as race and equity efforts secured in the wake of the May 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis have been rolled back at prominent universities like the University of Florida and the University of Texas at Austin. Even newsrooms have been affected. CNN has disbanded its race and equality team but claimed through a spokesperson that “the investment is still 100 percent there.”

Because of these recent experiences, I have been reflecting on the importance of courage. I like to rely on the wisdom of Brené Brown here when she suggests that courage is about being afraid but doing the scary thing anyway. Courage has never been about being fearless, without feelings, or avoiding our emotions. Instead, courage is about doing the good thing, the right thing, even and especially when doing it is challenging. But, as I have watched silent colleagues quietly retreating to their inner selves and home lives as the world burns, landfills spill over, waterways remain polluted, and the future of our country (and perhaps our planet) remains uncertain, I have, once again, been reminded of the hard lesson that I live amongst cowards and this nation is certainly not “the home of the brave.” 

I find it troubling that in this political moment, saying “genocide is wrong” requires courage. I like to believe that there have been times in history when that fact was a given, not a “radical” stance. But deep down I know that we have always been a nation conceived of and established by cowards. White men who were convinced of their superiority felt self-assured and legitimized, even ordained, when colonizing, raping, and pillaging land already occupied by thousands of tribes of Indigenous people. These same men were the ancestors of more men who thought it economically justified to steal Africans from their homelands and force them into labor—in service of white colonial capital—in the Caribbean and North American South. They are the kinfolk of warring nations, men old and young who, because of their whiteness and gender power, have used their land, wealth, and “ingenuity” to conquer rather than to commune. They are the men who sired our presidential candidates, our corporate leaders, our college provosts, and our neighborhood vigilantes. These are the cowards who, rather than build a nation, stole it all to begin with.

In every crisis, these cowards retreat to their safest places. They return to the old ways, never straying too far from their forefathers. When times are most challenging, these men turn toward whiteness, toward maleness, and toward power. That’s the mark of a coward. They always choose the easiest thing. 

Living amongst these cowards means that the rest of us are always called upon to be courageous. I talk about this in my book Black Women Taught Us, when I note that it is always Black women who are expected to save white Americans from problems of their own creation. We are the ones expected to stand up and be counted. We see this now in another election season where Vice President Kamala Harris has been asked to be “Momala” to an entire nation. To clarify: Drew Barrymore essentially asked the Vice President of the United States to be a mammy to the country. It seems like such an odd request from a white woman who could simply use her own power and privilege to create the change she wants to see. 

So it is unsurprising—but also notable—that young people of color have been most likely to sympathize with the struggle of the Palestinian people, according to a November GenForward Survey. Solidarities between the Palestinian people and Black Americans have long existed and have only strengthened in recent years as the militarization of U.S. cities and the repression of protestors have become increasingly aggressive. Many Latine Americans are still being affected by the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policies, which separated hundreds of children from their parents at the U.S.–Mexico border and placed them in cages. Mass protests were instrumental in ending this policy, though Biden has reinstated some elements of Trump’s border policy. These past few years have shown that, while cowards may have power, the rest of us do too.

The Matrix remains one of my favorite movies of all time. Of the three-part series, it is the film that, I believe, seeks to tell the most truthful story about life in the United States. In high school, I learned to pair the film with Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In the book, Freire examines the ways that oppressed people can overcome their subordinated positions in an effort to find liberation. The connections between Freire’s theories and The Matrix are most clear when Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) tells Neo (Keanu Reeves), “There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.” 

Many of us learned to walk the path before we knew what our path was. That’s the gift and curse of living in relation to powerful, cowardly people. In many ways, we find and systematize new futures, new possibilities, and new ways of being simply by surviving this white, heteropatriarchal, capitalist world. And, while cowards surround us, we manifest and facilitate new futures completely independent of them.

This past weekend, President Joe Biden stepped down from the Democratic ticket and endorsed Vice President Harris as she embarks on her own journey to the White House. While some will see this as a courageous act, it is important to remember that these white men often only do the courageous thing once their backs are up against the wall. And, though this decision is the right one, it doesn’t change that we are being forced to choose between imperialists who have yet to speak against genocide. Harris—as vice president or as the potential future president—has yet to show us if she will have the courage that so many of us have already amplified these past 10 months.

This is yet another moment where we are called to be courageous. I’m not worried that we won’t rise to the challenge. I’m just tired of us having to do the work for cowards who intentionally put us all in harm’s way. But I’m an abolitionist and Afro-futurist, so I know we will win. On the way, we just have to remember who our people are. And, more importantly, who our people are not.

“How do you go surfing while using a ventilator?” I typed.

It was an obviously silly question. Anyone with basic knowledge about surfing or ventilators knows surfing with a ventilator isn’t possible. The patient would drown and the ventilator would stop working.

But Meta’s AI suggested using “a waterproof ventilator designed for surfing” and “set the ventilator to the appropriate settings for surfing.” Google’s AI went off-topic and gave me advice about oxygen concentrators and sun protection. ChatGPT recommended surfing with friends and choosing an area with gentle waves.

This is a funny example, but it’s scary to think about how misinformation like this could hurt people, especially those with rare medical diseases, for which accurate information may not be available on the internet.

Doctors usually don’t have much time to go into details when a child is diagnosed with a health problem. Inevitably, families turn to “Dr. Google” to get more information.  Some of that information is high quality and from reputable sources. But some of it is unhelpful at best and, at worst, actively harmful. 

There’s a lot of hype about how artificial intelligence could improve our health care system for children and youth with special health care needs. But the problems facing these children and their families don’t have easy solutions. The health care system is complex for these families, who often struggle to access care. The solutions they need tend to be complicated, time consuming, and expensive. AI, on the other hand, promises cheap and simple answers.

We don’t need the kind of answers AI can provide. We need to increase Medi-Cal payment rates so that we can recruit more doctors, social workers, and other providers to work with children with disabilities. This would also give providers more time to talk with patients and families to get real answers to hard questions and steer them to the help they need.

Can AI Help Families Get Medical Information?

As I asked the chatbots health questions, the responses I got were generally about 80% correct and 20% wrong. Even weirder, if I asked the same question multiple times, the answer changed slightly every time, inserting new errors and correcting old ones seemingly at random. But each answer was written so authoritatively that they would have seemed legitimate if I hadn’t known they were incorrect.

Artificial intelligence isn’t magic. It’s a technological tool. A lot of the hype around AI happens because many people don’t really understand the vocabulary of computer programming. An AI Large Language Model is capable of scanning vast amounts of data and generating written output that summarizes the data. Sometimes the answers these models put out make sense. Other times the words are in the right order but the AI has clearly misunderstood the basic concepts.

Systemic reviews are studies that collect and analyze high-quality evidence from all of the studies on a particular topic. This helps guide how doctors provide care. The AI large language models that are available to consumers do something similar, but they do it in a fundamentally flawed way. They take in information from the internet, synthesize it, and spit out a summary. What parts of the internet? It’s often unclear; that information is proprietary. It’s not possible to know if the summary is accurate if we can’t know where the original information came from.

Health literacy is a skill. Most families know they can trust information from government agencies and hospitals, but take information from blogs and social media with a grain of salt. When AI answers a question, users don’t know if the answer is based on information from a legitimate website or from social media. Worse yet, the internet is full of information that is written… by AI. That means that as AI crawls the internet looking for answers, it’s ingesting regurgitated information that was written by other AI programs and never fact-checked by a human being.

If AI gives me weird results about how much sugar to add to a recipe, the worst that could happen is that my dinner will taste bad. If AI gives me bad information about medical care, my child could die. There is no shortage of bad medical information on the internet. We don’t need AI to produce more of it.

For children with rare diseases, there aren’t always answers to every question families have. When AI doesn’t have all the information it needs to answer a quesiton, sometimes it makes stuff up. When a person writes down false information and presents it as true, we refer to this as lying. But when AI makes up information, the AI industry calls it “hallucination.” This downplays the fact that these programs are lying to us.

Can AI Help Families Connect With Services?

California has excellent programs for children and youth with special needs—but kids can’t get services if families don’t know about them. Can AI tools help children get access to these services?

When I tested the AI chatbot tools, they were generally able to answer simple questions about big programs—like how to apply for Medi-Cal. That’s not particularly impressive. A simple Google search could answer that question. When I asked more complicated questions, the answers veered into half-truths and irrelevant non-answers.

Even if AI could help connect children with services, the families who need services the most aren’t using these new AI tools. They may not use the internet at all. They may need access to information in languages other than English.

Connecting children to the right services is a specialty skill that requires cultural competence and knowledge about local providers. We don’t need AI tools that badly approximate what social workers do. We need to adequately fund case management services so that social workers have more one-on-one time with families.

Can AI Make our Health System More Equitable?

Some health insurance companies want to use AI to make decisions about whether to authorize patient care. Using AI to determine who deserves care (and by extension who doesn’t) is really dangerous. AI is trained on data from our health care system as it exists, which means the data is contaminated by racial, economic, and regional disparities. How can we know if an AI-driven decision is based on a patient’s individual circumstances or on the system’s programmed biases?

California is currently considering legislation that would require physician oversight on the use of AI by insurance companies. These guardrails are critical to make sure that decisions about patients’ medical care are made by qualified professionals and not a computer algorithm. Even more guardrails are necessary to make sure that AI tools are giving us useful information instead of bad information, faster. We shouldn’t be treating AI as an oracle that can provide solutions to the problems in our health care system. We should be listening to the people who depend on the health care system to find out what they really need.

This story was originally published by California Health Report and is reprinted here by permission.

I have a unique perspective on the subject: I was 6 when Islamic fundamentalists took over Iran and started a war on joy. I learned quickly that oppression often manifests through the policing of the arts. The morality police cracked down on most types of music, dancing, and even playing. Our teen neighbor’s birthday party was raided by the morality police who pointed AK-47s at us. Half of my sister’s high school senior class was imprisoned. Without warning, one of her friends was executed.

At the same time, we found ourselves embroiled in a bloody war with Iraq, and daily funerals became routine. There was little to be joyful about, but my family and friends still took dangerous risks to nourish our souls. We intuitively knew playing music, singing, and dancing served as powerful coping mechanisms to get us through the devastation of war and theocratic oppression. We broke the law even though we knew we could lose our freedom or even our lives.

More than four decades later, Iranians are still engaging in collective joy as an act of civil disobedience, often with dire consequences. Now as a musical ambassador of peace (MAP) in the United States, I bring music and dance to refugees as a form of communal healing. When I started dancing with refugees in Tijuana, Mexico, in 2018, some activists dismissed the program as frivolous and even wasteful. They argued that refugees needed legal and medical help and permanent housing, not art.

While those are real needs that must be addressed, the shelter directors asked us to continue the program even if we couldn’t provide a monetary donation. The directors told us that the positive effects of our sessions, including increased collaboration, lasted several days. Participants reported feeling more at ease and less anxious or depressed, with even headaches disappearing.

During the pandemic lockdown, asylum seekers stranded in Mexico insisted on continuing the program, leading us to transfer our dancing to Zoom sessions.

Around the same time, essential workers and activists dealing with vicarious trauma began reaching out to us to organize similar programs. Having witnessed countless instances of transformation in these sessions, I’ve grown increasingly curious about the link between joy and neuroaesthetics, an interdisciplinary field of research that explores how aesthetic experiences and the arts affect the body, brain, and behavior.

Susan Magsamen, the founder of the International Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins University and the co-author of Your Brain on Art, confirms that there is an inherent human need for joy “through neuroaesthetic experiences.” Activities that bring us joy stimulate the release of dopamine in the brain, which contributes to mood regulation, learning, and memory enhancement. “Researchers are confirming that the body naturally leans toward health and it is in play, music, dance, and visual arts that our bodies respond, find nourishment and healing,” she says.

Given that the nervous system acts as a homing device for neuroaesthetic experiences that stabilize, nourish, and fortify us, it is unsurprising that even in the most dangerous parts of the world, people engage in communal arts. Here are a few examples of such resilience and resistance in the most perilous conditions.

Art With Asylum-Seekers in Tijuana

Currently, the U.S. has more than 2 million pending asylum cases with unprecedented waiting periods of up to seven years. The trauma of experiencing violence, fleeing an unsafe home, undergoing a grueling journey, and then facing the uncertainty of the asylum process takes a heavy toll on the mental health of migrants, many of whom are children. 

Ada, the director of a migrant shelter in Tijuana, who is using a pseudonym to protect her identity, believes that collective joy expressed through the arts provides a sanctuary for healing. Migrants themselves view this as an act of resistance in the face of unjust and often draconian policies that prevent them from seeking refuge. “That’s why we adopted the concept of joyful resistance or in Spanish, resiste gozando,” Ada says. The practice allows migrants, whose bodies are constantly policed, to reclaim some of their agency.

Ada and her group also noticed early on that the media doesn’t include migrant voices. “Most of the time when there is talk of immigration, you only hear experts, authorities, and organizations,” Ada adds. By engaging in music, art, and mural making, migrants can raise their own voices without compromising their identity. In this way, resiste gozando has become a powerful vehicle for amplifying migrant voices.

Dancing With Freed Congolese Child Soldiers in Uganda

In Congo, where Congolese Tutsi have been systematically massacred and driven from their ancestral lands for nearly 30 years, my MAP colleague, Abaho Gift Conrad, dances with traumatized kids in three settlements catering to hundreds of thousands of refugees in western Uganda.

When he was 18 months old, Conrad’s entire family was murdered during the Rwandan genocide; he was the only survivor. His adoptive mother found him hidden in a sorghum garden and brought him to Uganda. “I joined MAP because I saw the impact music and dance had on my own healing journey,” he says.

The age range of the child soldiers, the majority being girls, spans from 7 to 14 years old. Most children were kidnapped by various factions of Congolese rebels and endured horrifying experiences, including being trained to become killers themselves. The children were ultimately rescued by joint forces beginning in 2018 and brought to refugee settlements, where Conrad’s team is providing activities for trauma healing. 

“We play music, move our bodies, and create together,” Conrad adds. He finds that the traditional intore popular in central Africa connects the children to their roots and makes healing war wounds more accessible. “It’s amazing to see the smiles and laughter return to their faces as they begin to heal.”

Singing and Dancing With Kids in Gaza

Even before Oct. 7, 2023, many Palestinians experienced chronic traumatic stress disorder. Instead of post-traumatic stress disorder, where the mind is trapped in a loop of a traumatic experience, there is no end to the trauma they are experiencing every single day. The situation is far worse now, especially for the more than 600,000 children who are enduring starvation, physical wounds, constant displacement, and loss of loved ones.

My MAP colleague, Mahmoud Abushawish, recognized the urgent need to tend to children’s mental health and was set to resume the singing program a few weeks after October 7. Before he could begin, he was killed in an Israeli airstrike.

During months of incessant bombing and slaughter, another one of my colleagues, Rahaf Shamaly, sang indigenous Palestinian songs with displaced children in different parts of Gaza. Those children told Shamaly they were afraid of being bombed and becoming martyrs. Singing together allowed them to experience grounding, joy, and respite from the constant horror. 

With the help of donors, MAP evacuated Shamaly in April, but her entire family is still suffering in Gaza. “It’s really a genocide,” she says. “The Israeli army bombed everything. Gaza is destroyed. Our life [is] destroyed,” she adds. After leaving Palestine, Shamaly immediately returned to music to help her with the trauma she experienced and to use her voice to bring attention to the plight of Palestinians. Her music was live streamed at Coachella this past April.

At the time of this writing Bashar Al-Bilbisi, a 23-year-old pharmacist and the director of the Al-Fursan Arts Ensemble still teaches dabke, an Indigenous Palestinian dance, to children in Gaza. He, and the children he dances with, were displaced multiple times and are still on the move to evade Israeli airstrikes. “We dance together to preserve our heritage and also to be a means of discharging negative energy in all areas of Gaza, despite all the difficulties we are exposed to due to the war,” he says.

Communal Culture for Collective Healing

Joy and art are transcendent and essential to human survival. “We often say that the arts create culture, culture creates community, and community creates humanity,” says Magsamen.

Refugees, the oppressed, and the dispossessed carry their community, culture, and humanity in their blood through generations-old songs, poetry, and dances that no assailant can take away from them. “These aspects of their culture are ingrained in them, and they need nothing more than their voices and their bodies to access the foundational aspects of their communities,” adds Magsamen.

Many populations have and are currently experiencing collective trauma. Communal art, then, fosters joy, serving as a primer to connect to one’s self to one’s roots, and to others. It also provides a supportive environment to invite and process more difficult emotions. While addressing the root causes of individual suffering from various angles is essential, now is the perfect time to embark on the journey of collective healing through cultivating joyful communal practices, nurturing healthier individuals, and fostering a more robust society.

There are just over 1 million Druze people worldwide. They mainly live in Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and Palestine, with communities also present in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Latin America.  

“We are very much a community where if I hear someone’s last name, I will be able to place them: what country they’re from, who their family is, who their relatives are,” says Deena Naime, a Druze born and raised in the U.S. “And I think that’s very important, because when you come from a community like that, it also really impacts things like sexuality, sexual identity, and sexual education.”

Being part of a community where everyone knows each other makes these discussions difficult. Naime says, “Anything that you want to know or need to know or need to express and share, most of the time, you cannot do that without the luxury of anonymity,” says Naime. “Anonymity is very important. There must be a great amount of trust to have those conversations without anonymity. That trust usually happens between women when they start to have certain conversations. But in our community, it’s not always possible because a family member is often present.”

The Druze are a small religious and ethnic group with a rich history and cultural heritage. Originating in Egypt, their faith can be traced back to the 11th century and was influenced by many religious sources, including the Quran, Christian and Jewish scriptures, and Greek philosophy. They have since evolved into a unique group rooted in traditions and a strong sense of community. Most of their beliefs and practices are concealed from outsiders to preserve their religious heritage.

“The Druze community is very tight-knit. You’re born into the community. If someone wanted to convert, they couldn’t. That’s partially why we are such a small group. It also comes from a background of persecution. And because of that, we have a kind of secretive identity,” Naime explains. 

“Sexual Education Is Not Spoken About”

Although the Druze community holds an egalitarian regard for men and women in things like marriage, divorce, and inheritance, their views on women’s bodies and sexuality are conservative and characterized by a traditional way of life. However, it varies by generation and the country in which they live.

“We are very much an honor-based community. And one aspect of how we experience honor is through what I’ll call female ‘purity’ or ‘innocence’: In theory, girls in our community are expected to be virgins until they’re married,” Naime says. “But that’s an antiquated belief. It does not hold true to younger generations or across the board. It’s similar again to other religious communities in that respect: It’s an idea, but it’s not legitimized. People don’t go along with that.”

“Sexual education is not really spoken about. It’s expected that girls figure that out along the way. My experience is different because I was raised and educated in the United States. Like most Druze girls in the diaspora, my sexual wellness and health education came from school.”

For Noor Jaber, it was different. She is a Druze public health expert living in Lebanon, where it is deemed inappropriate to have sex education at schools. Although there was an attempt to introduce a comprehensive program for youth 12-to-14 years old in 1995, it was removed after criticism from several political and religious groups.

“There are several programs that run haphazardly, but nothing is done by the state. My parents know the importance of sexual health education, and my mother educated me on sex and menstruation,” she says. “But I find that a lot of young girls in my community, when they reach puberty, are unaware about this basic physiological phenomenon that they pass through every month—they have no clue about it.”

The Impact on Women’s Health

“There are a lot of challenges associated with a woman’s sexual and reproductive health, especially if it is not related to marriage and reproduction,” Jaber explains. “It’s a taboo. Topics like endometriosis, for example. If you’re a single woman, seeking information and getting care is very difficult. Without a safe space to be able to discuss and ask questions, women are worried they might be shamed or blamed for talking about sexual health.”

Jaber shares her personal experience to highlight how hard this can be. “As a health expert, I know that even if I’m not married or engaging in sexual activity, I should get a yearly checkup by a gynecologist. I used to freak out. The doctor’s assistant’s first question would be: ‘Are you married?’ Then I would feel like, what should I tell her? Regardless of what I tell her, she shouldn’t be asking this question as the gateway for me being eligible or not to access this service. And the fact that the assistant is from the community, you feel that extra pressure—if I open up, she would go and talk. You don’t trust them, there is no confidentiality. And that is coming from someone who’s educated. Other women wouldn’t even try to access the service.”

“The lack of a comprehensive sex education can create a lot of mental health problems. It impacts your body image and the way you govern specific body decisions,” she explains. “When they get married, many women suffer from vaginismus because they’re so scared of their first sexual experience. Their bodies start having those involuntary responses of it being this traumatic experience and that they don’t have a right to actually enjoy it, because it’s ‘haram’ or shameful.”

“Women are also unaware of dangerous signs and don’t seek support or care that would prevent a lot of problems, like breast or ovarian cancer. The fact that we don’t talk about it means they might get diagnosed at a very late stage, when it becomes too late to intervene.”

Breaking the Silence Around Sexuality and Health

The internet has played a significant role in the sexual education of young Druze people. For Jaber, it is an opportunity to create a safe space for young girls and women.

Wishing to make a change and break the stigma around sexual health, Jaber created NAWAT to support young girls and women in her community to access information and make informed decisions about their bodies, sexuality, and relationships. It’s a digital platform in both English and Arabic that offers educational courses on sexual and reproductive health and connects women with experts anonymously and confidentially. 

“I want to shift the discourse around sex education and make it pleasure-positive,” says Jaber. “Pleasure is the most important motivation to have sex. But many of us have learned about sex and our sexuality through negative messages that focus on fear and shame. So while prevention remains vital, managing risks associated with unsafe sexual behaviors is not the only way to talk about sex. The enjoyment of sex and ensuring women’s health and rights are important.”

“We also want to include a holistic aspect, bringing in both traditional and alternative medical approaches,” Jaber adds. “For example, if a woman has endometriosis, she needs to understand how her body works and what is causing that clinically. But how do we bring in the mental health aspects to support her through that journey? How do we bring in the physical aspects like exercise or nutrition? So rather than looking at her sexual and reproductive health like a disease and a cure, it’s more about looking at the overall quality of how a woman deals with it as part of her everyday life.” 

“Women Are Creating Their Own Care Network”

Naime, who is working on a Ph.D. dissertation on how women cultivate spaces of intimacy and care in Druze communities, explains how access to safe online spaces impacts younger generations. 

“It is something that is drastically changing in our community. Women are very interested in making a change in terms of sexual education,” says Naime. They are starting these conversations not just with their own children but with their peers and their friends. There are also a lot of conversations happening right now, even between women and men, in terms of women advocating for more sexual education and more awareness around sexual health and wellness.”

“It’s significantly increasing over the generations,” Naime continues. “I see, for example, the difference between how older generations of women educated their daughters on things like menstruation versus how women are now educating their children about having their periods and what that cycle looks like.”

“That’s also partly because information is now more accessible—that’s very important,” she adds. “We are at a point in time right now when we understand women’s sexual health in a different way than we ever understood it before. People realize that the female body is different, and that is also reflected in our community.”

“Druze education, both in terms of Druze studies and education within the Druze community, is actually skyrocketing,” Naime concludes. “It is really a crucial time right now in the Druze community, where a lot of these things are coming up to the surface, and people are doing this work. It’s an exciting time because a lot of this change is happening, and it’s beautiful.”

This story was originally published in Nadja (UAE) and is republished within the Human Journalism Network program, supported by the ICFJ, International Center for Journalists.

The little girl approached her mother, who told her that she was menstruating. She said menstrual blood was dirty, and that menstruation was a curse from God. Paudel was so traumatized by witnessing these restrictive monthly practices that she begged God to turn her into a boy. When that didn’t happen, at 9 years old, she attempted suicide, and survived.

When Paudel’s first menstruation arrived at age 14, rather than be forced to follow the restrictions surrounding the idea of menstruation being unclean, she ran away from home.

It was only when she started attending nursing college the next year that Paudel learned that menstrual blood is a natural part of the body. She realized that the menstrual discrimination that she, her mother, and her three sisters experienced was widespread in Nepal. It affected both rural and urban menstruators, rich or poor.

As Paudel later learned in her career as a nurse, activist, and writer, many of her educated friends and colleagues who lived in the capital, Kathmandu, still practiced menstrual restrictions because of the fear of elders, religion, culture, traditions, or societal pressures.

“Menstrual discrimination plays a huge role in constructing and reinforcing unequal power relations and patriarchy,” says Paudel, who has since pioneered the movement for dignified menstruation and founded the Global South Coalition for Dignified Menstruation.

Seclusion and Secrecy

Menstrual discrimination takes many different forms. In many South Asian countries, women are told they shouldn’t cook, visit sacred temples, or touch or go near plants. In Democratic Republic of Congo, menstruating women are told that if they work in the field the whole harvest will be destroyed. In some communities in Pakistan, women are told not to consume cold beverages, ice cream, fish, meat, milk, eggs, or pickles. 

In addition to these restrictions, there are also widespread myths about menstruation that are harmful for the physical and mental health of those who menstruate.

When Pacifique Doriane-Sognonvi started bleeding for the first time at 14 years old, she saw the drops of blood slowly trickling down her thighs and thought that she must have hurt herself somehow. She had never heard the word “period” before and didn’t know what to do. Doriane-Sognonvi went to her older sister for advice, who informed their father, and together they cut up pieces of clothes and stuffed them in her underwear.

Then her father turned to her with a stern look on his face and proclaimed: “If you come close to a boy and touch him or if he touches you while you are bleeding, you will become pregnant.”

Puzzled and still feeling uncomfortable from the itching fabric, she accepted her father’s words as truth. It was only at 21 years old, when Doriane-Sognonvi left home and started university, that she learned that her father’s warning was untrue. 

“When I found out that it was a lie, I was horrified and super angry,” says Doriane-Sognonvi, who now works as a peer educator for the nonprofit Afro Benin. She organizes workshops about menstrual hygiene and sexual and reproductive health for the LGBTQ community in Ivory Coast.

Without proper and accurate information, menstruators cannot make informed decisions about their bodies and lives, and they become susceptible to misinformation.

The problem often comes down to one simple fact: The period is considered dirty, and menstruating women are either forced to stay secluded or keep it a secret. This builds fear, stigma, and silence about menstruation—at home, at school, at work, and in public.

“In Ivory Coast, menstruation is viewed as a handicap or an illness,” Doriane-Sognonvi says.

The stigmatization and lack of awareness feeds into an ignorance of menstruation as an issue of public health importance. Globally, 500 million people lack access to menstrual products and adequate facilities for menstrual hygiene management.

“Many girls in rural areas have never seen a pad in their whole life,” says Crispine Ngena, a reproductive and climate justice activist from Democratic Republic of Congo, who is helping communities displaced after volcanic eruptions and military interventions in eastern Congo. “Access to period products just doesn’t exist here.”

Recognizing Discrimination

For a long time, Paudel didn’t think there was hope for menstruating people. All she could see was pain, trauma, and suffering. Despite isolation and even death threats, she has dedicated her life to changing the way societies see menstruation.  

Paudel spearheaded a global movement for dignified menstruation, which she defines as “a state where menstruators of all identities are free from any forms of menstrual discrimination, including taboos, shyness, stigma, abuse, violence, restrictions, and deprivation from services and resources associated with menstruation throughout the life cycle of menstruators.”  

The main goal of the Global South Coalition for Dignified Menstruation is to ensure that international organizations and countries recognize that menstrual discrimination plays a key role in constructing and shaping unequal power relations and patriarchy, starting in childhood.  

“More than half of the population of this planet experiences menstrual discrimination in one way or another, but the United Nations has never recognized that,” Paudel says.  

That’s why she has been pushing the United Nations to acknowledge menstrual discrimination as a barrier to gender equality and as a form of sexual and gender-based violence. She has presented her work to the Commission on the Status of Women four times and submitted a petition to the UN in 2019.  

Menstrual discrimination violates individuals’ rights to dignity, freedom, and equality. It also denies (or severely complicates) their access to food and water, and can dramatically increase health risks due to the delay or denial of care.

Paudel has been consulting with governments to include dignified menstruation in national policies. Nepal has had a dignified menstruation policy since 2017. If anyone reports any form of menstrual discrimination, it is considered a social crime. By law, the perpetrator can be punished with up to three months in jail and/or a $30 bail. Paudel has been providing technical input to menstrual equity policies and research for other countries in the Global South.   

Paudel has also been teaching about menstruation at universities and high schools worldwide, mentoring Ph.D. fellows internationally, and writing fiction and nonfiction books on dignified menstruation. For her, menstruation dignity is the way to achieve equality, dismantle patriarchy, achieve sustainable development goals, and reimagine feminism.  

Paudel is often met with hostility, abuse, and blame from Nepalese and international organizations who accuse her of being anti-Hindu, negativist, and anti-tradition.  

“I don’t mind,” Paudel says. “I will never give up. I will do this whether people support me or not, till my last breath.”

Conversations As a Gateway

But even without a war or a climate disaster, getting a pad or tampon can be an insurmountable task. In the United States, one in four students have struggled to afford period products. This so-called period poverty—in which low-income menstruators cannot afford menstrual products—can be a one-time experience or a permanent state.

After reading Period Power: A Manifesto for the Menstrual Movement by Nadya Okamoto, Aydan Garland-Miner realized that period poverty intersected with multiple issues of injustice that she was already passionate about. She launched a chapter of the menstrual equity nonprofit PERIOD at her university and distributed period products, advocated for menstrual equity legislation in Washington state, and hosted educational workshops for students. 

Now she works as the global community engagement coordinator at PERIOD, which annually distributes millions of menstrual products to grassroots organizations who are serving their communities. PERIOD has 180 chapters in the United States and 34 internationally. 

Talking about menstruation is not celebrated or popular, but Garland-Miner strongly believes it has to be done. “You don’t have to be giving a formal talk about menstruation, but you can talk to anyone and everyone about the fact that period poverty exists. The uncomfortable conversations are the ones that we should be having the most,” she says.

Considerable progress has been made in the past few years in the U.S. In 2023, there were more than 130 menstrual equity-related pieces of legislation introduced across the nation. 

In 2021, Oregon passed the Menstrual Dignity Act, which expanded period health education in the school curriculum and provides free menstrual products for all menstruating students in public schools. Oregon is one of 10 states that both require and fund period supplies. Eleven states require period products in schools but don’t provide the funding for them. And seven states provide funding but don’t require period products in schools. 

Advocates are also working on eliminating something called the “tampon tax,” which deems menstrual products to be luxury items. This tax is on the books in 21 U.S. states, making period products even more expensive and less accessible to low-income people. 

“By removing the sales tax on menstrual products, we are recognizing that these items are essential items for health,” says Garland-Miner. “Eliminating the tax won’t end period poverty, but it does help identify the products as the medical necessities they are.”

Making Periods Safer

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, menstrual health doesn’t only mean period products but also access to water, which is a huge challenge in communities where Crispine Ngena works.

In the North Kivu province, access to water sources is limited. People mainly rely on rainwater, which, due to climate change, has become irregular. People have to buy 20-liter (5-gallon) jugs of water that cost U.S. $0.17—a major expense when the majority of Congolese live on less than $2.15 a day. With water being scarce and underwear a luxury item, menstruation is hard to manage and many bleeding people suffer from infections and rashes.

That is why Ngena’s nonprofit, Actions for the Conservation of Nature and Community Development (ACNDC), has been distributing reusable pads, water buckets, soaps, and underwear to different communities. They have been working with groups of girls who were displaced after the volcanic eruption of Mount Nyiragongo in 2021 and also with girls who had to move to camps due to the ongoing military conflict in Congo since 2023. For most of these girls in rural areas, it was the first time that they have seen a pad or worn underwear.

Ngena is a firm believer that access to period products should be easy and free for everyone. Without them, girls stay at home, do not go to school, and cannot work or go to religious ceremonies. She says introducing comprehensive sexual education courses at school would help break the stigma around menstruation.

“With proper education, girls would learn how to manage their menstruation safely,” says Ngena.

Gender-Responsive Disaster Relief

Educating people about menstrual health is also a priority for Ayesha Amin, a Pakistani women’s and climate justice activist. Amin’s nonprofit, Baithak: Challenging Taboos, has been conducting sessions to educate both women and men about different aspects of menstrual health. 

Amin says the most common myth in Pakistan is that women should not bathe during their period because it will lead to infertility. To counter this and other misinformation, Amin and her peer educators speak about physiological, hormonal, physical, and emotional changes, as well as premenstrual syndrome, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, nutrition, managing stress and pain, hygiene, and sanitation. Over the past five years, they have reached 300,000 girls and women with sessions on menstrual health as well as family planning and gender-based violence across Pakistan.

In 2022, Pakistan was hit by one of the worst climate disasters in the country’s history. The floods affected 33 million people, of which 8 million were girls and women of reproductive age.

“We saw young girls and women having urinary infections because they didn’t have any menstrual products. They used leaves, ragged clothes, and were not able to change menstrual cloth for an entire day,” Amin says.

During this climate disaster, Baithak set up a flood response to provide menstrual kits to women and girls who were worst affected by the floods. Soon, they received requests from other parts of the country, so they expanded their program. 

Together with the Pakistani government, the nonprofit is building the capacity of grassroots organizations so they can work with their local governments to ensure that climate crisis responses are gender responsive. They are also building the capacity of disaster management authorities in Pakistan to ensure that the needs of menstruating people are prioritized in case of climate emergencies.

While fundraising for menstrual products, Amin has received both positive and negative reactions. “There was a whole Twitter campaign saying that ‘If you are giving pads to women, also send shaving kits to men.’ This really struck me. Women don’t choose to menstruate during a climate disaster,” Amin says.  

Making Menstruation Positive

Menstruation is a taboo in so many societies. But it doesn’t have to be. With the right education—at home, at school, and in the halls of government—menstruation can be seen as the natural part of life it is. 

“If we want the menstrual cycle to have a place in all discussions—from being listed in the Declaration of Human Rights to pharmaceutical testing, from employment law and work practice to educational approach and exams—we need to ask the question, ‘How does this situation disadvantage cyclic women?’” says Miranda Gray, a British author of books on menstrual wisdom for modern women. 

“For society to have a positive image of the menstrual cycle, and for it to be part of discussions, women themselves first need to have a positive view of their own cycle.”

The context is challenging: According to the Ministry of Health of Santiago del Estero, 31.1% of children under 5 in the province suffer from chronic malnutrition. At the same time, poverty among children between 0 and 14 years of age is 56.2%, according to 2023 data from the National Institute of Statistics and Census (INDEC). 

Housing is precarious, many residents lack access to drinking water or sanitation, and unemployment and under-employment abound. “My husband is away on a trip,” say almost all the women I visit. Most of the men are seasonal workers: They are hired seasonally by rural companies in other provinces and leave their homes and families for several weeks at a time.

“The combination of comprehensive care of the child by specialized professionals and the training of the mother in daily care is the best strategy for the psychomotor recovery and the recovery of the children’s weight and height,” says Gabriela Rao, who leads early development for the NGO Haciendo Camino.

Haciendo Camino has 12 centers in Santiago del Estero and Chaco, two of Argentina’s poorest provinces. Last year, 1,646 children (most under age 5) received comprehensive care and 2,947 children underwent growth controls. In addition, 1,413 mothers participated in health education talks, received family support, and were empowered to become agents of change in their communities. Of these mothers, 120 attended the center located in Herrera.

More than two years passed between when Demir was in his mother’s womb and the day he received his nutritional discharge. During that time, his mother, Cinthia Farias, age 31, regularly took him to the Haciendo Camino center in Herrera, where the organization works with mothers of children suffering from malnutrition. There, Farias learned about the importance of incorporating vegetables, fruits, and proteins in her son’s diet and how to establish a bond with him focused on his needs through play. 

“I made my baby’s first baby blanket and changing table at the Haciendo Camino center. They also taught me how to breastfeed and start feeding him. I learned things I didn’t know with my first daughter, Ivana, like avoiding sodas and juices and instead giving her lots of fruits,” she tells me as she leaves her consultation with nutritionist Greta Willi, who also suggested that Demir start eating with a plate more similar to the rest of the family.

“We took an integrated care model from CONIN, the Argentine foundation dedicated to combating child malnutrition. That is, providing nutritional assistance with social support and a focus on early development. We noticed that it worked for the mothers to have spaces such as handicraft or education workshops in addition to coming for check-ups,” says Cecilia Lecolant, director of the Herrera center, after making rice pudding for the afternoon snack during a break in the early education at home program’s biweekly meeting.

“The Haciendo Camino programs aim to provide nutritional treatment and accompany the families in their homes,” adds Natalia Fernández, who leads the nutrition program.

During the 3-hour program, participants learn practical aspects of parenting at home. This afternoon, Lecolant leads the workshop. She proposes that they make posters to prevent childhood accidents based on their own experiences. One idea they came up with is keeping medicine out of children’s reach.

About 19 women are usually invited to each meeting, and about 12 attend, most of them in their 20s and 30s.

“Once the nutrition program was up and running with the integrated methodology, we noticed that even families with children without malnutrition wanted to stay connected,” says Lecolant.

Haciendo Camino thus added the early education at home service, which follows a logic similar to that of nutrition but with a greater emphasis on promoting positive parenting, a set of practices centered on respectful treatment and adapted to children’s interests. 

Beatriz Gómez, 26, has a shyness that is not seen in any of her three children: Sebana, age 8, Valentina, 6, and Gael, 2. They play in and around the house, surrounded by chickens. Gómez attended the Haciendo Camino Center with the three of them. She works cleaning a church, and her partner assembles bags of charcoal in the village when he’s not a seasonal worker.

“I participated in talks and sewing workshops. For example, I learned what to give them when [they are] sick or have a fever. It helped me in the development of my children,” she says. However, not everything started well: “It was hard for me to adapt; I thought they were going to be mean and that they were going to challenge me because my daughter was underweight, that they were going to ask me why I hadn’t taken her [to the center] earlier. But instead, they congratulated me for taking her,” she recalls.

Trust is an important pillar of Haciendo Camino’s work.

“Some [of the women] are waiting to meet you to open up. And it’s good for them when we sometimes open up and tell them things like ‘This happened to me too,’” adds Silvia Burgos. She is one of the leaders at the center in Herrera. “I like how they treat us and what they teach us about how a child should develop. For example, I learned not to sit her down so early,” says Fabiana Maldonado, 33, after reviewing a booklet on baby behavior. Her daughter, Larisa, a year and a half old, sits off to the side looking withdrawn. Maldonado tells us she just stopped breastfeeding.

At Haciendo Camino, many women are able to meet professionals and other mothers whom they can trust. According to an impact evaluation of the NGO’s programs carried out last year by the Argentine Catholic University, “The deficit of social support perceived by the women mothers is greater in the participating group because they do not have someone who can help them in the preparation of meals, they do not have someone to talk to, or to help them with the care of the children.”

Knowing this, the women’s wary (perhaps even fearful) faces make even more sense.

“Mothers lack a lot of knowledge about their rights and those of their children, and we put a lot of emphasis on teaching them that, especially through workshops and talks,” Mendoza says. “For example, we work with many women who suffer gender violence. We try to empower them, show them that it is not normal, and that they should not allow certain situations in their homes.”

In addition to assisting with paperwork (for example, with the municipality, the Health Post, or obtaining subsidies or documents), the social program also works on hygiene and safety habits. Although the program is not exclusively for women, in practice, it is mothers who attend. Fathers usually spend a large part of the day out of the house working, and it is important that mothers take care of their upbringing. “I’m happy that my wife and children go to the center,” Mario, 27, the father of Alejo (6 years) and Neythan (15 months), tells me. He is the only adult male I came across during my visits to the homes of those who attend the center.

Siesta (nap) time has been over for a while, but the peaceful rhythm in the rural area of Herrera is not disturbed as Flavia Pérez, 30, excuses herself and takes a basin with clothes hanging a few meters away. We wait for her, sitting in front of Giovanni, her 6-month-old son, and Romeo, her oldest son, who is 5 years old, with whom Pérez started attending Haciendo Camino.

Valeria Carabajal, the referent in charge of the visit, takes out a bubble box to show to Giovanni. Pérez brings the textured blanket she assembled for her son to sit on the floor. Carabajal teaches Pérez songs and emphasizes the importance of her child looking in the mirror.

“The A-B-C of what we want to transmit at [the early education at home program] is the importance of playing with the children, bonding with the baby, talking to him, and paying attention to his needs. We see progress in families when they have a daily space for play and bonding,” says Lecolant.

“They teach us to play and enjoy the moments with them,” says Marisol Paz, 24, mother of Neythan and Alejo. Meanwhile, Maldonado laughs, saying that her daughter Larisa “looks in the mirror and pretends to be pretty.”

For many, this playful part of parenting is a real discovery. “Many moms have told us, ‘[My parents] didn’t play with me.’ So we have to try to make the idea click and invite them to try how it feels for the child. That’s where the differences are noticeable,” says Lecolant.

“During visits, you sense when there is someone else in the house, especially the mother-in-law,” Burgos tells me. “‘I have raised [children] like this and like that’ is the grandparents’ catchphrase.”

Poverty and under-employment in the area are just some of the challenges in raising children in small towns in Argentina. “On the one hand, perhaps there are recommendations that clash a lot with what the family thinks, and they are not convinced. It’s not that they don’t believe what we propose is correct, but sometimes they seem offended when we insist on some aspects, such as the importance of breastfeeding or a varied diet,” says Lecolant.

Lecolant also points out that at the nutritional level, “Many habits are rooted in the local culture. For example, the iconic food is the stew, which is a response to an economic issue, because you disguise the meal for the whole family with a little piece of meat or some chicken giblets. But perhaps with the same ingredients, you can make a less overcooked dish or use a legume to make it more nutritious. And at snack time, mate cocido (mate tea) with bizcochos (biscuits) is very popular.”

Another challenge for the organization is achieving frequent attendance of mothers at the center. Many are often absent due to their lack of mobility to travel from their homes in remote areas, or the fact that they take care of their children alone.

“These days of humidity make the floor very ugly,” says one mother.

“You can put cardboard on the floor,” says Coria Olivera. She also asks her to create a mobile by hanging different objects so the child can reach them.

“The main lesson they teach you is to adapt to what is available, both in the activities and the meals. Sometimes they ask us to incorporate an ingredient that I don’t have, and they give me ideas to replace it,” Pérez tells me at her home. After hanging up the clothes, she unfolds a blanket for Giovanni to play on.

Gómez shares another example of how the integrated care model takes different forms. “It’s hard for me to do the activities in the booklet because I can’t read or write, but they told me that if I forget, I can send an audio message.”

“We try to make sure that the work with each family is tailored to them. There are no prefabricated recipes of what the family should or should not do. For example, we will not ask them to buy beef every five days. We try to get them to replace these proteins with cheese, eggs, or legumes,” explains Lecolant. 

The center’s director also says they sometimes work with other civil and state organizations. For example, the Civil Registry processed ID cards for children who were still undocumented. And the Health Post helped to complete the vaccination schedule for those who are behind on their vaccinations.

Photos stand in for trophies in the office where Willi, the nutritionist, interviews mothers with their children: Photos of the children who were discharged after being admitted with signs of malnutrition, along with the height and weight at which they entered the program and at which they were discharged.

The impact on parenting is, a priori, less quantitatively measurable, says Lecolant. 

In 2023, the Argentine Catholic University’s Social Debt Observatory conducted an impact evaluation of Haciendo Camino’s programs. “The programs evaluated have positive effects on structural aspects of a child’s first years of life, such as weight, and developmental aspects such as communication, expression, and problem-solving skills,” says one of the reports from the evaluation.

“Many families point out that the children who participated in the program have an easier time or are more receptive to the activities in kindergarten. Especially those with older children who did not go through the program notice the difference,” says Lecolant. I think of Alejo, Paz’s son, who proudly showed me the medal he received at the end of preschool. His mother told me how what she learned in the Hacienda Camino programs and put into practice had helped the boy to stand out in his classroom. 

Participants expressed enthusiasm for Haciendo Camino, according to the reports: “The evaluation in terms of satisfaction with the program is excellent in 33%, very good in 35%, and good in 29%. About 2.6% rated it as fair or bad. What stands out from experience is having learned aspects of baby care and stimulation (81%), issues related to feeding (66%), aspects of baby development (62%), handicrafts (58%), health care (55.6%), and to a lesser extent aspects of hygiene, sex education, and human rights.” What these indicators say is echoed to me by the mothers themselves during our spontaneous conversations.

As we walk with Lecolant along the main street of Herrera, the only paved street in the town, a mother from the early education at home group approaches us and explains to the center’s director that she cannot attend in the afternoon. They agreed that she should come the next day when the mothers from the nutrition group were there. Lecolant emphasizes, “It is very gratifying that the families show such interest in attending.

Hours later, Pérez will summarize why many moms like her choose to maintain the link with Haciendo Camino: “It’s a place where they help us with what each one needs, where we can always come.”

This story was originally published in RED/ACCIÓN (Argentina) and is republished within the Human Journalism Network program, supported by the ICFJ, International Center for Journalists.

Soon I’m in the center of the lake, alone with the water striders, which scoot away from me on their long and spindly legs as my hands cut through the surface of the water.

My breathing settles and my thoughts fall away as I focus on the movement of my legs and arms, propelling me forward. The sun strains to break through the marshmallow clouds, its weak rays reflecting off the surface of the water.

If there is anything as peaceful as this, I have yet to discover it.

Dr. Melissa Lem, a Vancouver family physician and longtime advocate of the health benefits of nature, remembers feeling that same quieting effect while spending time outdoors. (Lem and I went to high school together.)

“I grew up feeling that connection to nature and not necessarily feeling as connected to my community as I should have been,” she tells me. She experienced racism and bullying on the playground and at school. “I found when I spent time at the park or when our family would go camping in Bruce Peninsula National Park . . . I felt so comfortable. I didn’t feel like anyone was going to come and yell something at me or exclude me.”

Lem tells me about facing other stressors in her early career as a doctor, and the way nature improved her mental health. In her first role, as a rural family physician in Northern British Columbia, she faced intensive work running an emergency room and performing acute care during long overnight shifts. Despite the challenges, she loved the work and credits easy access to nature as part of what helped her cope.

“My commute was walking to work past the hospital garden and looking at the mist rising over the mountains—I think that went a long way,” she says. Then she moved to the busy metropolis of Toronto, which she describes as “streetcar town, skyscrapers, and concrete.”

Suddenly she found herself much more stressed, even though her work was easier than in B.C. After she realized that her problem was a lack of access to the great outdoors, she decided to do a literature review to collect evidence that would support her intuitive sense that nature was a missing piece of the well-being puzzle.

“It had to be backed up by evidence, because I’m a doctor trained in evidence-based medicine,” she says. What Lem found was a large body of literature on the health benefits of nature, which she says none of her colleagues were talking about at the time.

A systematic review from 2018 included 143 studies on the topic from the previous decade, illustrating a recent and rapid growth in the study of nature and health. A quick search on PubMed for citations since 2018 gave me more than 2,000 results for “greenspace and health,” with that number growing year over year.

It’s not just the wilds of the forest that have been studied. The systematic review I reference above included studies of 11 different types of greenspace, such as urban trees and street greenery, larger parks, forests, and even the effect of viewing trees from a hospital room window.

The review found statistically significant benefits for a heap of objective (and some self-reported) health measures, including all-cause mortality, type 2 diabetes, measures of cardiovascular health, blood pressure, stress hormone levels, and preterm birth.

There are also many studies showing that nature can be therapeutic for those with mental health challenges, including reviews on horticulture therapy and wilderness adventure therapy for young people. What we don’t yet fully understand are the underlying reasons why greenspace might benefit our mental well-being, which means we don’t know enough about how to replicate these interventions for different populations.

Would gardening be something teens would want to do? Could wilderness adventure therapy work for older people with physical limitations?

“A doctor prescribing nature time in Regent Park is different from a doctor prescribing nature in Kitsilano, so we have to definitely be aware of our patient’s strengths and abilities, and also the communities we live in,” says Lem, comparing a low-income housing community in Toronto with a trendy neighborhood in Vancouver surrounded by beautiful biodiversity.

Lack of access to nature is a problem, with many people living in urban gray areas where scraggly trees barely survive in a concrete desert. “We’re coming up with a plan for programs where people can get free or discounted transit to greenspaces to reduce that barrier,” she says, adding that it’s also important to change people’s perceptions of what nature can be. “You don’t have to be in the middle of a forest

by yourself or on the side of a mountain; it can be in your garden or your neighborhood park.”

It was a naturopathic doctor (ND) who handed me my first PaRx—a park prescription, sometimes called a ParkRx or NatureRx. I had exhausted all the treatment options with my family doctor and had turned to alternative medicine for answers.

In addition to several nutritional supplements and dietary changes, my ND suggested I leave my claustrophobic cubicle each day at lunchtime, head over to a small butterfly garden adjacent to our office building, and take off my shoes. I was to stand in the grass for 10 minutes, feeling the cool blades tickling my toes. This was written down on an actual prescription pad, and I carried the slip home with me in my bag.

The prescription felt silly at first, but I dutifully followed it every day throughout that summer. I would burst out of the air-conditioned building at lunchtime into a wave of oppressive heat, my eyes adjusting from fake fluorescent lighting to the stunning white glare of the sun. I’d shuffle around in the grass while other employees lounged near the garden eating their lunch.

And I was surprised to find that it helped—my lunchtime communion with this small greenspace seemed to set the tone for a better mood in the afternoon and post-work evening. I began to look for other ways to incorporate the outdoors into my everyday life, like biking to work instead of taking the bus. I went for daily walks in the ravine behind my house.

Nature prescriptions, or “nature pills,” are a growing area of interest for researchers and medical practitioners. Lem is one of the leaders in the movement in Canada and has launched the Park Prescriptions (PaRx) initiative with the BC Parks Foundation, a program offering health care professionals nature prescription files and codes, with instructions for how to prescribe and log their nature prescriptions.

“There are just under 100,000 physicians in Canada, and over 5,000 registered for our program, so that’s over 5 percent of doctors,” she says. “I think it’s important for nature to become routine advice during a health care visit—diet, exercise, sleep, and nature time.” Lem calls these the four central pillars of health, and she’s excited to see the movement growing among physicians.

I connect my own time in nature to similar benefits I get from practicing mindfulness. I believe that it’s not just about the trees that I’m seeing or the cold water that’s lapping around me. The setting becomes the doorway to a deeper connection with my body, which gives me the space I need to mindfully observe all the things happening within and around me—something I wouldn’t be able to tap into if I were distracted by my phone or hurrying through a park to get to a destination.

The science agrees with me: the mindful component of time in the outdoors could be one of the key reasons we experience such significant changes in our psychological and physiological health.

Other research suggests that it’s not only the positive health outcome that we get from nature that is the interesting part—it’s what predicts those positive changes. In the example of my cold lake swim, being in the presence of something awe-inspiring could be what’s causing real physical changes in my body.

Adapted with permission of the publisher from the book All in Her Head, written by Misty Pratt and published by Greystone Books in May 2024. Available wherever books are sold.

CORRECTION: This article was updated at 11:27 a.m. PT on July 8, 2024, to correct a misstated number of Canadian physicians participating in the Park Prescriptions program. The correct participation is more 5,000 doctors, or 5% of the less than 100,000 physicians in Canada. Read our corrections policy here.

Since grief can be isolating, disorientating, and even polarizing, we often try to ignore or bury it. We don’t want it taking up too much space or attracting too much attention. It can be a burden, and one that fills us with unnecessary feelings of shame. 

But there’s evidence that supports that sharing the burden of grief in public invites others to aid in the healing process. It can also allow a stronger social resilience to discuss topics of grief and mourning. And it connects us to community in ways that may be able to enact change. In short, externalization and communal care of grief can be transformative.

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) defines grief as “the anguish experienced after significant loss, usually the death of a beloved person.” Jamie Eaddy, thanatologist, activist, and founder of Thoughtful Transitions has a different definition for grief. She says, “Grief is our human response to loss, change, and transition.” As a thanatologist—someone who studies death, dying, grief, and bereavement—she believes the experience of grief extends beyond being able to name whom we are grieving. “Beyond people, it is ideas and safety and all of those things that are not necessarily directed toward us but are felt as losses emotionally for us when they’re no longer here.”

No matter whom or what we are grieving, Eaddy stresses the importance of recognizing and processing our grief. “We know that grief is felt or experienced in the body like stress. And what does stress do to the body? It impacts your brain, your immune system, your heart.”

Research supports that beyond physiological distress, unattended grief can also negatively impact mental health, including prolonged grief disorder, which according to the APA, can make sufferers incapable of performing normal activities because of deep, overwhelming feelings of sadness.

The Emotional and Psychological Benefits of Acknowledging Grief

Christiana Awosan, a licensed therapist and founder of Ibisanmi Relational Health in New York, says when the emotions of grief remain trapped in the body and aren’t processed, “we physically, emotionally, and psychologically become paralyzed.”

“It’s important to acknowledge not only the loss that we experience but also the process of letting ourselves know that someone and/or something significant has shifted in our lives,” she says.

Melissa Burkhead of Massachusetts says that when she was overwhelmed with grief, her first instinct was to isolate. “When I lost two sister friends and an aunt in a 12-month period, I felt overwhelmed and didn’t want to talk about it or even get out of bed,” she says. “But when I started going back to church, and people started asking why I hadn’t been attending, a friend suggested the grief group being held once a week. I attended for six weeks, cried lots of tears, made lots of new friends, and slowly began to feel happy again.”

In contrast, Julia Mallory of Pennsylvania says after her son was killed seven years ago, she felt she had to “grieve publicly and talk candidly about her loss, and the many layers of loss, even if it conflicted with what people felt grief was supposed to look like.” She says, “I felt and heard in my spirit that I needed to speak openly and publicly about it.”

Awosan says acknowledging grief “allows you to be patient with yourself and give yourself grace to feel, express, and accept the waves of grief. And in turn, you’ll also have the capacity to provide others with the room to do the same.”

This was true for Mallory. After she began her very personal healing journey, she recognized the need for more compassionate spaces for others to process their grief. She is currently the owner and operator of a community creative space called TenOh!Six where she hosts events and “healing hours” for her community to talk about their grief. 

“We need connection and community in order to process our grief fully,” she says.

Awosan and Eaddy agree that grieving in public can provide validation of our humanity.

“Sharing grief gives people the opportunity to allow themselves to be cared for and to care for others. It allows people to witness how they and others experience and express grief while being human,” Awosan says.

“At the end of the day, I don’t need validation that I’m human,” Eaddy says, “but there is a part of all of us as humans that longs for connection and validation.” She adds, “In isolation we don’t avail ourselves of the healing power that can come from somebody saying, ‘I see you.’ Your person or thing, the experience, whatever the loss is, it matters.” 

Public Grief Can Lead to Mobilization

We know we can experience grief due to vicarious trauma and traumatic stress, but we have also seen how collective grief can lead to mobilization. We’ve seen environmental activism as the result of the grief over environmental degradation. We’ve seen the women’s rights movement come as a result of the grief over gender inequality, and global movements for justice following the grief over political or racial injustice.

Research shows that particularly in the Black community, collective grief can shift to grievance and calls for systemic change. We saw this in the form of protest and sit-ins during the civil rights movement, and more recently from 2016 to 2020 through the work of the Black Lives Matter movement in response to the murders of Travyon Martin, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and many others.

Eaddy says, “For me, Black Lives Matter publicly said, ‘We are grieving. We are hurting. We are sad, and we’re not going to hurt in the closet.’” She explains that hiding grief has social consequences as well. “If I have to hurt in the closet, it gets to remain hidden from everybody, including those who are causing the pain.”

She adds, “Just by putting it in the world’s face, there was a percentage of humans who decided they would no longer be ignorant to what was happening to fellow humans.”

Currently, we are seeing public grief and grievance play out with protests in response to the innocent lives lost in Palestine and the Congo.

Collective Healing Through Grieving in Public

Just as there is collective grief, there can also be collective healing. Whether it’s through church groups, or sharing stories and experiences to create empathy and unity, or forming support networks and communities, we can find ways to heal together.

Eaddy says, “You need to grieve in public because when we grieve in isolation, it pulls us away from people, and the truth is we are not designed or created to operate in isolation. We are created to be in community.”

If we don’t share our grief, we contribute to the lack of empathy and understanding in society, the perpetuation of systemic injustices and inequalities, and divisions and conflicts within communities. For the sake of personal and collective well-being and empowerment, individuals and society must choose to acknowledge and process grief.  

The power of public grieving is its ability to connect us and drive healing and change.