Conclusion
To reflect on the process of creating the anthology and on the themes that emerged, the KRJC team decided to have a conversation rather than write a formal conclusion. Concluding the anthology with a conversation felt like it reflected the dynamic, relational process of creating the anthology and would make our thoughts more accessible to readers.
We also decided to speak rather than write about the anthology because the anthology is living! This conversation is a reflection of the anthology so far, but it is not complete! If you are interested in sharing a piece of art or writing or want to share your story in an interview, connect with us at admin@kuluntu.center. May there be many more conversations like this one!
Khye Blue, Jasmine Charles, Alanah Armstead, and Marin Hart gathered on a video call on June 25, 2026. Here is their conversation!
We also decided to speak rather than write about the anthology because the anthology is living! This conversation is a reflection of the anthology so far, but it is not complete! If you are interested in sharing a piece of art or writing or want to share your story in an interview, connect with us at admin@kuluntu.center. May there be many more conversations like this one!
Khye Blue, Jasmine Charles, Alanah Armstead, and Marin Hart gathered on a video call on June 25, 2026. Here is their conversation!
Transcript:
KB: Look at all these beautiful faces! All these cute queers! [laughs]
MH: So, we are gathered here today to have a reflection conversation about the whole anthology process which started last summer, summer of 2025. So we've been performing interviews since August of 2025, and we're now wrapping up our analysis of the interviews, our writing and thinking about them. So we just wanted to come together to talk about what the process has been like, what we've learned. So that's what we're doing here!
KB: Awesome. I'm excited to be here and to have this conversation. I can start us off by asking the first question. So based off of the interviews, off of everything that we've learned, the analysis, what stands out for y'all as things that enable radical community care?
JC: The first word that came to mind for me is capacity. I feel like a lot of folks talked about how they wouldn't be able to do the work that they were doing alone because it just requires so much more than one person can offer. I know some people also spoke about the pandemic being a time where they really were able to pause, reflect, and kind of reorganize either their disposable income, their commitment to volunteering, showing up for other people, but I think all of that was really correlated to finally having a pause on this global level for many of us to really sit back and decide like, how do I want to use my time? How do I want to use my energy? How do I want to use my money? And all of that just brings me back to the word capacity.
MH: Yeah, I think that's definitely true. And it's really interesting to me all of the different things that create capacity for someone, like relationship, which you just mentioned—having other people's time, energy, money to work with—and the relationships themselves give us the joy and energy to keep doing the hard work. I was especially moved by hearing from Jamarah, one of the folks we interviewed who founded the Southern Birth Justice Network, talk about her relationship with her mentors and the way that those relationships facilitated the care work that then she did by [those] people just being like, ‘hey, we need this in the community or I'm doing this and I need to pass it on to someone, will you take it up?’ And if we don't have those relationships, then that can't happen—it just isn't facilitated. And I think so many of us are lacking relationships with our elders and with mentor figures and stuff. So, like, how do we
build out those relationships just so that that can keep happening, you know?
AA: I think similar to both of y'all, one of the words that came up for me was willingness, like a willingness to get to know people and a willingness to give and receive care, willingness to ask for care. I can't remember the interviewee's name, but the owner of the [mutual aid] store, and the way that their whole setup was genuinely like take what you need, you'll never take too much, there's always enough for whoever needs it. And you don't have to earn it in a way, like you don't have to become a friend to be entitled to what I have to give. So I think that kind of enabled like… you get to know people past the point of stranger, but also there's a pretty low threshold for a person to not be a stranger anymore and to accept and give what we all need.
KB: Two things! I was gonna say two things about one, back to what y'all were saying about Jamarah and having elders and mentors. I think that's one thing about midwifery specifically, and like not even birthwork as a whole like specifically midwifery, because it's been stolen from Black and Indigenous folks and, you know, people who practice it within their cultures, there is this concerted effort to bring it back, and so like the elders are locked in, the elders are like we know that it is our job to pass this down to the next generation, and in other iterations of care work or other iterations of like community building work, I'm not sure if that intentionality is there. So I think that's really, really crucial, is the understanding—and really one of my purposes for doing this project was to give community building gravitas, I guess, or to give it a like, ‘no, this is important. This is a thing we need to invest in, and this is why.’ And I think that, again, in the midwifery community, it's very much like we know that if we don't pass this down, this could get lost and it's already been lost once and we're bringing it back. And it's very purposeful in that way.
The other thing I was going to say was I really appreciate that y'all had words, Jasmine and Alanah, of like being open, having capacity, those types of things, because I think my first thought about what stands out as what enables radical community care is structure. And it doesn't have to be a super intense infrastructure of an institution or anything, but the structure I'm thinking of is like multiple people mentioned growing up and going to church, and not necessarily still doing those things, but the structure of every Sunday, 11 a.m we meet at this place and we do this thing, we do these rituals together. And it also reminds me of Octavia Butler and in the Parable of the Talents—I always get them mixed up but the second book—the Earthseed had a meeting every week, every Wednesday, they would have a meeting and this is what they would do at the meeting. And there was space for dissent. There was space for conversation. There was space for deeper study. And I think that in a variety of the interviews and what we've learned throughout this project, when there's that level of intentionality, the relationship building, the community building is deeper, they're more successful I feel like, they're more capable of doing whatever it is that they're setting out to do because of that structure and that consistency. And I think that that's something that can be a struggle—creating that structure, maintaining it, but also like if you don't maintain or create that structure and you're just kind of doing things like ad hoc it can be kind of hard for people to latch on to it. And so to have something where people can rely on that, I think is really important.
JC: Yeah, what you're talking about is making me think a lot about place, like location, because that is such an important part of building those types of structures. And I think the piece that we don't always talk about is when a structure is rooted in a physical space, obviously, like spaces can change, be destroyed, all the things, so it's not as like perfect or protected, but i feel like that allows the fluidity of, like you were saying Khye, people entering in and feeling like they can find a place to fit in versus when we've seen other orgs or mutual aid groups kind of dissolve because it was actually related or more heavily associated with a person rather than the place, and so when there's conflict with a person, when there is something happening on that kind of interpersonal level and people can't work past it, everything disappears. And so thinking about structure as a place that lets people come in and out of—I know nobody really spoke about that as explicitly, but I feel like the things that you’re saying, I'm connecting it to some of the challenges that people shared when they were like, I'm trying to build this structure, but I'm building it with these people and somebody popped off and now the structure is gone, you know? And so what that has to tell us too about how this work can survive and thrive regardless of who's there and who's not.
KB: Yeah. And I think, to tie it back to midwifery, a lot of folks might take on an initiative by themselves or maybe with a really small group of people but then like, and it doesn't even have to be like an interpersonal thing—somebody could get sick, somebody could lose their job, somebody could move across the country, like whatever. Anything could happen where it's like, okay, there are two people who are doing this and now one person is down for the count, so now we're floundering because it was never going to be sustainable with two people. But you know in midwifery, there aren't a lot of midwives—community-based midwives and like Black midwives—in the country, but there's more than two! And so the work has been distributed to a point where if one midwife retires or moves away or whatever that it doesn't completely crumble… Aw man, I lost it. I lost the thought. I’ll come back to it.
JC: Yeah, the last thing that I'll add about the midwifery piece that you've been bringing up, and kind of what a few people were touching on before, is this idea of being voluntold. I feel like that's something from the older generation that we don't see enough now. But a lot of people I feel like are not being called into work or called upon to do specific work, and that is just as important of a piece for a lot of the people that we spoke to. Or if not that, I think they might have an innate feeling of, ‘oh, I want to do this because I'm thinking about the generations after me’ when I think about some of the parents that we talked with. So that word also comes to mind.
MH: Yeah, I love that word. And I think instead of thinking about it as someone being pushy, like that is how you create leadership is you ask people to take it up and to do the next iteration
of it. And sometimes I think in these movement spaces, we're allergic to leadership and afraid of how to do it in a good way, which makes sense, obviously, but bringing people into leadership and asking more of people slowly as trust and relationship builds is so important. That's how we get more energy and labor power to make things sustainable.
KB: Yeah I think generationally that's one of the things that like—it's like we don't just pop up on people in their houses anymore, for good reason right, there were enough of us that were like, we don't actually like that. However, the elders, you just sit on the porch and somebody walks by and you're like, ‘hey, how you doin? Come sit. Let's catch up.’ And there's a little bit more like imposition maybe? I saw an Instagram post about this that was like ‘are we considerationing ourselves out of community?’ Of like, oh, well, I don't want to bother anybody, I'm going through a crisis, but, you know, we have a check-in scheduled for two weeks from now, so I'll just wait until then. And it's like, you can't always wait until the thing on the calendar comes up! Sometimes it's like how do we make space for everything to not be so scheduled and not be so like planned out, and I think I'm connecting that to elders voluntelling people what to do because like, on the one hand, we don't do that because it's like ‘oh well they're busy’ or ‘oh they have a lot going on’ and we kind of answer the question for them without even asking. And like yes we're all busy, yes we're all stressed out, yes we all have five jobs and so did our elders! You know, like that's not unique to our generation necessarily. We have some unique circumstances, but folks have always been busy, folks have always been doing all the things, and so I think being voluntold to do something—like it's not always the best, but i think it does a couple of things: one, it's like a ‘I see you, I see your work, it's valuable, I believe in your leadership abilities,’ but it's also—when I worked in education, there was this phrase and it was ‘challenge and support.’ And it's some really old theory that somebody came up with in the 60s. And it's like, yeah, you know, challenge obviously is important for growth, but if you don't give them an equal amount of support, they will fail. Or if you support them too much, but don't challenge them, you're coddling them. So you have to find that balance. And so being voluntold to step into a leadership position hopefully comes also with that support of the mentorship of, hey I’m asking you to do this thing, I'm going to guide you through it, I'm going to help you do it, but this is me investing in your leadership capacity as the newer generation. And I think a lot of times we get so caught up in ‘if you want it done right, do it yourself’ that we forget to teach, that we forget to bring up the next generation of people. To our detriment, because then you're 40, 50, 60 years old and you're still doing all the work, you're not passing on your knowledge, and then, like I said, this person gets sick or, you know, god forbid something happens, and then you have all this knowledge that never got passed down anywhere. Now it's gone. And that's what we can't have happen. And I think that some folks think about that, that legacy piece of their work and some folks don't. And, you know, I get it. When you're constantly in emergency mode, it's hard to think about that, what is it… contingency planning, but it's a really crucial piece of all of this.
AA: Yeah, I think one of the other things I thought about in response to this question, which I think kind of relates to the points y'all are making about authority and leadership, was radical care is enabled by having this kind of blanketed belief in the autonomy and agency and authority of humans. And I think the interview with Yolande really highlighted that for me as like there are people who let their children step out of what we would consider a “child's place” to have preferences and voice them and make decisions about their life and even teach adults. So they're kind of granted this position of authority. And so they can really step into that and just feel empowered and trust themselves and trust the people around them and meet each other, like everyone is able to meet each other with that type of understanding and disrupt all these kind of inherent hierarchies with just that one belief.
MH: Yeah. To build on that and go back to what Jasmine started talking about about parenting, I think that was something that stood out from starting to do the analysis that Jasmine really brought to the forefront that I hadn't really noticed: that the act of parenting brought people into radical care in several different of the interviews. Because people talked about, you know, wanting to create the world that they want their kids to live in and having to literally create the structures for their kids to live good lives, especially when the institutions like school and stuff are failing kids right now. Like you can't wait to build something new when your kid needs to be educated right now. There's a kind of urgency that comes into world making when you have kids. Yeah, I don't know if you wanted to talk any more about that, Jasmine, but that seemed to shift people into a sense of radical caregiving or enable that for some people.
JC: Yeah I do want to talk about it more, but I'm having multiple thoughts. We might have to cut this out because I feel like what we've also been doing is kind of answering the second question, like how can we support and grow those things [that create radical community care] either as individuals or us as an org. So I'm thinking about how I want to answer the parenting question with that because I do feel like there's something there. And the answer shouldn't have to be like ‘everybody go have kids!’ because that's definitely not it because not every parent is going to step up in that way, but I don't know, I think we've had multiple conversations not right, directly related to this but definitely around what you're talking about Marin, like how for some people it is parenting but just I think what you were saying earlier relationship building and being like ‘oh I'm actually in relationship with this other person and I want us to experience something together, like how do I begin to format that? And how do I get to like experiment and learn from this trial and error process?’ And I feel like that is something that came up a lot in our interviews, like people are like I am freestyling, this is my first time out here, and I feel like one thing that I remember Jamarah specifically saying was even though a lot of the stuff I'm creating feels brand new, it's not like nobody is reinventing the wheel. A lot of people are looking back whether it's to their ancestors, to their childhood experiences, to their mentors. And so thinking about all of those points and people as kind of activations that I feel like do help people grow either in their leadership, in their radical care, et cetera, et cetera. So I can pause there.
KB: And I'll say in relation to parenting, one thing that I feel like all the people that we interviewed who are parents mentioned in some way was that like I'm building this thing within my household for my kids, or I built this thing in past tense, and then I brought it outside of my household to my wider community, and so this idea that like we're all kind of, not winging it but we're all trying out these new things, but inside the home is often like the lab. And then once it kind of works in the home, then take it out into different contexts to see how this works. Like, okay, mutual aid. Okay, conflict management. Okay, you know, reflecting on how can we ask for the help that we need. And so, yeah, I definitely feel like for the parents, there is an intentionality of like I have these kids, I need support now, my kids need support now, so what can I do right now for them? Not this mythical future that I may or may not see, but like right now at this moment. And I think that in general, being a parent or just being a caregiver to children really has this like groundedness and presence in it of like, you can't be in your head when you're chasing a toddler around, ‘cause you know, you gotta know that they're going to be safe. Because you are there. And so I think that that's a really powerful piece that I saw threaded throughout all that.
MH: Alanah, do you want to say more about what you wrote in the chat?
AA: Yeah, I was thinking about kind of what you were talking about, Marin. And how becoming a parent kind of makes so many more things possible. So I was just literally on a walk earlier and I saw this woman on a bike riding with two toddlers in a wagon. And I was like, I cannot imagine having to carry around two heavy ass kids for the rest of my life. But like, it's the type of thing that becomes necessary because it's there and you want to see it do well. And I think it could apply to so many things outside of parenting, like I used to have a Chihuahua that peed out of excitement, and I don't remember being upset. I just accepted that that was part of how I had to take care of him. And I think to what Jasmine was just saying, like, I'm doing this because I want to see you in a happy space or us be well or something like that. So, yeah.
KB: Thank you for that story, Alanah. [laughs] It's real though, it's like… the things that in theory, before you had the kid or the dog or you were in a particular situation, like caregiving an elder, like, oh, wiping butts is nasty! And then it's your grandma sitting there, like she needs help! You're not going to be like, ‘sorry, grandma, that's gross’—you’re going to do it! You're going to step up, because that's what the moment calls for. And I think parenting on the one hand normalizes things that, if you're not a parent or before you became a parent would not even cross your mind, but on the other hand, it normalizes things that would have never crossed your mind.
Jasmine, I think you mentioned it earlier, like not all parents step up to the call, right, and it's so easy to normalize like, oh, well, I have to be supermom, I have to do it all by myself, I can't ask for help—you know, to raise your kids in the normative way, which is a one way ticket to your body breaking down. And there's an opportunity to see infinite futures when you have these kids of like, you know, I could just ride in an uber with my kids or I could put some helmets on them, put them in the wagon, and tote them behind my bike. And I think that's what I love to see about different cultural parenting practices is like, you know, some parents it's like the baby's strapped to my back, let's go, like I'm gonna go and do the thing, or like you know the baby's here with me in the swimming pool, like people just bring their kids with them to do things. And you know in this society, you'd be like ‘oh I would never let my kid chop vegetables’ meanwhile there's a three-year-old right now that's like prepping for dinner and like chopping up some carrots. Kids can do so much more than what we assume sometimes, especially in this society, but at the same time we create the container for kids to grow into, and if that container is like ‘we have no expectations of you, I'm gonna wait on you hand and foot,’ then that's what they're gonna grow into, or if it's like ‘hey you're here with me, I'm going to the protest you're gonna be at the protest on my shoulders,’ then that's what the kid will grow into.
And so I think it's very easy to just fall into the script. I feel like we hear the stories of like, oh, yeah, me and my friends, we were all radical in college. And then like folks started pairing off, getting married, having kids, and now they have the nuclear family, 2.5 kids, and the picket fence and blah, blah, blah. It's very easy to kind of jump on that escalator or, I guess, never jump off the escalator of normative. But also, yeah, you have kids and your whole world can open up if you're open to that and you're willing to step into those possibilities.
MH: Yeah. Part of having kids is also just needing so much more help than you did before. And you can let that radicalize you if you want to and create structures of care and support that are outside of that normative family model, but not everyone does.
I wanted to pull on this thread that you introduced, Khye, about our home spaces as labs for technologies that then we like bring into our organizing spaces because I think this was another one of our questions throughout this process and it's definitely one of my curiosities about like the relationship between our personal care structures whether that's our families, our chosen families, our households, and how that's related to radical care work, which we have defined as it has to be kind of collective in some way, like it has to get a little bit bigger than our households. But the radical work that we do in our households informs that. And at least many of our interviews seem to speak to them informing each other. So I was curious about if y'all's perspectives on that changed throughout this process or if you have new thoughts about that.
KB: I have a thought. It's not fully formed, so it may or may not make sense. But I feel like most of the people we talked to, the work that they do is long-term work. And they've been doing it for a while, and they plan on doing it for longer term. But there were a couple people we talked to who were doing very, like, urgent [work], like I think about the person who did the mask bloc during COVID, like, it was urgent. It was, like, timely for that moment. And I mean, COVID's not over, it's still timely, but you know, the world has moved on for some reason. But just, I feel like the people whose work was more long-term, it was a lot more integrated into their day-to-day personal lives, versus the people who were doing that urgent timely work, maybe it was a little bit more disconnected. They were just like “I'm doing a mask bloc because people need masks.” Like it wasn't necessarily like a part of their larger politics–I mean, it was, but they didn't necessarily make that connection themselves. I don't know, that may be me misremembering things from the interview, but it just felt a little bit more disconnected, like still connected in some ways, but a little bit more disconnected from like the day-to-day.
JC: No, I think you're right, because the person who was in charge of the mask distribution was very clear that what they were doing was a resource first and a community second. And I think that is kind of what you're talking to about, like, okay, this is still a project that people can take from, use as needed, share widely, but... the intention behind the space was not for that same kind of like community long-term, like, wider expansion that we saw with some of these other folks who have had these longer projects. So I feel like it's funny, Marin, like to your question, I think for whatever reason, hearing people talk about like experimenting in their home presently created this like feedback loop in my mind that I wasn't seeing before. Because we had spoken with so many people to be like “what was your family like? Did you grow up in an extended family? Did you see radical care early on?” and for the folks who did, I felt like that snapshot was clear, but for whatever reason, their present life and how they're not necessarily mirroring exactly what they saw as a child, but at least kind of replicating like, “okay, this is the structure that I'm providing and this is what my kid is going to reference” if we were ever to interview their kids later, you know what I mean? Like, seeing that as more of like “oh, this is how it starts in the home and expands wider and wider even before it gets to the point where people are sharing beyond the community” because as soon as you like share that information with your child, now the child is going to school and sharing it in these different types of ways and saying “oh, but this is what I do at home” and little things like that. So I also don't have a complete thought, but I will say like I think it just clarified my perspective on what it means to like, yeah, tinker and figure things out in a household, and then bring it to a wider community. Because I think where we started when it came to interviewing folks we were seeing through their eyes as like a child, like “oh this is what I'm absorbing” versus later when they're talking about what they're doing in their own homes, it's like “oh this is actually what I'm creating.” And I think that was like that clarifying shift for me that was really important, talking to people and seeing how that work informs the other.
MH: I feel like this question continues to be complicated, and doing the interviews only complicated it further for me. But that's–that's great. That's a great outcome, because I think people illustrated very artfully how much the personal is political, which was what Yolande said in their interview, and how these different parts of people's lives are not like binary or separate in any way. And also the interview with M.E. O'Brien was a lot about this question and about the limitations of what we do in our households, [for] creating revolutionary change. And so that's... It's something I've been sitting with, too, that we can't just act within our homes and expect the whole world to change. And we do have to acknowledge how much the pressures of our huge economic and social systems put on our interpersonal lives, our home lives, the structures we create for ourselves. But it's not either or, ever, like, the things we do to create alternative care structures for ourselves and for our kids, for the people we care about matter and give us the tools, often, to do more extended work in the community. And we shouldn't get too like myopic about our individual lives because I think that can distract us from building broader community relationships and then creating those wider networks which I think will be actually what sustains us when our systems crumble more and more. That's like my overall understanding now from after doing the interviews.
KB: Yeah and I think… thinking more on what M.E. O'Brien was saying. Like I think she did have a good point about, like, you can't always control your household dynamics. You can't always control, like, maybe you end up co-parenting with someone you didn't choose with your co-parent's new partner or something. Or maybe you, like… just there are so many variables in life and especially with parenting. Like, it's hard to say, like, ‘okay, I'm going to raise my kids like this.’ Because yeah, there's a thousand different things that could go differently than how you imagine them. And so then, yeah, not everybody has that ability, I don't know if it's a privilege, but that ability to run their households in a particular way. And so some people don't have access to that. And even like some of the things that she was saying about like… she kind of pushed back against the, you know, childhood pieces and was basically like, “how does that connect to what people are doing now?” And I mean I think starting out, or before the interviews, I thought there would be, like, a clear throughline between people's childhood experiences and their adult experiences. And ‘this is what I learned as a kid and this is how I'm applying it as an adult,’ or ‘this is how I analyzed it and decided what to take and what to leave.’ And I think for some people that was the case, but for other people, it was less clear. It was more muddied, the connection between their childhood experiences and their adult experiences. Yeah, I think that not everyone has a very clear through line and that's okay. And, you know, people become radicalized at different points in their lives and maybe having kids radicalized you or maybe, you know, going to college or, you know, having a close friend or anything can radicalize people. And so like if you have these community-based experiences as a kid, it can be a through line through the rest of your life, but that's not everybody's experience. So yeah, I appreciated that different perspective that maybe I wasn't expecting, and it took me a while to, like, wrap my head around exactly what she was saying and like, how that applies to this work.
JC: What's one thing we hope people will take away from this project? And feel free to say more than one.
AA: I think since we were just talking about the M.E. O'Brien interview, one of the things that stood out, and I feel like I'm going to say this wrong, because I have a short memory. What is it—is it fractal theory or is it like raindrop theory? Which one is it? Can someone explain it really quickly?
KB: Yeah fractal theory! Y'all know how I feel about fractal theory. adrienne maree [brown] brought it up in Emergent Strategy, and it's basically this idea–when I first heard it explained, someone, whoever it was, explained it as like snowflakes. Like if you look at a snowflake under a microscope, like whatever the structure of the overall snowflake is, that's what all the like, mini structures are that like, make up the full structure of the snowflake. So basically fractal theory is like the micro makes up the macro or like how I see–I mean it's–I think it's a scientific version of “the personal is political” and my version of it is like how you treat the people closest to you is how you treat people, you know, on a large scale. So you have these like cult leaders who are doing… [or] people claim that they're doing, amazing things, but then they like go home and torture their wife and kids or, you know, they're a CEO and the business has helped millions of people, but then they're a tyrant as a boss. And that comes out in the big picture parts of the work as well, even if on the surface it looks different. Like when you really get into it, it's like, no, these patterns are replicated in all these different ways and in all these different contexts.
AA: Yeah, so I think from the M.E. O'Brien interview, it felt like she thought she was disappointing us in some ways with a few of her answers. But I think it made clear to me the fractal theory in a way that I didn't totally understand. But I think O'Brien made it like so clear that there's not going to be like one big boom to end the world or save the world. And that there's like a lot of… misdeeds? I don't know, there's some fault in trying to have one effort to reach everyone, and so fractal theory kind of was like ‘everyone just reach as far as your arms go so that we can all cover the earth’ with this really beautiful hyperspecific like, and dynamic way to meet our neighbors needs, because we know them and we trust them and I feel like… I think I just hope people decide to reach as far as their arms go to affect the people around them, outside of their household, just to, like, give people what they'd hope to receive from someone else.
MH: That was so beautiful. Yeah, I think that's a really lovely image for exactly one thing I hope people are taking from this, that people are seeing these stories as like all these people in their little pockets of the world are creating care in these ways and they're not all doing all of them, right? They're like, they're all doing one of them, and they're doing whatever makes sense for their context and what they have the skill and passion and energy for. And like, that's a good in the world and inspires me. And so I hope people feel inspired by the different possibilities for what radical community care can look like because it looks so many different ways even just across these few interviews, and to know that they can do that if they are paying attention to just their little pocket of the world, just as far as their arms can reach, as you said. I got chills when you said that.
KB: I love that. It reminded me of, I don't even remember. Is it like a Patti LaBelle song, somebody from back in the day saying like “reach out and touch somebody's hand.” Like that's what it made me think of. Just like, you know, who's within reach. And I think that that's really powerful, because I think it can get overwhelming very easily and quickly for people to feel like there's going to be a big boom and there's going to be this one moment that is the apocalypse, capital A Apocalypse. And it's like, but really there's a bunch of little apocalypses happening all the time. And so really thinking about like, one, what are we doing to take care of each other when the little apocalypses happen? When the little things go wrong, when, you know, your co-parent passes away or gets disabled? How do you reach out to community or how do you build what you need? When you lose your job or when good things happen. When you move to a new city because you always wanted to live there, but, you know, we got to build community. What do we do in those like, smaller, those personal maybe, personal apocalypses or personal upheavals? And then too like, I hope hearing all these different stories and all these different approaches to things is a reminder that like, you know, we all have our gifts we all have our abilities and our talents and our skills and we can use those to affect the people around us, and it doesn't have to all look the same way. We don't all have to open up a food pantry. We don't all have to do a childcare collective. But like, if that's your thing, do it. But if your thing is like ‘I'm really into STEM and science’ and you know whatever, then maybe you'll teach the kids some science things during the summer while their parents are at work, you know? Just really emphasizing that like we're all different we all have our different backgrounds and identities and experiences and knowledge and skills that we can use to build community in a really beautiful and hopefully organic way, in a way that doesn't feel overwhelming and doesn't feel stressful.
JC: Yes, I love the word organic because I think, what I'm hoping people take away from this is just the ability to see themselves in these stories, you know what I mean? Even if you aren't the parent who is creating a whole new world and structure for the child, like you maybe have benefited from that kind of care. And so I think, not just only with these interviews, but this anthology as a whole, when we were collecting stories from people, art from people, like, I think at times people saw what we were trying to showcase and thought ‘oh I'm not doing anything that's radical. I'm not participating in any kind of community care.’ No, you actually probably are! [laughs] Like, if you're kind, you know what I'm saying? Like it don't take too much. So I just really hope that people get to see these stories and see like ‘oh I've actually been giving in ways that I didn't think about before and I've been receiving in ways that I probably didn't consider before either.’
KB: I love that. I love that.
MH: Yeah. I could talk about this all day long, but I think that's a beautiful place to end it if
everyone else feels satisfied…
KB: Yes, we've done so much. It's a lot.
JC: Yes, very grateful for this group, for the work that we've collected and that we get to share.
AA: It's been great.
KB: Well, thank y'all so much for your thoughts, for your work on this, for your consideration. Thank you to the people that we interviewed. Thank you to those who submitted artwork and poetry and everything to the anthology. I'm so excited for y'all to engage with it. And please let us know how you feel about it. What is it bringing up in y'all? What feedback do you have? And what information do you think is missing?
MH: We should also mention that the anthology is living, so if you're inspired to share your story, let us know!
JC: Thank you!
AA: Thank you!
MH: See y'all soon.
KB: Bye.
KB: Look at all these beautiful faces! All these cute queers! [laughs]
MH: So, we are gathered here today to have a reflection conversation about the whole anthology process which started last summer, summer of 2025. So we've been performing interviews since August of 2025, and we're now wrapping up our analysis of the interviews, our writing and thinking about them. So we just wanted to come together to talk about what the process has been like, what we've learned. So that's what we're doing here!
KB: Awesome. I'm excited to be here and to have this conversation. I can start us off by asking the first question. So based off of the interviews, off of everything that we've learned, the analysis, what stands out for y'all as things that enable radical community care?
JC: The first word that came to mind for me is capacity. I feel like a lot of folks talked about how they wouldn't be able to do the work that they were doing alone because it just requires so much more than one person can offer. I know some people also spoke about the pandemic being a time where they really were able to pause, reflect, and kind of reorganize either their disposable income, their commitment to volunteering, showing up for other people, but I think all of that was really correlated to finally having a pause on this global level for many of us to really sit back and decide like, how do I want to use my time? How do I want to use my energy? How do I want to use my money? And all of that just brings me back to the word capacity.
MH: Yeah, I think that's definitely true. And it's really interesting to me all of the different things that create capacity for someone, like relationship, which you just mentioned—having other people's time, energy, money to work with—and the relationships themselves give us the joy and energy to keep doing the hard work. I was especially moved by hearing from Jamarah, one of the folks we interviewed who founded the Southern Birth Justice Network, talk about her relationship with her mentors and the way that those relationships facilitated the care work that then she did by [those] people just being like, ‘hey, we need this in the community or I'm doing this and I need to pass it on to someone, will you take it up?’ And if we don't have those relationships, then that can't happen—it just isn't facilitated. And I think so many of us are lacking relationships with our elders and with mentor figures and stuff. So, like, how do we
build out those relationships just so that that can keep happening, you know?
AA: I think similar to both of y'all, one of the words that came up for me was willingness, like a willingness to get to know people and a willingness to give and receive care, willingness to ask for care. I can't remember the interviewee's name, but the owner of the [mutual aid] store, and the way that their whole setup was genuinely like take what you need, you'll never take too much, there's always enough for whoever needs it. And you don't have to earn it in a way, like you don't have to become a friend to be entitled to what I have to give. So I think that kind of enabled like… you get to know people past the point of stranger, but also there's a pretty low threshold for a person to not be a stranger anymore and to accept and give what we all need.
KB: Two things! I was gonna say two things about one, back to what y'all were saying about Jamarah and having elders and mentors. I think that's one thing about midwifery specifically, and like not even birthwork as a whole like specifically midwifery, because it's been stolen from Black and Indigenous folks and, you know, people who practice it within their cultures, there is this concerted effort to bring it back, and so like the elders are locked in, the elders are like we know that it is our job to pass this down to the next generation, and in other iterations of care work or other iterations of like community building work, I'm not sure if that intentionality is there. So I think that's really, really crucial, is the understanding—and really one of my purposes for doing this project was to give community building gravitas, I guess, or to give it a like, ‘no, this is important. This is a thing we need to invest in, and this is why.’ And I think that, again, in the midwifery community, it's very much like we know that if we don't pass this down, this could get lost and it's already been lost once and we're bringing it back. And it's very purposeful in that way.
The other thing I was going to say was I really appreciate that y'all had words, Jasmine and Alanah, of like being open, having capacity, those types of things, because I think my first thought about what stands out as what enables radical community care is structure. And it doesn't have to be a super intense infrastructure of an institution or anything, but the structure I'm thinking of is like multiple people mentioned growing up and going to church, and not necessarily still doing those things, but the structure of every Sunday, 11 a.m we meet at this place and we do this thing, we do these rituals together. And it also reminds me of Octavia Butler and in the Parable of the Talents—I always get them mixed up but the second book—the Earthseed had a meeting every week, every Wednesday, they would have a meeting and this is what they would do at the meeting. And there was space for dissent. There was space for conversation. There was space for deeper study. And I think that in a variety of the interviews and what we've learned throughout this project, when there's that level of intentionality, the relationship building, the community building is deeper, they're more successful I feel like, they're more capable of doing whatever it is that they're setting out to do because of that structure and that consistency. And I think that that's something that can be a struggle—creating that structure, maintaining it, but also like if you don't maintain or create that structure and you're just kind of doing things like ad hoc it can be kind of hard for people to latch on to it. And so to have something where people can rely on that, I think is really important.
JC: Yeah, what you're talking about is making me think a lot about place, like location, because that is such an important part of building those types of structures. And I think the piece that we don't always talk about is when a structure is rooted in a physical space, obviously, like spaces can change, be destroyed, all the things, so it's not as like perfect or protected, but i feel like that allows the fluidity of, like you were saying Khye, people entering in and feeling like they can find a place to fit in versus when we've seen other orgs or mutual aid groups kind of dissolve because it was actually related or more heavily associated with a person rather than the place, and so when there's conflict with a person, when there is something happening on that kind of interpersonal level and people can't work past it, everything disappears. And so thinking about structure as a place that lets people come in and out of—I know nobody really spoke about that as explicitly, but I feel like the things that you’re saying, I'm connecting it to some of the challenges that people shared when they were like, I'm trying to build this structure, but I'm building it with these people and somebody popped off and now the structure is gone, you know? And so what that has to tell us too about how this work can survive and thrive regardless of who's there and who's not.
KB: Yeah. And I think, to tie it back to midwifery, a lot of folks might take on an initiative by themselves or maybe with a really small group of people but then like, and it doesn't even have to be like an interpersonal thing—somebody could get sick, somebody could lose their job, somebody could move across the country, like whatever. Anything could happen where it's like, okay, there are two people who are doing this and now one person is down for the count, so now we're floundering because it was never going to be sustainable with two people. But you know in midwifery, there aren't a lot of midwives—community-based midwives and like Black midwives—in the country, but there's more than two! And so the work has been distributed to a point where if one midwife retires or moves away or whatever that it doesn't completely crumble… Aw man, I lost it. I lost the thought. I’ll come back to it.
JC: Yeah, the last thing that I'll add about the midwifery piece that you've been bringing up, and kind of what a few people were touching on before, is this idea of being voluntold. I feel like that's something from the older generation that we don't see enough now. But a lot of people I feel like are not being called into work or called upon to do specific work, and that is just as important of a piece for a lot of the people that we spoke to. Or if not that, I think they might have an innate feeling of, ‘oh, I want to do this because I'm thinking about the generations after me’ when I think about some of the parents that we talked with. So that word also comes to mind.
MH: Yeah, I love that word. And I think instead of thinking about it as someone being pushy, like that is how you create leadership is you ask people to take it up and to do the next iteration
of it. And sometimes I think in these movement spaces, we're allergic to leadership and afraid of how to do it in a good way, which makes sense, obviously, but bringing people into leadership and asking more of people slowly as trust and relationship builds is so important. That's how we get more energy and labor power to make things sustainable.
KB: Yeah I think generationally that's one of the things that like—it's like we don't just pop up on people in their houses anymore, for good reason right, there were enough of us that were like, we don't actually like that. However, the elders, you just sit on the porch and somebody walks by and you're like, ‘hey, how you doin? Come sit. Let's catch up.’ And there's a little bit more like imposition maybe? I saw an Instagram post about this that was like ‘are we considerationing ourselves out of community?’ Of like, oh, well, I don't want to bother anybody, I'm going through a crisis, but, you know, we have a check-in scheduled for two weeks from now, so I'll just wait until then. And it's like, you can't always wait until the thing on the calendar comes up! Sometimes it's like how do we make space for everything to not be so scheduled and not be so like planned out, and I think I'm connecting that to elders voluntelling people what to do because like, on the one hand, we don't do that because it's like ‘oh well they're busy’ or ‘oh they have a lot going on’ and we kind of answer the question for them without even asking. And like yes we're all busy, yes we're all stressed out, yes we all have five jobs and so did our elders! You know, like that's not unique to our generation necessarily. We have some unique circumstances, but folks have always been busy, folks have always been doing all the things, and so I think being voluntold to do something—like it's not always the best, but i think it does a couple of things: one, it's like a ‘I see you, I see your work, it's valuable, I believe in your leadership abilities,’ but it's also—when I worked in education, there was this phrase and it was ‘challenge and support.’ And it's some really old theory that somebody came up with in the 60s. And it's like, yeah, you know, challenge obviously is important for growth, but if you don't give them an equal amount of support, they will fail. Or if you support them too much, but don't challenge them, you're coddling them. So you have to find that balance. And so being voluntold to step into a leadership position hopefully comes also with that support of the mentorship of, hey I’m asking you to do this thing, I'm going to guide you through it, I'm going to help you do it, but this is me investing in your leadership capacity as the newer generation. And I think a lot of times we get so caught up in ‘if you want it done right, do it yourself’ that we forget to teach, that we forget to bring up the next generation of people. To our detriment, because then you're 40, 50, 60 years old and you're still doing all the work, you're not passing on your knowledge, and then, like I said, this person gets sick or, you know, god forbid something happens, and then you have all this knowledge that never got passed down anywhere. Now it's gone. And that's what we can't have happen. And I think that some folks think about that, that legacy piece of their work and some folks don't. And, you know, I get it. When you're constantly in emergency mode, it's hard to think about that, what is it… contingency planning, but it's a really crucial piece of all of this.
AA: Yeah, I think one of the other things I thought about in response to this question, which I think kind of relates to the points y'all are making about authority and leadership, was radical care is enabled by having this kind of blanketed belief in the autonomy and agency and authority of humans. And I think the interview with Yolande really highlighted that for me as like there are people who let their children step out of what we would consider a “child's place” to have preferences and voice them and make decisions about their life and even teach adults. So they're kind of granted this position of authority. And so they can really step into that and just feel empowered and trust themselves and trust the people around them and meet each other, like everyone is able to meet each other with that type of understanding and disrupt all these kind of inherent hierarchies with just that one belief.
MH: Yeah. To build on that and go back to what Jasmine started talking about about parenting, I think that was something that stood out from starting to do the analysis that Jasmine really brought to the forefront that I hadn't really noticed: that the act of parenting brought people into radical care in several different of the interviews. Because people talked about, you know, wanting to create the world that they want their kids to live in and having to literally create the structures for their kids to live good lives, especially when the institutions like school and stuff are failing kids right now. Like you can't wait to build something new when your kid needs to be educated right now. There's a kind of urgency that comes into world making when you have kids. Yeah, I don't know if you wanted to talk any more about that, Jasmine, but that seemed to shift people into a sense of radical caregiving or enable that for some people.
JC: Yeah I do want to talk about it more, but I'm having multiple thoughts. We might have to cut this out because I feel like what we've also been doing is kind of answering the second question, like how can we support and grow those things [that create radical community care] either as individuals or us as an org. So I'm thinking about how I want to answer the parenting question with that because I do feel like there's something there. And the answer shouldn't have to be like ‘everybody go have kids!’ because that's definitely not it because not every parent is going to step up in that way, but I don't know, I think we've had multiple conversations not right, directly related to this but definitely around what you're talking about Marin, like how for some people it is parenting but just I think what you were saying earlier relationship building and being like ‘oh I'm actually in relationship with this other person and I want us to experience something together, like how do I begin to format that? And how do I get to like experiment and learn from this trial and error process?’ And I feel like that is something that came up a lot in our interviews, like people are like I am freestyling, this is my first time out here, and I feel like one thing that I remember Jamarah specifically saying was even though a lot of the stuff I'm creating feels brand new, it's not like nobody is reinventing the wheel. A lot of people are looking back whether it's to their ancestors, to their childhood experiences, to their mentors. And so thinking about all of those points and people as kind of activations that I feel like do help people grow either in their leadership, in their radical care, et cetera, et cetera. So I can pause there.
KB: And I'll say in relation to parenting, one thing that I feel like all the people that we interviewed who are parents mentioned in some way was that like I'm building this thing within my household for my kids, or I built this thing in past tense, and then I brought it outside of my household to my wider community, and so this idea that like we're all kind of, not winging it but we're all trying out these new things, but inside the home is often like the lab. And then once it kind of works in the home, then take it out into different contexts to see how this works. Like, okay, mutual aid. Okay, conflict management. Okay, you know, reflecting on how can we ask for the help that we need. And so, yeah, I definitely feel like for the parents, there is an intentionality of like I have these kids, I need support now, my kids need support now, so what can I do right now for them? Not this mythical future that I may or may not see, but like right now at this moment. And I think that in general, being a parent or just being a caregiver to children really has this like groundedness and presence in it of like, you can't be in your head when you're chasing a toddler around, ‘cause you know, you gotta know that they're going to be safe. Because you are there. And so I think that that's a really powerful piece that I saw threaded throughout all that.
MH: Alanah, do you want to say more about what you wrote in the chat?
AA: Yeah, I was thinking about kind of what you were talking about, Marin. And how becoming a parent kind of makes so many more things possible. So I was just literally on a walk earlier and I saw this woman on a bike riding with two toddlers in a wagon. And I was like, I cannot imagine having to carry around two heavy ass kids for the rest of my life. But like, it's the type of thing that becomes necessary because it's there and you want to see it do well. And I think it could apply to so many things outside of parenting, like I used to have a Chihuahua that peed out of excitement, and I don't remember being upset. I just accepted that that was part of how I had to take care of him. And I think to what Jasmine was just saying, like, I'm doing this because I want to see you in a happy space or us be well or something like that. So, yeah.
KB: Thank you for that story, Alanah. [laughs] It's real though, it's like… the things that in theory, before you had the kid or the dog or you were in a particular situation, like caregiving an elder, like, oh, wiping butts is nasty! And then it's your grandma sitting there, like she needs help! You're not going to be like, ‘sorry, grandma, that's gross’—you’re going to do it! You're going to step up, because that's what the moment calls for. And I think parenting on the one hand normalizes things that, if you're not a parent or before you became a parent would not even cross your mind, but on the other hand, it normalizes things that would have never crossed your mind.
Jasmine, I think you mentioned it earlier, like not all parents step up to the call, right, and it's so easy to normalize like, oh, well, I have to be supermom, I have to do it all by myself, I can't ask for help—you know, to raise your kids in the normative way, which is a one way ticket to your body breaking down. And there's an opportunity to see infinite futures when you have these kids of like, you know, I could just ride in an uber with my kids or I could put some helmets on them, put them in the wagon, and tote them behind my bike. And I think that's what I love to see about different cultural parenting practices is like, you know, some parents it's like the baby's strapped to my back, let's go, like I'm gonna go and do the thing, or like you know the baby's here with me in the swimming pool, like people just bring their kids with them to do things. And you know in this society, you'd be like ‘oh I would never let my kid chop vegetables’ meanwhile there's a three-year-old right now that's like prepping for dinner and like chopping up some carrots. Kids can do so much more than what we assume sometimes, especially in this society, but at the same time we create the container for kids to grow into, and if that container is like ‘we have no expectations of you, I'm gonna wait on you hand and foot,’ then that's what they're gonna grow into, or if it's like ‘hey you're here with me, I'm going to the protest you're gonna be at the protest on my shoulders,’ then that's what the kid will grow into.
And so I think it's very easy to just fall into the script. I feel like we hear the stories of like, oh, yeah, me and my friends, we were all radical in college. And then like folks started pairing off, getting married, having kids, and now they have the nuclear family, 2.5 kids, and the picket fence and blah, blah, blah. It's very easy to kind of jump on that escalator or, I guess, never jump off the escalator of normative. But also, yeah, you have kids and your whole world can open up if you're open to that and you're willing to step into those possibilities.
MH: Yeah. Part of having kids is also just needing so much more help than you did before. And you can let that radicalize you if you want to and create structures of care and support that are outside of that normative family model, but not everyone does.
I wanted to pull on this thread that you introduced, Khye, about our home spaces as labs for technologies that then we like bring into our organizing spaces because I think this was another one of our questions throughout this process and it's definitely one of my curiosities about like the relationship between our personal care structures whether that's our families, our chosen families, our households, and how that's related to radical care work, which we have defined as it has to be kind of collective in some way, like it has to get a little bit bigger than our households. But the radical work that we do in our households informs that. And at least many of our interviews seem to speak to them informing each other. So I was curious about if y'all's perspectives on that changed throughout this process or if you have new thoughts about that.
KB: I have a thought. It's not fully formed, so it may or may not make sense. But I feel like most of the people we talked to, the work that they do is long-term work. And they've been doing it for a while, and they plan on doing it for longer term. But there were a couple people we talked to who were doing very, like, urgent [work], like I think about the person who did the mask bloc during COVID, like, it was urgent. It was, like, timely for that moment. And I mean, COVID's not over, it's still timely, but you know, the world has moved on for some reason. But just, I feel like the people whose work was more long-term, it was a lot more integrated into their day-to-day personal lives, versus the people who were doing that urgent timely work, maybe it was a little bit more disconnected. They were just like “I'm doing a mask bloc because people need masks.” Like it wasn't necessarily like a part of their larger politics–I mean, it was, but they didn't necessarily make that connection themselves. I don't know, that may be me misremembering things from the interview, but it just felt a little bit more disconnected, like still connected in some ways, but a little bit more disconnected from like the day-to-day.
JC: No, I think you're right, because the person who was in charge of the mask distribution was very clear that what they were doing was a resource first and a community second. And I think that is kind of what you're talking to about, like, okay, this is still a project that people can take from, use as needed, share widely, but... the intention behind the space was not for that same kind of like community long-term, like, wider expansion that we saw with some of these other folks who have had these longer projects. So I feel like it's funny, Marin, like to your question, I think for whatever reason, hearing people talk about like experimenting in their home presently created this like feedback loop in my mind that I wasn't seeing before. Because we had spoken with so many people to be like “what was your family like? Did you grow up in an extended family? Did you see radical care early on?” and for the folks who did, I felt like that snapshot was clear, but for whatever reason, their present life and how they're not necessarily mirroring exactly what they saw as a child, but at least kind of replicating like, “okay, this is the structure that I'm providing and this is what my kid is going to reference” if we were ever to interview their kids later, you know what I mean? Like, seeing that as more of like “oh, this is how it starts in the home and expands wider and wider even before it gets to the point where people are sharing beyond the community” because as soon as you like share that information with your child, now the child is going to school and sharing it in these different types of ways and saying “oh, but this is what I do at home” and little things like that. So I also don't have a complete thought, but I will say like I think it just clarified my perspective on what it means to like, yeah, tinker and figure things out in a household, and then bring it to a wider community. Because I think where we started when it came to interviewing folks we were seeing through their eyes as like a child, like “oh this is what I'm absorbing” versus later when they're talking about what they're doing in their own homes, it's like “oh this is actually what I'm creating.” And I think that was like that clarifying shift for me that was really important, talking to people and seeing how that work informs the other.
MH: I feel like this question continues to be complicated, and doing the interviews only complicated it further for me. But that's–that's great. That's a great outcome, because I think people illustrated very artfully how much the personal is political, which was what Yolande said in their interview, and how these different parts of people's lives are not like binary or separate in any way. And also the interview with M.E. O'Brien was a lot about this question and about the limitations of what we do in our households, [for] creating revolutionary change. And so that's... It's something I've been sitting with, too, that we can't just act within our homes and expect the whole world to change. And we do have to acknowledge how much the pressures of our huge economic and social systems put on our interpersonal lives, our home lives, the structures we create for ourselves. But it's not either or, ever, like, the things we do to create alternative care structures for ourselves and for our kids, for the people we care about matter and give us the tools, often, to do more extended work in the community. And we shouldn't get too like myopic about our individual lives because I think that can distract us from building broader community relationships and then creating those wider networks which I think will be actually what sustains us when our systems crumble more and more. That's like my overall understanding now from after doing the interviews.
KB: Yeah and I think… thinking more on what M.E. O'Brien was saying. Like I think she did have a good point about, like, you can't always control your household dynamics. You can't always control, like, maybe you end up co-parenting with someone you didn't choose with your co-parent's new partner or something. Or maybe you, like… just there are so many variables in life and especially with parenting. Like, it's hard to say, like, ‘okay, I'm going to raise my kids like this.’ Because yeah, there's a thousand different things that could go differently than how you imagine them. And so then, yeah, not everybody has that ability, I don't know if it's a privilege, but that ability to run their households in a particular way. And so some people don't have access to that. And even like some of the things that she was saying about like… she kind of pushed back against the, you know, childhood pieces and was basically like, “how does that connect to what people are doing now?” And I mean I think starting out, or before the interviews, I thought there would be, like, a clear throughline between people's childhood experiences and their adult experiences. And ‘this is what I learned as a kid and this is how I'm applying it as an adult,’ or ‘this is how I analyzed it and decided what to take and what to leave.’ And I think for some people that was the case, but for other people, it was less clear. It was more muddied, the connection between their childhood experiences and their adult experiences. Yeah, I think that not everyone has a very clear through line and that's okay. And, you know, people become radicalized at different points in their lives and maybe having kids radicalized you or maybe, you know, going to college or, you know, having a close friend or anything can radicalize people. And so like if you have these community-based experiences as a kid, it can be a through line through the rest of your life, but that's not everybody's experience. So yeah, I appreciated that different perspective that maybe I wasn't expecting, and it took me a while to, like, wrap my head around exactly what she was saying and like, how that applies to this work.
JC: What's one thing we hope people will take away from this project? And feel free to say more than one.
AA: I think since we were just talking about the M.E. O'Brien interview, one of the things that stood out, and I feel like I'm going to say this wrong, because I have a short memory. What is it—is it fractal theory or is it like raindrop theory? Which one is it? Can someone explain it really quickly?
KB: Yeah fractal theory! Y'all know how I feel about fractal theory. adrienne maree [brown] brought it up in Emergent Strategy, and it's basically this idea–when I first heard it explained, someone, whoever it was, explained it as like snowflakes. Like if you look at a snowflake under a microscope, like whatever the structure of the overall snowflake is, that's what all the like, mini structures are that like, make up the full structure of the snowflake. So basically fractal theory is like the micro makes up the macro or like how I see–I mean it's–I think it's a scientific version of “the personal is political” and my version of it is like how you treat the people closest to you is how you treat people, you know, on a large scale. So you have these like cult leaders who are doing… [or] people claim that they're doing, amazing things, but then they like go home and torture their wife and kids or, you know, they're a CEO and the business has helped millions of people, but then they're a tyrant as a boss. And that comes out in the big picture parts of the work as well, even if on the surface it looks different. Like when you really get into it, it's like, no, these patterns are replicated in all these different ways and in all these different contexts.
AA: Yeah, so I think from the M.E. O'Brien interview, it felt like she thought she was disappointing us in some ways with a few of her answers. But I think it made clear to me the fractal theory in a way that I didn't totally understand. But I think O'Brien made it like so clear that there's not going to be like one big boom to end the world or save the world. And that there's like a lot of… misdeeds? I don't know, there's some fault in trying to have one effort to reach everyone, and so fractal theory kind of was like ‘everyone just reach as far as your arms go so that we can all cover the earth’ with this really beautiful hyperspecific like, and dynamic way to meet our neighbors needs, because we know them and we trust them and I feel like… I think I just hope people decide to reach as far as their arms go to affect the people around them, outside of their household, just to, like, give people what they'd hope to receive from someone else.
MH: That was so beautiful. Yeah, I think that's a really lovely image for exactly one thing I hope people are taking from this, that people are seeing these stories as like all these people in their little pockets of the world are creating care in these ways and they're not all doing all of them, right? They're like, they're all doing one of them, and they're doing whatever makes sense for their context and what they have the skill and passion and energy for. And like, that's a good in the world and inspires me. And so I hope people feel inspired by the different possibilities for what radical community care can look like because it looks so many different ways even just across these few interviews, and to know that they can do that if they are paying attention to just their little pocket of the world, just as far as their arms can reach, as you said. I got chills when you said that.
KB: I love that. It reminded me of, I don't even remember. Is it like a Patti LaBelle song, somebody from back in the day saying like “reach out and touch somebody's hand.” Like that's what it made me think of. Just like, you know, who's within reach. And I think that that's really powerful, because I think it can get overwhelming very easily and quickly for people to feel like there's going to be a big boom and there's going to be this one moment that is the apocalypse, capital A Apocalypse. And it's like, but really there's a bunch of little apocalypses happening all the time. And so really thinking about like, one, what are we doing to take care of each other when the little apocalypses happen? When the little things go wrong, when, you know, your co-parent passes away or gets disabled? How do you reach out to community or how do you build what you need? When you lose your job or when good things happen. When you move to a new city because you always wanted to live there, but, you know, we got to build community. What do we do in those like, smaller, those personal maybe, personal apocalypses or personal upheavals? And then too like, I hope hearing all these different stories and all these different approaches to things is a reminder that like, you know, we all have our gifts we all have our abilities and our talents and our skills and we can use those to affect the people around us, and it doesn't have to all look the same way. We don't all have to open up a food pantry. We don't all have to do a childcare collective. But like, if that's your thing, do it. But if your thing is like ‘I'm really into STEM and science’ and you know whatever, then maybe you'll teach the kids some science things during the summer while their parents are at work, you know? Just really emphasizing that like we're all different we all have our different backgrounds and identities and experiences and knowledge and skills that we can use to build community in a really beautiful and hopefully organic way, in a way that doesn't feel overwhelming and doesn't feel stressful.
JC: Yes, I love the word organic because I think, what I'm hoping people take away from this is just the ability to see themselves in these stories, you know what I mean? Even if you aren't the parent who is creating a whole new world and structure for the child, like you maybe have benefited from that kind of care. And so I think, not just only with these interviews, but this anthology as a whole, when we were collecting stories from people, art from people, like, I think at times people saw what we were trying to showcase and thought ‘oh I'm not doing anything that's radical. I'm not participating in any kind of community care.’ No, you actually probably are! [laughs] Like, if you're kind, you know what I'm saying? Like it don't take too much. So I just really hope that people get to see these stories and see like ‘oh I've actually been giving in ways that I didn't think about before and I've been receiving in ways that I probably didn't consider before either.’
KB: I love that. I love that.
MH: Yeah. I could talk about this all day long, but I think that's a beautiful place to end it if
everyone else feels satisfied…
KB: Yes, we've done so much. It's a lot.
JC: Yes, very grateful for this group, for the work that we've collected and that we get to share.
AA: It's been great.
KB: Well, thank y'all so much for your thoughts, for your work on this, for your consideration. Thank you to the people that we interviewed. Thank you to those who submitted artwork and poetry and everything to the anthology. I'm so excited for y'all to engage with it. And please let us know how you feel about it. What is it bringing up in y'all? What feedback do you have? And what information do you think is missing?
MH: We should also mention that the anthology is living, so if you're inspired to share your story, let us know!
JC: Thank you!
AA: Thank you!
MH: See y'all soon.
KB: Bye.
©2026 All Rights Reserved. Kuluntu Reproductive Justice Center.
