The current-day reality of life in the U.S. is that there is very little public safety net. Our system is set up on the assumption that people’s families will care for them, and without the Family, there aren’t many other options. So what happens when families are abusive or hostile? Or simply can’t make ends meet? Several people we interviewed spoke about realizing how little support system there is outside of the private family structure. 

zara (z pronouns) experienced the lack of a real safety net firsthand when z entered the family policing system as a child. When zara was 13, the family policing system separated z from z’s siblings and displaced z from z’s home. In reflection, zara realized that “there was no magic other place that I could go and be safe… safety is something that we create and that we practice.” z’s desire to create safety for z’s community echoes out into all of the work z does today, including organizing with the Philly Childcare Collective which “provides free and donation-based childcare for grassroots organizing meetings and events.”

Addison (they/them) shared a similar sentiment, having experienced homelessness while being estranged from their family. When Addison and their partner became homeless while pregnant with their kid, they didn’t have family to turn to: “if we're homeless—I mean, when we've been homeless—we don't get to move back in with our mom. We don't have that luxury.” Not only do Addison and their partner feel their own precarity without having families of origin to turn to in crisis, they witness the same lack of family support for many of the people they organize with at their food distribution project. For both them and their unhoused neighbors, “building community is survival too, it's survival for all of us. If we don't take it seriously, many of us don't have those families to fall back on.”

Both of these people saw firsthand that when connection was severed with their families of origin, there was little support to rely on, as many government programs were either inaccessible or perpetuated further harm. They also both expressed that without a safety net built in, they have to create it themselves. These experiences pushed them toward the care work they do today.

Jovan (they/them) also illustrated the lack of public support outside of the family in the United States, and how different the culture of care is in Haiti, where they’re from. Jovan described the family they grew up in as “not quite blood family” but more like a “clan.” These were their extended family, like their uncle and cousins, and others who were not biologically related but “from the same village area in Haiti.” In Jovan’s case, biological connection did not define their family, rather they were connected through the shared geocultural context of being from the same village. When they moved to the U.S., Jovan’s community included immigrants from other places who were all part of the same suburban neighborhood. 

When we asked about how this community of immigrants supported each other, Jovan described a home-made safety net, which included “jobs that flowed” between people, “a rich transfer of funds,” and taking people in if they needed a couch to sleep on. There was an understanding within the community that “no one would be allowed to hit rock bottom.” This seems like the very definition of a safety net: a structure meant to catch people when they fall on hard times. In this case, Jovan’s community’s safety net was made up of a web of relationships that protected each other when the state would not.  

Today, Jovan and their partner Yolande (they/them) are helping create a financial safety net for marginalized people in Atlanta through the Metro Atlanta Mutual Aid Fund, or MAMA Fund, and a bail fund for Black folks called the Free Atlanta Abolition Movement. These projects are all under the umbrella of the Organization for Human Rights and Democracy. 

Privilege often leads people to believe that there is some structure that catches people when they fall on hard times. Generally, the systems in place work well enough for white, financially resourced, able-bodied, and otherwise privileged folks, so they may not pay much heed to the calls for transformation of our systems from others. Often, it takes a big interruption to the status quo to show that capitalism leaves us all precarious. For several folks we interviewed, it took actually experiencing a crisis personally to realize that our systems are fragile, and when they fail, no one from “above” is coming to save us. 

For two of the people we talked to, who are both white, that wake-up call happened during the COVID-19 pandemic. Amanda (she/her), who grew up in what she called a “very traditional nuclear family,” had little exposure to alternative care structures before COVID. She said it was “the pandemic for me in 2020 that really started radicalizing me and how I view community and family and things.” Although she was already “bucking some social norms” by having multiple romantic partners, it was COVID that showed her “how isolated everyone was in my life from each other and from actual community.” That realization led her to start making masks for friends and eventually distributing free masks widely. The mask distro project turned into a Discord server for COVID-conscious community members to share lifesaving resources.

For Addison, although they already had a new perspective on care and mutual aid through experiencing homelessness, it was the pandemic that pushed them to get “super, super serious” about their mutual aid efforts. Addison described their amazement seeing people care for each other differently once the pandemic started: “to see people coming out of their homes, setting up water tables, just like all that, I've never seen that. It was so special.” They said it was the first time they saw people “helping in a community” rather than “people helping each other as friends.” Seeing people come out to help meet each others’ needs during the pandemic prompted them to take action themselves, and for two years they did mobile food distribution. Eventually, they started a permanent, weekly food distribution stand in their neighborhood.

For many parents we interviewed, parenting served as an invitation to practice collective care tactics and build institutions that expand care beyond their families. It is clear that these parents are building the world they want their children to inherit by ensuring the care structures they are investing in are not exclusive to the children in their homes. 

For example, for zara, becoming a parent pushed z into building collective care networks. When zara became a single parent, z realized just how much time and money were necessary to care for themself and z’s kid. Needing support, zara searched for others who wanted “to build something with [z] around collective care” but struggled to “find [z’s] people.” Without a partner or a connection to z’s family of origin, zara had to build the care z needed for themself. z reached out to other parents, started co-parenting with some of them, and has used restorative justice practices like circle keeping to tend to those relationships. Later, zara became part of the Philly Childcare Collective as part of z’s desire to create more structures of support for parents. For z, the childcare collective became the type of consistent engagement and deepened trust/intimacy needed to build a collective care structure. 

Yolande’s experience as a parent also brought them into broader collective care. In our conversation with Yolande, they talked about wanting to create new institutions for their children, recognizing our current institutions as “pillars” of the harmful systems that surround us that need to be “knock[ed] out.” Wanting to educate their children outside of the public education system incited the Lakou Learning and Liberation Cooperative, a place where both their children and other children can engage in self-directed cooperative  education. Yolande recognized that normative homeschooling requires “one parent who can be out of the economy” and “a lot of resources,” so they turned to a more collective approach. Like zara, the need to provide care for their children, in the form of education in this case, pushed Yolande toward creating a collective care model that serves many others.

Parenting also brought Jamarah (she/her) further into community care work by giving her a framework for collective care that she then used to structure her organization, Southern Birth Justice Network. Jamarah modeled SBJN after the community care she received from folks helping to care for her children. In our interview, Jamarah touched on how critical having other people parent with and for her made it even possible for her to finish midwifery school. When she first lived in Atlanta, it was easier to join spaces because the infrastructure for childcare among Black or queer parents existed. There were groups and meetups, but once Jamarah was in Miami, she had to build that network from scratch with others that needed the same type of care: “we all had children. Some of us were partnered, some of us were not. But either way, we all needed support.” Finding the mutual shared responsibility created an opening that would prove to inform SBJN: 

"So for me as a midwife, I've then been able to create community around what I received

and benefited from. So to institutionalize it in a nonprofit—to create mutual aid programs

and to connect moms together so that they can parent in community—that's something

that's been very important to me because I know I wouldn't have gotten to where I am

without that."

Communal parenting automatically attunes those involved to the type of radical care we know is possible. This type of expansive parenting creates a playground to develop and practice community care and the world we want all children to inherit. Parenting can become a practice ground for creating wider support networks that will serve entire communities, not just parents and kids. 

One big theme that came out of our conversations with people about communal care was the idea that doing care in this way is a return to ancestral, pre-capitalist ways of being rather than a new invention. This idea is deeply embedded into Kuluntu’s work and into the conversations other reproductive justice-centered groups are having about moving beyond the nuclear family form. In the introduction to their New Visions collection, Forward Together wrestles with the idea of “family abolition” and explores what that really means. To them, and to us, “abolition is known by other terms. Decolonizing. Reindigenizing. Redefining. Radicalizing. Reimagining. Healing.”

Many of the people we interviewed reflected the idea that practicing care in an expansive, collective way is nothing new, simply a remembering. When we asked Addison about the origin of their free food project, they reminded us that “people have done mutual aid-type things forever, you know, forever and ever and ever, so it's not like it's a reinvention.” They emphasized that the idea of creating a space to share food and supplies with their neighbors every week was not “a brand new thing” at all.

For Yolande, who practices “communal polyamory” and is part of several mutual aid efforts to expand the care they give their family into the wider world, practicing radical care means returning to their Jamaican roots: “...whether it's my organizing or living, I'm just trying to replicate the best of what I experienced as a child with my grandmother in the hillside in Jamaica.” For them, reimagining their relationships and how they care for others outside of the nuclear norm is not a “revolution” but rather “a piece of home.” This speaks volumes about how differently care is approached outside of the U.S. and how much there is to learn from returning to our ancestral roots.

Jamarah also articulated a culturally-rooted return to the old ways in her conception of communal care. Reclaiming African traditions and knowledge lost in the capture of people during the transatlantic slave trade is an important part of Jamarah’s life work. Reviving the tradition of Black midwifery in the United States, which is rooted in Indigenous African cultures, is central to the mission of Birth Justice. In her essay “Birth Justice Futures,” which she read at the end of her interview, she envisions a world in which “we remember care in the ways of the ancients and we utilize the principle of Sankofa to bring forward that which we need now to actualize the fullness of our humanity.” Sankofa is an Adinkra term and symbol from the Akan people in Ghana which means “to go back and get.” Sankofa instructs us to look to the past and to our ancestors to retrieve what has been lost. 

In alignment with the other interviewees, Jovan affirmed that it was capitalism that “redefined family to say that it was a nuclear family.” Jovan is clear that the way they do family and care is a reclaiming of what was theirs for centuries, a re-indigenizing, rather than an invention. They paint a beautiful picture of their perspective on what family meant in pre-colonial times, saying that “folks always knew that family was community, that family was the folks who smile at us but we don't know their name, but we're in the same village…” The idea of family as “village” is a powerful call back to a more communal and less individualistic ideology of care.

One of the questions at the heart of this project is what makes radical care possible. In the pressure cooker of late-stage capitalism, how do people carve out the time, space, and money necessary to do care work for free (or very little)? What beliefs, practices, and resources fortify people for this often difficult work? In many places, care that is communal, mutual, and non-hierarchical happens out of necessity—because it’s survival. The framework of Liberatory Harm Reduction, as laid out in the beautiful book Saving Our Own Lives by Shira Hassan, shows us this—that for decades, BIPOC, queer, trans, and disabled people living on the street, trading money for sex, and doing drugs have been saving each other’s lives through creating syringe exchanges, Bad Date sheets, and spaces where people can just be. 

Hassan and the many other harm reductionists in the book speak with clarity about one of the things that makes communal care possible—relationship. Relationship is what moves us to care for each other, and it is also an engine for that care, powering us when things get tough. Working with others fortifies us and brings us joy and focus. Our relationships also provide us the care that keeps the work sustainable. 

In our interviews, relationship emerged as one of the factors that made people’s care work possible. One of the most explicit examples of this came from our conversation with Addison. In the middle of our conversation, Addison’s housemate Casey (they/them) joined us. Casey met Addison when they started cooking for the mutual aid stand, and after a few weeks of knowing each other, Addison invited them to stay for a few nights when they needed housing. As they were recounting this story, Addison said, laughing, “it was gonna be a few days… and now we make family decisions together.” There was an obvious ease between the two of them, and they talked a lot about the warmth in their relationship, the ways they’ve adapted to living together, and how much better both of their lives are because of it.

When talking about the connection between their relationship and their work for the community, Casey was clear that their relationship with Addison supports their mutual aid efforts: 

“Well, our relationship fuels our food distribution too. I wouldn't be able to do all the cooking that I do without that relationship with Addison. That gives me the energy to give to the community. Because if we're having a bad day, we'll joke about it and then still be able to cook. You know, if it wasn't, I would be really inconsistent with being able to cook because my mental health would be up and down.”

Addison agreed, saying that just the day before, they were in a bad mood and wouldn’t have made it to the mutual aid stand without Casey. There’s a connection here worth noting—that Casey and Addison living together and being friends increases their ability to cook for the community for two reasons: because they have the energy and physical capabilities of two people instead of one, but also because their friendship fuels them! For Addison and Casey, their capacity grows when they’re working together. 

Jamarah also described how her relationships fueled and focused her work—in particular, her relationships with her elders. Jamarah told us that the Southern Birth Justice Network began with her mentor Ada Becky Sprouse asking her to take over her Mobile Midwife practice, which brought free care to rural and migrant people around Miami. She also recounted being “voluntold” to start the first national professional association for Black midwives by another elder, Mama Shafia. At first she didn’t think it was possible, but after five years, that request became reality. Without the relationships Jamarah had with these elders, SBJN and the National Black Midwives Alliance would not have come into being. As a result, her work is part of an unbroken legacy of collective care.

In addition to the power of relationship to fuel communal care, we asked folks about the monetary resources that enabled their care work. One story was striking: Addison recounted how a two-year rent strike gave them the relief they needed to funnel money into their community care. Addison and the occupants of the three other units in their building started a rent strike after the death of their landlord. It took a long time for anyone to notice they weren’t paying rent, and when they finally did, the eviction process got tied up in court. They prolonged the strike for as long as they could, and Addison and their family saved thousands of dollars over the two years. They decided to start making food and procuring supplies to give away for free with the money. This one act of disruption to the system created a cascade of positive outcomes for their community. Addison remarked on the simplicity of this act, saying “all we did was not pay rent. That's it. And now we have a neighborhood that knows that they will not die of hunger.” In our interview, Addison wondered, if this was the result of just one four-unit building striking, what could a general rent strike do? Imagine what resources would be freed up to feed and care for people, rather than put money in landlords’ pockets. 

Amanda also discussed how disposable income generated through non-normative choices formed the basis of her mutual aid project. During the pandemic, Amanda started buying masks and distributing them for free. How was this possible? Because she was living with her two partners who were both engineers with high-paying jobs. Recognizing that this gave them plenty of resources to share, “it felt only appropriate to put that into the community and people who need it.” Although we’re not advocating for polyamory as a response to late-stage capitalism (thanks to O'Brien for the reminder!), we see the connection between Amanda’s choices in her personal care structure and her ability to care for the wider community around her. Of course, polyamory is not the only route to this kind of resource sharing. If there are several working adults in a friend circle, care web, or household, extra funds could be strategically redistributed. Later, when things shifted and Amanda’s partners were no longer working those jobs, they couldn’t sustain this part of their community care efforts anymore, and someone else took on mask distribution. 

People’s relationships to each other and the disposable income (sometimes) created through those relationships are just two factors that support people’s radical caregiving. There are many more paths to radical care and the resources, both physical and spiritual, it takes to maintain. We will explore more answers to the question of what makes radical care possible in our conversation concluding the anthology.

One of our curiosities in our interviews was in the potential connections between the way people structure care in their home lives and the care they give their communities. O’Brien counseled us to resist seeing non-nuclear family choices alone as radical, or to assume that these intimate choices will correlate with radical community care. Without making either of those leaps, we still wanted to know about how people conceptualized what we’re often taught to consider as two separate realms: the personal and the public.

Everyone we talked to made some kind of connection between their intimate care structures and their community work, and we have discussed many of these connections in other sections. Our conversations with Yolande and Jamarah elicited some specific examples of the ways these spaces have influenced each other in their lives. Yolande described the way their practices around conflict have flowed between their household and the work they do in the wider community. They shared that “the same process for transforming conflict that we've evolved with the children are ones that are present in the bail fund, that are present in the mutual aid fund, and across the ecosystem.” The language of “ecosystem” really captures the fluid connection between all of these spaces: the nutrients and information from one space flow naturally into the next, as through a mycelial network.

Yolande further emphasized the connection between the work they do reimagining institutions of care at home and in the wider world. Yolande said “there’s hardly a thing that I create for my family that I don't extend out into the world… I always use a consistent mantra that the personal is political. And so what I'm doing for me, I feel like I have to extend out so that other people can benefit.” Yolande’s stance that the “personal is political,” first popularized by Carol Hanisch's 1969 essay of the same name, proclaims that what they do in their home life cannot be removed from the political fabric they exist in. Yolande’s words are also a reminder that the separation between personal and public spaces is socially constructed in a capitalistic system in the first place. 

Jamarah described a similar flow between practices in personal and community-wide care spaces surrounding her learning of Restorative Justice principles and practices. Although she was trained in Restorative Justice for her work, she “also really realized how much I ended up using it and have continued to use it in my family, and in my community and friend circles as well.” Once she learned this way of approaching conflict and relationship building, it traversed intimate and broader spaces. The flow of tools, like conflict management strategies, from an intimate care space to a more public space, or vice versa, is just one example of the ways people’s household choices could be connected to their community care. The folks we interviewed conceptualized the relationship between these parts of their lives in many different ways, which is worth further exploration. 

In recent years, there’s been a surge of discussion around conflict and conflict resolution as something that can make or break organizing projects. As Care from Erotics of Liberation says, “we can’t be abolitionist and conflict avoidant.” Handling conflict is a skill that most of us practice with our intimate circles—our families, roommates, friends, and lovers—but it’s also a skill we need when working with others for social change. In organizing spaces, people get activated, emotions can run high, and interpersonal stuff comes up, just like in any other space. The only difference is that we often can’t afford for the organizing projects that feed and clothe people to be derailed by something as natural as conflict.

Navigating conflict well is especially relevant for folks who are living and working outside of the norm, as we are constantly having to deconstruct what we’ve been taught by racist, colonial institutions in order to create something new. In light of all this, and because of the specific link between how conflict shows up in intimate spaces as well as organizing spaces, we asked all of the interviewees about their relationship to conflict. 

We weren’t surprised that everyone we talked to had thought about conflict resolution to some degree and had been through some form of conflict. Folks were honest about their responses to conflict, describing their instinct to “run away,” “fawn,” or “shut down.” Conflict is deeply challenging, and no one denied that.

However, several people named that conflict is inherent to the work of community building and to life itself, and that moving through it can create deep trust. On this topic, Jamarah said 

“My thing is always that conflict is inevitable. It's not a matter of if there's conflict, it's a matter of when. And the important thing is about how we navigate it and how we recover from it and how we stay in right relationship with each other.”

For Jamarah, what matters is accepting that conflict is going to happen and being prepared for it. Being prepared for conflict is so important to her that she got trained in Restorative Justice (RJ) and had the entire staff of Southern Birth Justice Network trained up. Restorative Justice is a framework and set of practices for resolving harm without punishment or prisons with origins in Indigenous cultures across the world. zara also named restorative justice as central to z’s approach to conflict, and both use the RJ practice of holding circles as a conflict management tool. 

zara spoke specifically about how conflict can create intimacy and deepen trust between people. Conflicts have come up between z and z’s co-parent as they make the million tiny, daily decisions of parenting. z felt like moving through a more serious conflict recently “really pushed us to be more honest with each other and engage in conflict in a very real way, and it allowed us to deepen trust.” Conflict is both integral to developing intimacy with one another and also often the consequence of closeness with our loved ones.

zara also made the direct connection between a community or care web’s ability to handle conflict and its sustainability. z reflected that z has “gotten better at building and sustaining villages as I've gotten better at navigating conflict.” z implied here that a lack of strong conflict skills is often a group’s downfall. A group of people’s ability to experience conflict and come out the other side is often crucial for the longevity of the group, and sometimes the survival of their communities.

Several folks echoed zara, asserting that conflict had been the breaking point for groups they have been part of. Amanda shared direct experience with this, as conflicts led to the dismantling of several COVID-cautious Discord servers she helped run. Those conflicts had very high stakes for her community because many disabled folks relied on those servers for lifesaving support. Those past conflicts, which were primarily interpersonal, led her to establish a motto for the newest iteration of the server: that the server is “a resource first and a community second.” The intention of this motto is to serve as a reminder that the primary goal of the group is to connect people to lifesaving care, and is a social space second. Members are encouraged to keep this in mind because “being a resource first means being open to people that you don’t necessarily agree with.”

Amanda discussed a few other strategies for when conflict comes up in the current server. First, she steps away when conflict is activating, then comes back to it when she’s feeling calmer, knowing that trying to respond in the midst of intense emotion will only escalate the situation. It was powerful for her to learn “how much just avoiding escalating conflict could do” in making steps toward resolving it. Additionally, Amanda designated a few people who are skilled at conflict management to be point people when conflict shows up in the server to provide needed support for all parties involved. Acknowledging that people in the community have different skills and celebrating those differences has been important in making the server more resilient to conflict.

For people across the African diaspora and many other groups colonized by European Christians, church holds a complex place in our hearts and communities. Historically, we acknowledge that church was often the only place enslaved Africans were free from both back-breaking labor and consistent white surveillance. Church was a place to sing, dance, play instruments, commune with a higher power through syncretized practices, and carry out wider cultural practices that were often inaccessible in the “new world” they were navigating. This evolved into Black churches becoming the cornerstone of communities; churches were often the home of mutual aid work, distribution of resources such as food and money, and community organizing and strategizing, in addition to being a third space that hosted many life transitions such as weddings and funerals.

In a late-stage capitalist world in which third spaces are rapidly declining, church is and was a consistent third space that accepted us as we were, or claimed to. Many communities are feeling the loss of these spaces due to exclusion of openly queer/trans people, religious abuse, and gentrification (among other reasons). Even with a critical eye of Christianity, those building community sometimes seek to duplicate the positives of the community building often present in religious spaces.

When we asked Jamarah and Jovan about their upbringings and early experiences of expansive care, they both mentioned church as a place where communal care happened. Jamarah described her experience with church growing up as an “expansive network of connected community.” Church brought people together and supplied a network to rely on for childcare and other daily needs. Jamarah recalled that “our parents kind of [built] support networks within that structure of like, okay today I'll make dinner, you know, next week you watch the kids, they're sleeping at your house tonight.” 

Jovan described something similar when discussing the care networks they grew up in. They were raised in an extended family structure which they think of as more of a “clan” of folks, both biologically related and not, all from the same area in Haiti. Religion, in addition to Haitian heritage, was an important factor that bonded them together. Jovan’s community was “a Haitian circle of folks who went to church together and otherwise supported each other.” 

Religious communities are still very important sites of community care for many people, but across the country, it’s become less common for people to identify as Christian and regularly attend church services over the last twenty years. As we churches become less frequented, what spaces might replace these hubs for communal care and organizing? What shared beliefs or values might we rally around? Jovan addressed this question, saying

“I think we've had to really work to figure out how to replace, in my life and network, what Christianity used to serve as in the church, because we don't have that. We've had to figure out or recreate some of the traditions or practices that link us and ties together.”

Jovan and their community have had to be architects of new “traditions or practices” that create and sustain connections that going to church once did. Something Jovan asks themselves as they’re considering what to structure community around is “what are we working on together or supporting together?” In answer, they described the business they’re building with their brother and sister and the weekly calls they have to work on it. It’s a simple thing, but working on something together “allows us to connect every week with a reason.” These small connection points sustain them. 

Jamarah sought community outside of the church through culturally-aligned spaces. When she moved to Atlanta, she became involved with the African-centered community there and the queer community. “Those two communities really afforded me a lot because of the nature of the values… I think shared values and a kind of community ethic.” Similar to how church functioned as a structure from which families could build support networks in her youth, she said the many community spaces of the city were “structure[s] for people that were parenting to have support networks that were intentionally built around a shared set of values.” Although Jamarah experienced tension in the separateness of the African-centered and queer spaces in Atlanta, they gave her a sense of community and provided support for her as a parent. Jamarah’s experience with culturally-aligned spaces is one example of how she is finding places of community connection that can then grow networks of care, similar to how the church served in her youth.