AA: So our first question is to introduce yourself in any way you would like, such as name, pronoun, location, occupation, or any other identity markers important to you.

JJ: Okay, my name is Jov(AN) or Jov(AHN). I'm a queer, non-binary non-biological parent to
queer and trans children being raised in the U.S. South. My family and my family group is of Caribbean descent generally. My own family lineage is from rural southern Haiti. And well,
mom's side is from the town Ti gwav and my dad's side is from Jérémie by wayMe Baraderes. Born and raised in the US in a diasporic family. My work, I guess, is primarily in community building and movement organizing in the U.S. South, though I also work on the plantation at Georgia Tech as a data scientist in healthcare. So weird intermixings there. I'm 36, about to turn 37. So moving somewhere out of my youth time and somewhere into my middle ages and that feels like a pretty solid holistic of my identities I think.

MH: Lovely. Thank you. Can you tell us more about your home life in childhood? About where you grew up and what your family structure was like?

JJ: Yeah, I grew up in a, what do they call it, an extended family, not quite a nuclear family. My father and his brother immigrated to the U.S. together, and their mother lived with them. So she was the primary, I would say, like, raiser of record maybe. She was the one who was in the household with myself, my dad's children, as well as my uncle's children, and a number of other Haitian kids who grew up in our sort of family circle. We were primarily in a Haitian circle of folks who went to church together and otherwise supported each other. We grew up in an immigrant community once we moved to the suburbs so lots of East Asian, South Asian, South American folks, but not too many Black folks. Yeah, so I guess the first, like definitely the parent of record, like in my heart and mind was my grandmother, and she was on a pretty continual basis. I learned Kreyòl first because I was speaking and communicating with her. So I learned English and started getting incorporated into the American system, I guess, once I started going to daycare and then those sort of school settings. And I was shipped off to boarding school at 12, so that was a pretty pivotal sort of shifting moment for my family.

MH: Neat. I'm curious about, if you could say a little more about how folks in your circle supported each other, like what did that look like among the immigrant community you're describing?

JJ: Yeah, so I mean, I think there's a couple of ways. One, certainly, like, the jobs that flowed between, through, and for people was something that was pretty regularly happening. I guess more so before the children were born. But particularly as folks that came over to the States, there's lots of familial stories about who was living together, who was, you know, sharing whether it was paperwork or otherwise and passing on jobs. There was a rich transfer of funds that as a kid I wasn't quite so aware of but there was an internal—not quite banking system but banking system—of IOUs and support that sort of ensured that no one was houseless or hungry. And, I mean, those were not, like, without any sort of balance. So there was accountability, and sometimes people would fall out and whatnot. I think my grandmother, for example, served as, like, daycare for a wide range of folks, both internal to that sort of, I think in my head, I really describe it more as a clan. It wasn't quite, like blood family, there was an extended set of family who many of them came from the same village area in Haiti, emigrated to Port-au-Prince together, or Jérémie, a smaller city than Port-au-Prince, then came over to the States in some sort of collective, sort of understanding and care for each other. That I think was frayed a little bit because most of them were Protestant, and even though my grandmother was like the wife of a former pastor, he had died by the time I was born. And then my dad and mom were integrated in their religious practice. They were a little more freewheeling around their questions around religion. So I remember there were some friends in community who weren't allowed to read like Harry Potter, for example. My parents were like, do as you will, just don't do drugs.

Yeah, so I think the support looked like some financial resources going, definitely like essential needs being met. So if someone was out of a home, then we would have friends and relatives who stayed on our couch, or we would stay on the couch and they would get a room, or things sort of shifted as they needed. Also, finances were shared in the sense of like no one would be allowed to hit rock bottom, but there was also sort of a shared understanding that there was a relatively high bar of strain before you actually got support. So like where and when I might ask for support today was very different than culturally what was acceptable for what support looked like. You would struggle first, maybe you'd go down to eating just ramen or whatever, before you actually asked for support. And that support could happen both through the religious community or externally through interpersonal relationships. I think that answers most of the question.

MH: Yeah. I'm curious about what support looks like for you now, but I'll circle back to that. Were there, like, parts of that care structure that worked for you and parts that didn't? And did you feel, do you have any awareness of, like, not fitting into a nuclear norm or feeling different than other kids your age?

JJ: I mean, I grew up with a lot of immigrants, so many of our family circles were very similar. So I remember there were like South Asian friends who sometimes my grandmother would care for, sometimes I'd go over to their house. We had similar cultures where there wasn't so much a like, are you feeding the person or not—if a kid was over at your house then you were being cared for, you would feed them. And there were similar sort of expectations about how children would behave, so I could go over to my Korean friend David’s house one Friday or my friend Christian's house or they would come over to our house without necessarily asking but that sort of care of children just happened naturally and as expected, so I wasn't aware that it was a really different setting, probably until boarding school, where I was like, oh, this is different how y 'all do this, or what is inside the house versus outside the house. So I think that was part of your question was about feeling abnormal. I think looking back now, there's certainly cultural aspects, whether that was around queerness or nonconformity, that I didn't have the space to express at the time, and whatever that was was just sort of shuttered. And thinking back now, I think there were certainly pieces just around sexual health or what was appropriate or not appropriate and those sort of things that we didn't have tools to allow communication around, so I think there were some things around that where those put an asterisk on some of the earlier interactions in my life.

AA: What do your care structures and/or kinship structures look like today?

JJ: I think kinship is centered around—I mean, I think Yolande and I would probably similarly use lakou as a framework, with some slightly different understandings. But I think this land that we're shepherding and that the core of the family lives on of the two children, myself and Yolande, and the building on it that family and folks flow through is maybe what a lot of my family unit is centered on. There are some, like, I wouldn't call them peripheral loves, but like connections that are also very strong in terms of romantic and other relationships. But because [there’s] just the tyranny of time and energy and children, I think that the center really is here.

My biological family, like my Haitian biological family, in terms of both my mother and father's side, remain relatively tight-knit. My half-brother on my father's side and my sister are two of the closest people to me and certainly we have a business that we run together and we have funds that we share and bank accounts and whatnot that are part of that support network. I co-own a condo that my sister's living in with my cousin on my father's side and we lived together for 12 years before our more recent romantic relationships moved us into separate houses, so that's certainly a core relationship as well. And this larger clan infrastructure that I exist in, more so from my dad's side, is certainly part of the care network. There's aunties who live nearby who I check in on and check in on me, there's a mother of a former lover who's in town who we’ll check in on who my dad grew up with. They're like core chosen family, let's say.

Then there's the friend networks of folks who have remained in relationship with me for the past 10 - 15 years that are also pretty intricate. Care there doesn't always look like financial support, but financial support is available when people need it. Folks have lived together as necessary and that sort of thing. And then there's a network of children primarily from blood family but some outside of blood family who remain in relationship.

And there's the folks who I organize with deeply here in Atlanta, and sometimes it feels closer than others—I think particularly in this time of strain where and what support looks like and how much folks are willing to risk for each other doesn't always feel as clear as it once did, and I think those relationships are navigating what does it mean to really show up for each other? What does it look like? What do we each separately mean about what it means to show up, to risk safety, etc.? I think we're working out vocabulary that we didn't otherwise think we might need, so those are figuring them[selves] out.

And then inside of, like, the movement infrastructure that I exist in, one lens of looking at it is, like, the nonprofit structure, which certainly exists of, like, management and whatever. But I think on the other side of it from, the community, Haitian, lakou, organizing sort of structure, there is a number of folks who I'm mentoring but also responsible for making sure their paychecks come through and money is there, both on the movement side as well as in the academy in terms of supporting their work. So that is also some of the care responsibility that exists for me, but also the care that I'm receiving from mentors and the like. And there's a lot of folks who have decided that they're my parents by choice who show up for me in different capacities, whether that's former teachers or elders in movement or otherwise who I've remained in contact with even after the financial part of the relationship ended, who show up, who check in and do all that sort of thing. And I'm part of a network of facilitators called Youth for Environmental Sanity or YES and they exist as another layer of ongoing support and building and places that call for support.

MH: Sounds like a very expansive and beautiful web.

JJ: Lots of people, lots of things. It's beautiful when it's working. And when it's not… sometimes I just want to check out. Turn off.

MH: Yeah, that makes sense too.

JJ: I'd rather be part of an alive community than one that doesn't know itself.

AA: Super interested in hearing more about accountability. So maybe that will tie in with our next question, which is what values and practices are central to your personal care structure and where did you learn them?

JJ: Yeah, I think fortunately or unfortunately, a lot of it is rooted in the experience of knowing my grandmother and getting to know her both as, like, a lived person, I think, post her passing from, like, the corporal body, me and my sister have been in deep relationship with her spirit. And also just getting to know people who were impacted by her. So, one thing is just giving as much as I am able when I'm able. And I think that's informed also just, like, by spending a good amount of my 20s in Haiti, where there was a different relationship to how money flows between folks in the sense of, like, when I see someone on the street who’s asking for money, if I have money in my pocket, I'll give it. In Haiti, it's a little different because those are the same people who will help you when your car breaks down or, you know, when a hurricane comes—we're all sort of stuck with each other. It feels a little bit different in the US, but I think that is one sort of value that my grandmother instilled in me, is like when people need support you give it because you don't know when you'll need support, and having a strong network of giving and taking without question allows for you to get the support you need when you need it.

Inside of that, I think I am certainly invested in a study of maroons and like what does it mean to draw lines around some set of liberatory values that we co-hold and a willingness to show up for the folks who are building that world versus if folks are just sitting inside of like popular capitalism or what have you, then maybe it's not my role to build community with them. So I think that, like, study of Haitian history definitely informs a lot of how I choose to move, where I choose to invest my time and energy and show up for folks and where sometimes I'm like, I don't know, can't fix everything, but if we're just on the plantation together, then let's play by plantation rules.

Accountability does feel really important. I'm always generally willing to give the first time and the second time, but if there isn't reciprocity, like that is a big word for me. Yolande and I have a deep contention over whether reciprocity or equity is our base framework—we're still working through it—and not that it has to come back in the direct way, but if there isn't balance in my life, then I do sort of recede. And generally, I mean, it moves through the network, right? Like some people support me more, some people get more. As long as the people who are supporting me more also have support and the people who are getting from me are also supporting others.

I have a mentee once upon a time who asked me for some money to pay for their refugee who needed money to pay for their college funds, and I told them ‘pay it forward,’ and they were like, I don't get it, what are you talking about? And now they very much love to hit me up when they're like, all right, I owe you $500 less, I did this or that. So I think that sort of spirit of building network, not in like the networking sense of like we're building it because we know what it's going to be useful for, but building it because if we have something to reach back to, then when we need it, maybe it'll be there, is part of I think the reasoning or values there.

I felt my grandmother building relationships with people because it was worth building, not necessarily because it was something that they were going to take from or harvest with a reason. And that's sort of the spirit that I build relationships with. And it's very one to one—I think Yolande and I have another contention there about whether we build for mass impact or just like, all right that person is the one who showed up in front of me today, I'll show up there. Does that answer the question?

AA: Definitely. Thank you.

MH: What challenges have arisen as a result of doing care in this way?

JJ: I mean, one thing I can say is, like, I used to avoid children because I was like, I think y 'all will transform the way that I think about care or have to, like, protect myself or a set of closer folks who I have accountability to, but being open to relationships as they came, you know, the kids adopted me at some point. Yolande sat everyone down and was like, all right, we have a romantic relationship, but y 'all don't need to have any particular relationship to Jovan. What is the relationship that you all seek? So I think being open to that or being open to whoever comes in front of me means that sometimes I've run out of energy to do the new work that shows up in front of me.

I think every once in a while I can sit down and look at the life I could have lived if I had just become an engineer and started working for Google and, you know, written AI code and whatnot. Like, oh, I could have some nice things. Not that those nice things are better than what I have, but every once in a while, the intrigue of affording, like, season tickets to the Hawks or whatever it is, they pass through. And I think often, like, in terms of cost, one thing is it doesn't feel as impactful sometimes as I wish it could feel, like care work doesn't add up to me being able to say I've published 15 papers and I built ‘x’ business and so on, and the things that do exist aren't necessarily things that I can get credit for, like having family that is stable or having young people in my network who feel open to being in our family circle and so on. Like, it's not quantifiable, and it's not necessarily something that I can take credit for. It's just a network that I exist in.

And so that can be challenging, because I think sometimes my peers or friends can say, like, here's what I built. Here's the, like, dentistry office that I'm running. Or here's the for-profit business that I've built. And I'm like, I exist in an ecosystem of folks who are doing really cool shit, you know, like Kuluntu is writing reports, redefining the family. It's not my work—it's a network of folks who I exist within. It's folks who I provide care to and provide care to me. But is that valuable in the ways that like Western society counts it up or like my CV asks when I come up for tenure? I don't know how to put that in words that count in the system.

MH: Yeah, I think that's a great point, and something we don't talk about a lot in terms of
the costs of doing family this way.

AA: So our next one is, how do you manage conflict with those in your chosen family or
your care web? Where did you learn these conflict management techniques?

JJ: I mean my general conflict resolution strategy is to run away and avoid it, until it comes back around. I know that that's my, like, panic reaction to conflict and do generally try now at some point to start to bring it up in conversation. I think I don't like taking things on myself, so I do like to build coalition or shared understanding with other like-minded folks before bringing it to conversation. In our, like, core family, as the adults responsible for it, we do host and facilitate a lot of the meetings or conversations that need to happen. And some of what I learned was from interactions at Youth for Environmental Sanity, which gave me some frameworks to understand my own reaction, response, and how I could move myself through and then move the system through conversations.

I am in a romantic and soulmate and otherwise partnership with Yolande, and they're older than me and versed in a radical queer Black feminist framework they've come up with, so I've certainly learned a ton from them. And then I've learned a lot from the Black women and Black people that I've been in partnership with, primarily Black folks assigned female at birth, whether it was my grandmother or my mother or my cousins or, not always Black women, but the other women and femmes who took me under their wings through boarding school and then college and then relationships afterwards. They have all invested a ton in my social-emotional growth to allow me to reach here and then, I mean, my kids have taught me a lot. Being in relationship with them has either affirmed some of my growth points or, you know, in seeing the things that I need to unlearn from my parents and my own like familial system, they have brought that right back to bear like to my face of like ‘hey you thought you had this shit together? Look at that, work on that, please.’

And I mean spending time in Haiti and speaking to other Haitians and Haitian young people has definitely helped me to understand the things that were happening in my family that were just in my family and the things that are like generational systemic trauma that i'm like, all right y'all we have not figured out how to say that shit hurts! Or like it is a hard thing when you lose a hundred thousand people, or like we haven't dealt with the history of enslavement and like the way that we deal with that is you, you know, beat me and then you tell me to sit on my knees.

MH: Yeah, definitely. I want to hear more about your non-hierarchical approach to parenting and your thoughts about parenting in general, like how you approach that and how that fits into the larger scheme of your care web and your beliefs about that.

JJ: Yeah. I mean it's still evolving right, like before I came into this family unit I was like after I graduate with my PhD I'm out! I'm moving to Haiti and I'm gone! Since then I think Yolande and I, for example, have felt like we're ready to go to the Caribbean whenever, like I have some commitments to making sure the infrastructure that we've helped set up with organizations here is stable and I can move out of it in a way that feels accountable, but outside of that, I'm like, I just want to live in Haiti and whatever comes comes. Our eldest, for example, has named that they really want to grow up and be in the U.S., that they desire to go through high school in Atlanta. And so, for example, I mean, when I was growing up, my parents sort of told us what we were doing—they told me I was going to boarding school, I was like, I want to stay home. They were like, yeah, whatever, opportunities, deal. So I think that for, like, taking into account the diversity of voices that are in our system and figuring out ways to honor the needs of multiple parts is a thing there. Certainly, I think one of the struggles is figuring out, okay, but like, how then do you still honor your own choices and values? How do I as a parent still exist as myself? For a long time I wanted to go to Haiti and there were questions around safety and otherwise and finally everyone's sort of at a point where I'm like all right y'all in November I'm going to be gone for 20 days—I don't know what happens! Or even questions like I had a motorcycle for a long time, and what is my responsibility to be accountable to the system and the parts of it that I help stabilize versus my own desire just to be on my motorcycle? How do you balance those things? So I would say maybe like the central thing there is less about non-hierarchy and more about understanding and feeling out the whole network and being accountable to it.

And it feels like some of the things I learned about being in multi-generational community are that there are different roles. Young people aren't necessarily tasked with holding the truth of the whole network, that middle-aged folks do have some responsibility to the stability and resourcing of the network as a whole, and then elders have some care work to do and some focusing on themselves and healing from whatever they had to carry along the way. So there are these, like, multiple roles that are all playing with each other. I'm excited to leave this whole middle-aged stability-making role and be like, all right, I'm an elder! I'm just hanging out with the children and helping them grow. I will happily disinvest from the marketplace. And, you know, I understand, like, my own privileges as a, male-bodied, scientifically-trained person in our system who has an ability to, like, move through white spaces or white culture in ways that get us resources, and okay, so then I have to play on the plantation a little bit. So balancing those things and, you know, balancing the, like, multiplicity of desires, and I don't think we get it perfect but we're committed to getting to Haiti and Jamaica as much as we can, to not hoarding our resources but sharing them out both in our shared community, in time, talent and otherwise. And, you know, if our network fails, we're all failing together—there's no nest egg or retirement that's going to be the saving grace!

AA: Thank you. So we have a question asking what practices or structures have worked well in your experience such as small-scale care networks, hyper-local context—it sounds like you're moving globally—collective decision-making and other approaches to conflict?

JJ: Lots of my interpersonal care networks also either came out of school settings or out of Youth for Environmental Sanity or my organizing work where there were like really local movements building with each other that then now we exist in separate spaces. I think a lot of them are built on ongoing communication. I have dear friends, for example, like we have scheduled time where we check in and we have time in the year when we all re-attend, or like on some regular cycle, meet face-to-face, air-to-air to trade time and space with each other, so I think that's pretty big. And so I think some of those sorts of things exist, whether it's like meeting at conferences, like Allied Media Conference used to be a big one where a little core of my world would come together. There's other conferences and settings. The work that we do together to bring the network is, because of how many people and connections I am, that often is the thickest connection in any given moment: do we have a project? Are we working on the queer jam to bring together 30 queers to do some facilitated work together? If so, then those five people who are all close to me are folks who I'm talking to once a month to check in about how they’re doing, how their families are doing and what we're doing together. When we're not doing that work, we're a little more disparate.

So maybe I guess in that, working through it, the core is like, what are we working on together or supporting together? My brother and my sister, we have a business that we're working on, but really because it allows us to connect every week with a reason—half of our meeting is just checking in. 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.

MH: Yeah, that makes sense. How have other people responded to your non-nuclear choices, either, like, interpersonally or institutionally?

JJ: Hmm. I mean, interpersonally and institutionally, I think like the polyamory and the
multiple lovers thing is the thing that confuses people the most. They're like, what are you talking about? How do you love multiple people? Aren't you jealous? This sort of thing. My mother, for example, I remember was very adamant that she had fucked me up because I was polyamorous and queer. I think more often than not giving access points for why it makes sense has helped folks be like ‘okay not quite as crazy as I thought.’ My mom, for example, I was like ‘hey isn't it better that we're just honest with each other about our shared loves rather than cheating on each other like many of y'all do?’ You know, they were like, oh, shit, you're calling me in. I feel some way, but word, that's true. Better to know. And I think there's a lot of fears about what folks expect or have seen in movies or shows and whatnot. And when they experience time with our family, they often are like, ‘oh, this isn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be.’ So I think that's the biggest thing, is not leaving it in the ether of what is possible and actually diving into, like, no, look, come and be in space with us, come and experience what it means to be in this family, come and see how our children are doing. Like, I think the experience of them often disarms people because it's not what they thought they were walking into.

AA: Yeah. We can move on to our next section, which is oriented toward questions for community organizers. So we talked a bit with Yolande about the [learning] co-op and a couple other things y 'all have going on, so if you want to speak to that as well in any amount of detail, that would be appreciated. So what prompted you to start / get involved with your project? And why do you think it's important?

JJ: Yeah, I mean, I think broadly speaking, the care networks that I'm part of creating on an institutional level are really about recreating what existed outside of an institutionalized form inside of my family, in my clan and my larger network. I grew up in a network of folks where we are relatively tight-knit. We don't have a lot of resources, but if we have resources to keep someone out of jail, I mean anyone who's connected to my family we're gonna try to bail out. I believe in abolition and I believe that there's some responsibility to create the world that we want to see.

And so I think one thing was, being raised by my grandmother, falling in love with the idea of what Haiti was, and then self-study around what it could be—and Haiti is like a broad concept that generally I would line up as like from our early constitutions, are you against white supremacy and the idea that anyone should be enslaved or caged? And if so, you can fall in here somewhere. And one of the first sort of namings of Black as an encompassing identity that was about a shared vision of folks' humanity and space for folks of African, Indigenous, and European descent to all be part of shared struggle together. So sitting inside of that is the legacy I come out of. I feel like I have a family network that itself is pretty well formed and cares for each other. And most of the work that I do outside of that is about opportunities to see that in bigger or different forms in the world.

So our bail fund, FAAM (Free Atlanta Abolition Movement), that bails out Black caregivers primarily, felt like easy work: I don't believe people should be in cages. I definitely don't believe caregivers should be in cages. I know how impactful having my caregivers near me is and I know the system is fucked up if Donald Trump isn't in Fulton jail but a random Black person who can't afford a $50 bail is. Or I mean, you know, we're bailing folks out for $100 - $200,000. So generally it's like how to live into the biggest possibilities of the work. MAMA Fund (Metro Atlanta Mutual Aid Fund) came together because there was a call at the time, and I have bookkeeping skills. My dad trained me to be a bookkeeper—sort of apprenticed me back in the day—so I show up in that capacity. OHRD (Organization for Human Rights and Democracy), both because of, like, Yolande, who at the time was my lover, and the work it was doing was a place that was relatively easy to commit to because of the ways they wanted to care for community. In a way that didn't feel restrictive in the sense of a lot of spaces that I had run into. And then, you know, we're working on this Black market health initiative project. I don't know if you know, but that's maybe the place that I am trying to thread together the work we've been doing outside of the academy and inside of the academy. And that feels more like… this world doesn't make sense to me. It doesn't make sense why investing in care is so hard. So there is a piece of me that's just like, all right, maybe these people on the other side really do have some humanity in them. And if we can explain it clearly enough in math and other things, then they'll understand the logic of caring for each other. So there is a little bit of not wanting to give up hope that humans can generally be good people and animals. Animals as like, you know… or skin bags with blood and guts in it and maybe we can rise to something better.

MH: Yeah, I hope so. Would you say a little bit more about the health association, like what the goals of the project are?

JJ: Yeah, I mean, I think like most of our projects, I believe in cooperation. I've been engaged with people for the last 15 years who each bring their own special magic to the worlds that they're building. And collectively, I do try to find sort of pivot points that we can all agree on. And health feels like one of those easy places where folks will say things like, I believe everyone should have health care or health care for all, but then really quickly restrict that to health within U.S. borders or health as something that's been clinically proven or evidence-based but not holding up all of the ancestral Indigenous and other practices that are the foundation on which all of our health and wellness exists.

So the project is about utilizing the years of training and learning to speak math and things to try to refigure or speculate a world that is truer to what we're already saying we want to do. It's not, I wouldn't say it's my project or a project alone. It's more just trying to use the tools that exist to allow folks to see what's already nearly here and what's possible. So we're building, ideally… I mean, again, it's a funding and energy and money and time thing. How much time do I put on my own visions of projects that I believe in and how much is bookkeeping for the world of folks who I’m accountable to?

But what we're trying to build is a digital twin simulation where folks can collectively make some decisions about what a shared health insurance product would look like. You know, I think sometimes they scare us with things like there's going to be death panels. There's always a death panel. There's always a decision that people are making. Every time we pass our friends GoFund me and we don't put money in there, that's a decision that we've made around what we're gonna fund. Every time we pass someone who's unhoused on the street and we don't give them food, that's the decision we've made. So I think we need to force ourselves to look those decisions in the face and share them. And that's what we're trying to do, starting with health, but really broadening it to think about not just help inside of these borders, but if we really believe there's genocide happening in Palestine, then maybe we have to make decisions about putting our own health care on pause here to rebuild elsewhere. If we believe that [what’s happening in] the Congo is a situation that is wrong, then maybe we have to make decisions not to buy any new technology for some period of time, but we need to make those decisions collectively and so we're trying to start somewhere. And for right now the thoughts are around COVID: how do we make some shared decisions around what and how much COVID we're allowing to spread and what and how much long-COVID we're willing to deal with and how much privilege I might have as someone who can buy a mask and remain relatively secure versus someone who's working in an industry where that might be more challenging. Or someone who's living outside of the country who doesn't have the same access, but how do we make decisions around that? How do we make decisions around alcohol and substances that we choose to use or not use? And I don't believe in not using substances, but I believe in having a balanced approach, that, you know, if I'm going to take a lot of molly today then maybe I need to be okay with some amount of mental suffering later on. I don't know, not to say that the answers are there but that we can make collective decisions about what risks we're willing to take, how we're accountable to those risks, and how we pay for them in the long term.

MH: Yeah, thank you.

JJ: Maybe I'll say one last thing there. On health, it's a starting point, right? My research in school started with alcohol because it felt like an easy enough… not an easy enough thing, but like I drank a lot of alcohol in college, and I had a lot of friends who drank, and it was a starting place. And I think folks have challenges, like we've been scared away from socialism and communism as frameworks where we can make collective decisions. Which, I mean, there's issues to work through. I don't know if you were like a democratic socialist or like a centrist, you know, but there's lots of things and lots of issues to figure out about how we want to make decisions, but I don't think we should be scared of them. So we're trying to find the places that feel the least fearful so folks can practice, because otherwise we’d fall into a trap of believing what they tell us about being afraid of democracy, being afraid of making shared decisions, like, not caring about each other. And ultimately, I'd rather work really hard to take care of whatever is the shared network of people with shared values worldwide than investing all my energy in caring for Americans knowing that 50 % of them or more don't want me alive and are happy to replicate the genocide that was practiced here on this land elsewhere and wipe people out. So doing the hard work of repair and accountability, I think is what we need to start answering. Otherwise, it's sort of BS for Americans to stand up and say they have a problem with what's going on.

AA: What barriers are there in reaching your goals / staying in alignment with your values?

JJ: I think balancing the personal, interpersonal, systemic, national, international, like what levels are the appropriate ones to focus on are really challenging. I'm a limited person. I have 24 hours in a day, if I don't sleep. I have x amount of money in my bank account and so on. How do I balance my children's very real needs and not, you know… I think there's lessons to be learned about how many movement children really struggled in the past to overcome the feelings of abandonment that they might have. I don't know if abandonment's the right word, but lack of investment from their parents because they were taking on the problems of the world. So how do I balance the needs of my children with my own personal needs, with career desires, and, you know, I have ingrained desires around what success looks like and what it feels like to be successful and useful and whatnot.

I have folks from Dalit folks in South Asia and India, to Haitians living in Haiti to, you know, the person who's asking me for money on the streets of Atlanta. And how do I balance all those things? My work here, like the personal projects that feel alive, like the health initiative and the projects that already exist in the ecosystem that are each, in their own right, critical and important. How to balance that dynamically on a day-to-day basis, on a week-to-week basis, and on a year-to-year basis, for me is a real struggle. But also folks aren’t stepping up to take things off my plate so I'm like I don't know what to do y'all. I could just quit and see what happens but I don't think that's the right move, so yeah I think the balance part is the biggest struggle.

MH: Yeah that's huge. You talked a little bit about seeing the relationship between your personal care web and your wider community work as, like, wanting to expand what you see happening in your personal web further or to more people. And correct me, because I'm, you know, using my own words, but I'm curious if you see any other relationship between your community work and your, like, closest interpersonal intimate care web work. And if you've learned things in one space or another that have then, you know, filtered into the other space.

JJ: Certainly. Yes! They all exist within each other. I remember there were conversations in MAMA Fund and I was very much like, if we're not building this thing for ourselves, then I don't want to be a part of building it. And so constantly, everywhere my sense is that what I'm building in my family should be open to a wider world. I'm constantly trying to bring more people into familial connection with me. And so certainly, lots of what I've learned about being a family member are things that I bring out into my organizing and work. At the same time, you know, my family was a relatively conservative Christian family that was indoctrinated in certain ideas about capitalism and white supremacy. So there’s lots of that that I'm bringing from the rest of the world back into the closer intimate networks.

I think they're constantly learning from each other, and I'm serving as some sort of through point for the information to cross-pollinate the two sides. And maybe just to reframe some of what I said earlier about expanding the family into the other world. I know for me, one of my biggest struggles is the ability to ask for care. It feels challenging to see all of the care that's necessary, to be aware of all of the privileges that I can sit and list out all of the relative privileges that I have. And so sitting inside of that sort of understanding, it’s challenging for me to ask for the help that I need without the network being strong. And so whether it's at the interpersonal level, whether it's at the Organization for Human Rights and Democracy, our broader ecosystem, the academy that I work in, the network of my family and community as a whole, it feels like a lot of what I'm doing is like, can we strengthen enough that I can let go and ask for help? And when do we get to that point? And certainly one thing that I've learned in interpersonal coaching between me and Yolande is maybe there is no perfect time and I need to learn how to let go and ask for help when it's necessary in the ways that I'm asking people to do the same.

MH: Yeah, totally. Thanks for that.

AA: So, I know you've been getting at it a little bit, but we have next: how do you manage conflict with the organizers of your project?

JJ: I think it depends on where in the web someone sits in the organizing world. I think there's folks who feel like family, who we've been through a lot, and we've figured out how to work through it. And maybe those are the people who feel like siblings. I think I can map almost every relationship to a relationship in my family or family network. There's folks who feel like my sister—they're a womb twin. We weren't born at the same time, but we passed through the same womb. We were raised by the same grandmother. We were three years apart. Lots of our experience has been shared. And I can see and hold most of them, and they see and hold most of me. And whether or not we totally agree, we show up as support, and we are like, imma go to bat for you, whatever it is, and we'll figure it out together. So those sort of folks in movement feel like folks who I can just name my conflict and we'll find ways to work it out.

I think of them more in the realm of like a romantic partner who's committed to deeply working things out. So those folks, it's like we'll get into it. Sometimes we might need facilitation. Sometimes we don't. Sometimes we need to bring in a third party. But we're willing to be in the mud together and we're willing to work it out and stand-up. Then there's the people who are more like my brother where like 90 % of me they get, but they have some questions about some things and we haven't worked through all the questions. So I bring the parts of myself that feel alive and we're willing to work through hard things, but like, some of those I'm like, we're not going to win everything or we don't need to go through it.

There are folks like my mother, who I sort of hold at arms length. I think one thing about family and community for me is like it feels really hard to let go of people. So my other romantic partner is someone who we've been in each other's lives for 15 years, sometimes as romantic partners, sometimes as friends, sometimes as like really hurt people who still care for each other. So we work in and out of proximity and closeness. For some of the folks, they're more like, I know we exist in the same world. They've hurt me. I've hurt them. We haven't quite worked through all the way of the conflict, but we found some working equilibrium where, you know, I'm not inviting them to my birthday party but we're showing up in the work together to get people free. So I think there's some of those conflicts that’s like do I need to work through all the conflict? I don't know. Do we want to live in the same house together or in the same compound or in the same lakou? Probably not. But if we lived in the same village could we work towards the same ends, and if they need food, would I give them food? Yes. But they're like frenemies in the sense of like, all right, we got conflict, but, you know, like, we can see past it. I know there are some ways that they work that I wouldn't want to have to grow food with them, but I'm more than willing to share food and best for the time.

MH: Yeah thanks for that metaphorical breakdown. I liked it.

JJ: Well if you all use it hopefully the people who read it will only feel a little shade.

MH: Yeah. If you were going to give advice to someone who is embarking on a community care project what would you say?

JJ: I mean I think mostly I would ask them about like is it a project or is it a way of life? I think it's fine to frame things as projects. It's fine to understand them as projects. It's fun to build them out as projects. But for me, I guess, care… I don't think it necessarily started with survival. But when survival was a part of it, I don't think my ancestors got to choose and say, ‘this revolution is a project.’ They're, like, ‘I'm committed to some parts of my spirit, my culture, my identity, surviving regardless of what comes.’

I think when formerly enslaved folks in the U.S. were building their first schools, I think they were doing the thing that was necessary to care for each other and live, not a thing that was like a project that could get funded and so on. So I think that would be my core question. Like, at its root, I think a care project is about making a new world, and I'd advise folks to figure out what that piece feels like for you or to find people who know that piece for themselves and start there.

And I think the other thing I'd say is the way that we measure projects often in the U.S. of like, ‘will Robert Wood Johnson Foundation fund it?’ It doesn't tell you whether a project is valid. Or whether or not your professor figures it out or believes it's worth it.

For me, I think if it's a care project and it's really about caring for yourself or the people in your community who you see need care, and it's connected to the ways that your ancestors believed in care, or tried to practice care, and it's a way that you think that you'll be connected as an ancestor to future generations, then those are projects to lean into. Regardless of whether the funding is clear, or the pathway is clear.

I don't know if y'all have read the Bwa Kayiman prayer, but the last line is koute vwa la libète kap chante lan kè nou, meaning ‘listen to the voice of liberty that sings in your heart.’ I think to me that's the thing that I always try to follow, is what is the thing that feels like it must live through me? And trying to tap into that sort of greater spirit.

MH: That's really beautiful.

AA: Yeah, that's very encouraging. So I think we're about ready to move on to our final section which is just a reflection section. So the first question is how has redefining family changed your life? How has it improved it?

JJ: I think the biggest thing is it allowed me to affirm the parts of me in my community that were always here and that I always felt called to but questioned. And I think part of that is about English, like the English language, and the ways that there's this culture that dominates it, whether it's in the science books that I was reading or the books that were in the library or the way that we talk about family. I think, for me, it feels like someone redefined family to say that it was a nuclear family, away from the thing 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 and so on. We've come into this capitalist world that has fucked up all of our sociology, and then we're like ‘okay let's redefine family’ but really it was always here. My grandmother grew up in not necessarily polyamorous, but definitely polygamous and probably polyamorous community. She has siblings of multiple different mothers who were engaged with her father at the same time. She can speak to this rich village of relationships, like non-bloodwise, but folks who she knew would feed her and care for her and otherwise. When I read histories of, like, everybody, whether it's Irish folks or Indigenous folks in North America, or Dalits in South India all of those places had practices of mutual aid. They had practices of aunts and uncles and aun-cles, or whoever, but, like, outside of the blood family, who also were responsible for raising you.

So for me, it feels like this redefining family process that, as y'all have described it, is really about affirming the types of family and human connections that are not about capitalism in some sense. Like the family that was before that, the family that will be after that, the family that allows us to survive it. So redefining it, reassessing what the word means, has allowed me to say yeah, this thing is here and I believe in it. And the things that I thought were true that kept me alive, that helped me flourish, are real. I think, you know, as someone who's in the academy, I have to write out my CV every year, and they don't have a line for me to say, my grandmother taught me how to read Kreyòl when I was three and walked me through the Bible, like the logics of the Bible to say, like, ‘I disagree with Ruth where she did this thing to Boaz, but like this other thing is cool.’ Like, those things don't exist there, but that is family. Those are the things that make me possible. Like my soccer coach who would pick me up from school and ride me over with his daughter and was like, ‘my daughter's playing on the team because she can compete with all you boys.’ Like that was part of that. Those connections that we don't label and then we don't call it family. Redefining family has helped me to remember that is the community that I believe in. That is the world that I want to see manifest, and just because folks have built up this mathematics around economics doesn't mean that we can't build up a family economics that says something really different about how money should pass, how time should pass, how research should pass. So redefining it has helped to bring English back in line with the cultural values from Haiti and Kreyòl and otherwise that were true for me and my family networks and allow me to believe that another world is possible.

AA: Thank you.

MH: If you could ask for any kind of support to make this way of living and caring
more possible / easier what would you ask for?

JJ: If I could have something magically appear or if I was asking of something from the
world?

MH: Magically appear.

JJ: Magically appear? I mean, the project that I'm working on in healthcare sort of sits in that. It's a new market around how we quantify money in particular. I think the US dollar in money is one of the root things that breaks apart what's possible. This idea that a Haitian life on average is worth $1,000, but an American life is worth $33,000. This idea that I deserve to be
able to eat as many avocados as I want for $2 – that whole idea of economics is broken. So I think figuring out some new way of quantifying or accounting for all of what goes into our lived experience and how to rebalance the balance is the thing I would ask for. Because I think if we did that then I could focus on being here with my children and just educate, like I wouldn't teach a damn person in school! I just want to sit here with my kids and the kids that are their friends and the folks who are in community and just teach them.

But there's lots of logics around survival and money that make it different, so if we could refigure what that looks like and what accountability looks like, and at the end of the day deal with reparations for this world we live in. Even though I think for me, as an American, it would suck. We owe a lot to a lot of people, and there's probably lifetimes of owing. But I think that would get me closer to actually living in a world that affirms the type of family and care, and family in the broader sense. So maybe the other thing, if there was a simpler ask, maybe like, can we learn a different language instead of English as our shared language? I really appreciate Kreyòl because of the ways it forces me to contend with my familial history. I love the way it has one pronoun for everybody. And I know there's contention and things we'll figure out but like better to go down to one than to start wherever we are here. So maybe it's like releasing ourselves from all of the ease of the past and being willing to start fresh, however hard it is. Thanks for letting me talk all through that to get to a little warm way.

MH: Of course.

AA: Yeah, don't apologize. So, yeah, the next question I want to ask is what are you working on next and how can folks support it?

JJ: I mean what I'm always working on is my kids. Maybe working on, maybe working with, maybe working alongside. I think the biggest thing to me is them, and the many children who are in my network in life. I think the biggest thing is can we re-envision what a path of success looks like for them? So I would ask folks who have ideas about the types of courses or learning they want to offer to children who are living in this broader, expansive care world and network, what do those classes look like and what can you provide? What do internships look like in a world where someone who's 15 or 11 or 18 can get a taste of what's possible here? How do we seduce them with media?

How do folks create movies about the Haitian revolution, but not even the Haitian revolution as capitalism envisions it where it's like ‘let's talk about Toussaint,’ but how do we talk about the families who survive? How do we talk about the queer folks who were alive then? How do we talk about the love stories that persisted even in such dark days? So mostly I'd say that. What are those projects that were called to and how do we live into them today… like fully? I think that would be the biggest thing. What does it look like not even to strike but like, not strike as, we're striking and stopping so that you give us better conditions, but, like, how do we strike out on the new path together? How do we start climbing that hill in a way that feels real? So I guess it would be having people live their biggest, truest dreams towards that shared reality.

MH: Yeah. I love that. I think that's a great place to close.