JC: Can you please introduce yourself in any way you would like, whether that's name, pronouns, location, occupation, or any other identity markers that you feel like are important to you?

zr: Yes. So my name is zara raven. I just use z or zara instead of pronouns. I am a mad, Caribbean, queer care worker. And, let's see, hmm, what else is there to know about me? I'm a libra stellium.

JC: Cute.

zr: I raise kids, care for kids in my daily life and also through the Philly Childcare Collective where we're building this infrastructure of care for local movement organizations and for kids in our communities.

JC: Awesome. That's really beautiful. I'm so curious, like, before we get into what you're doing presently and how you came into this work, what was your home life like? Did you grow up in a nuclear family? Did you see something else? I'm curious about what was present before and how things are different.

zr: Yeah, I was born to a Puerto Rican single mom. I grew up in a really abusive household. She had experienced domestic violence, and she also perpetuated it. And when I say I grew up in an abusive household, I think, you know, to be specific, there was a lot of physical violence, but there was also a lot of emotional and psychological abuse. And when I was 13, the state intervened, and my siblings and I were separated by the family policing system. So we were each put into different homes. But what I learned from being displaced by the family policing system was that there was no magic other place that I could go and be safe, that safety is something that we create and that we practice. And so I was moved from home to home over the next two years. I probably made about 12 moves in a very short period of time. I finished eighth grade on Long Island and then started ninth grade in New York City. And I remember starting ninth grade and being like, I'm just here for this year—I'm going to be moving back to Jersey. And that was sort of at the time, I think, my hope. And now I understand that as disenfranchised grief. You know, my whole life was gone in one night. And it was treated as a rescue operation— I wasn’t safe being isolated in a home with an abusive parent, and displacing people into completely different communities, displacing me from my siblings, my friends also wasn't safety.

But ultimately after a year both my siblings were returned home, and I'm only recently starting to grapple with why I never went back, but when I finally did find out that my mom had had custody of me—she had had custody already for a year—and the only time she came back was to have me institutionalized. And so I think a lot about the different experiences of disabled, especially Black, disabled, queer, and trans kids, both in our homes and in the family policing system, because my experience was that I just wasn't wanted in either space. When I was 15, I ran away, and again, sort of was going from home to home, but on my own terms. And yeah, so I lived with housing instability for the next couple of years. I worked in the sex industry, and then when I was 17, I moved to L.A. and was able to just learn to do things differently.

JC: I heard you mention very early on that you realized that there was no magical place that you could go to, right, that safety was something you had to build for yourself and on your own terms. Do you have any early experiences or memories of that as you were navigating that housing instability, being institutionalized, the grief around your family? If not that early that's okay, but I'm just curious if you felt like you were maybe seeing or experiencing a bit of that community building in your early life despite or in spite of everything that was going on.

zr: I think during the time that I was homeless, I felt very left behind. I remember, you know, I had a lot of friends—I remember making calls to people and people not answering, you know when I'm calling from pay phones. And so I have a lot of grief around that time period, and I think that's how I learned that I could survive using sexual labor, and, you know, the people who were going to open their homes to me were the people who wanted to have sex with me. So I can't say much about that time period, but I can say when I was 17, when I got to L.A., I worked for this organization called the L.A. Homeless Services Coalition which did fundraising for the L.A. Youth Network which was a series of youth shelters, and my boss there, his name was Kerry Raven, he’s where I take my last name from now.

JC: Oh beautiful.

zr: He just really showed up for me in really big ways. He was someone who, if I needed a ride to the hospital, he was there. If I just needed someone to show up, he was consistently present. And I was reflecting on that recently because he was a 61-year-old Vietnam War veteran, and he had told me back then that he had had a daughter, and he hadn't been in her life really. He was kind of living what he called the fast life, he was using drugs and, you know, he had regrets around being absent from his daughter's life. And so I feel like now I look back and I think we both got a second chance at building a different kind of not quite parent-child relationship but maybe elder-young person caring relationship, and there were many ways that I cared for him as well. And that relationship was so significant and so important to me that I changed my last name and made sure that my daughter has Raven as her last name.

JC: Yeah, that's so beautiful. I’m touched to hear that you were able to just create a new life for yourself when you went to L.A., and that there's a person who you carry with you today that your daughter even has a piece of. That's very very beautiful. I'm wondering a little bit, I guess we can kind of fast forward because you've mentioned your daughter a few times now, like, if you just want to talk about what your life looks like today in terms of care structures and kinship, you can maybe speak first to yourself and then about what parenting is like, or whatever feels natural. But yeah, just overall curious about what your care structures look like today.

zr: Yes. It's taken a really long time. I will say I've had many villages. And I think I've gotten better at building and sustaining villages as I've gotten better at navigating conflict and being in relationship with others and knowing myself and knowing how to communicate my needs. I became a single parent when my daughter was born 11 years ago, almost 12 years ago now. And I remember thinking, because I always thought, you know, my friends are going to be there. My friends are just going to show up. And I think that was a big, um… I think that none of us really knew what my life was actually going to look like once I became a parent, and I remember early on creating a spreadsheet and, you know, I took a second job—I was working days at a non-profit and I took a night job at a restaurant—and so I had different friends on shifts to care-give for my daughter because otherwise I was really just losing all the money that I was making at the restaurant to pay for a babysitter! It didn't make sense! I think it was such a rude awakening to find how expensive child care was—more than the cost of my rent, because I had a salary position—and I wasn't making a lot, I was making 40K—but it meant that I was disqualified from accessing any kind of relief or support as a single parent. So it was just a total catch 22.

And yeah, I just consistently felt that I was on my own. Even though I felt like I was always asking friends for support, most of my friends were childless. And then as I began to make friends with more people who had kids, they were mostly coupled and in nuclear families, and so not really trying to build something with me around collective care. So it's taken me a really long time to find my people.

But today—so I moved to Philly in 2022, and that was after a period of unschooling, which I started when schools just shut down during the pandemic. There was not really another option, except my six-year-old being on multiple Zoom calls every day, which was not working. And so, yeah, I started unschooling. I gave virtual school a chance for most of 2020, and then by 2021, dove fully into unschooling. And so then by the time we moved here, I was looking for a school, because she really wanted to be in a social environment. My daughter is an Aquarius. She is, we were talking last night about how—she's so funny. She'll tell me like, ‘oh, wow, I wish I had gone to see Seussical when you asked me to go two years ago because I love it so much.’ I'm like ‘yeah, I have an idea of what you like! And I try to encourage you to explore it!’ But it has to be her idea.

JC: Yeah that's so funny.

zr: So she really wanted to be in a social environment, and I would have loved to keep unschooling, but we ended up finding a school where kids can choose how to spend their time and how to spend their day. They don't have to ask to go to the bathroom, for example. They really get to experience a lot more autonomy. So it felt consistent enough with my values. I definitely have critiques of the school, especially the ways that they used punishment instead of promoting community care and safety—I've had a lot of challenges with that. But something I appreciated about being at that school for a year was that I was able to meet other single parents who were poly and queer and trans and disabled and kinky and, you know, just people who are more like me and who shared my values more, even if we couldn't find in that space what our kids needed. And so that was where I first met Han, who I still co-parent with to this day.

So Han is a solo parent to, at that time, a four-year-old, and Han’s husband had died very suddenly in a car accident maybe a year or two before I met them, and they were learning about abolition and at the time I was coordinating a project called Queenie's Crew which teaches little kids about prison abolition. So it was a two-year project as part of Project Nia, and mainly virtual so kids could participate from wherever they were, and every month we would have different activities like pod mapping or we did like Mother's Day cards for incarcerated moms. And I was still coordinating that program when I met Han and they were interested in learning about abolition, and so we just got coffee one day and like, hung out, got to know each other, shared our stories with each other. And I offered—and this was something that was probably true for me for a really long time—I was quicker to offer than to ask for help. And so I was like you're a single parent—if you ever want your child to stay over or if you need extra support, like I'm here. And so I started hosting sleepovers with the four-year-old. And my daughter at the time, I think, was seven. And it was really sweet. And I think, you know, for me, I'd always wanted more kids. And I didn't, and to this day, I don't know for sure that I'll give birth again, but I feel very excited about raising more kids, and also at the time I was pretty protective of my child and wanting a lot of values alignment and a lot of relationship before I felt comfortable receiving the kind of support that I was willing to offer, but we built it over time. We had another friend who we also met at the school. And so we were the three of us co-caregiving together for about three years. And I got a lot of practice in We would have regular restorative circles, and I'd gone to a training on land-based restorative justice in 2022. So I've practiced transformative justice for a really long time, and transformative justice is about essentially being proactive, it's not just about responding to harm but about creating the conditions for safety in a very proactive way. And what I learned about restorative justice was that we actually could have circles for anything. You don't have to have a circle in response to a conflict or an incident of harm. You could have a grief circle. You could have a planning circle. You could have a celebratory circle. And so with this care pod, I was able to blend what I've learned about transformative justice with what I was learning about restorative justice, and specifically circle-keeping practices. And we started regularly holding circles.

The first one was, we took a trip to Puerto Rico—I'm bipolar and I just kind of booked a flight and was like, do y'all want to come? barely knowing these two people. And they're also crazy. And so we all did it. And we just kind of jumped in, and it was a little chaotic, and we had a lot of conflicts, but afterwards we had our first circle to talk about the conflicts and how we wanted to move forward. And so we used circle keeping as a regular practice to plan, and we still do, like plan what our fall activities are going to be. Something that was hard was that for a lot of the time we were dealing with manipulative behavior and lying from one of the folks in the circle. And we just tried to mitigate it and stay in a relationship and continue to love and support all the kids over time. And that really imploded actually this year, and so I feel grateful for the experiment and I think for a long time, because a lot of the last 18 months was boundary after boundary after boundary, recognizing the one person's behavior was pretty severely impacting everyone else in the group and still wanting to stay present and in relationship with the child and not knowing exactly how to do that, given what we were navigating. So the story I would have told six months ago, [laughing] is probably a little different from what I'm telling now. But yeah, it really exploded in August. And now, Han and I are continuing to raise kids together, but I think, you know, there was a period when I wasn’t even sure, and I’m sure they weren’t sure, of what was going to happen. You know, we can’t just continue forward as though two people who were part of our care pod are still here or as if nothing has changed. And so what we did at our last circle, actually, was we tended to grief. And actually we made a grief tree altogether, us adults and the kids. And what that looks like is one of the children drew a tree on a large piece of paper, and we made leaves, and on the leaves we wrote things we want to carry forward and what we're releasing or letting go of. And so the top of the tree are the things we're carrying forward and the bottom of the tree are the things we're letting go of. And I think that the grief tree was a really, really helpful practice for all of us to tend to the shift, the grief related to that big transition.

And so now today, to get to your actual question, what it looks like is, yeah, we have to revisit a lot of things that we were doing because, well, now the kids are older, their needs are different, the makeup of our care pod is different. So we've revisited and now my daughter goes and sleeps over at that house once a week. The now eight-year-old doesn't want to do sleepovers, and part of it too is I have a 12-year-old daughter who loves k-pop and tik-tok and he's an eight-year-old boy who likes to play soccer. So you know their interests are just different. And so the way that we care for the kids is now different than it was, you know, even two years ago, or one year ago, actually. And so the eight-year-old doesn't want to do sleepovers anymore, but I pick him up from school on Fridays. And there are plenty of activities that we all do together, so, like last weekend we all went to a pumpkin patch together. My daughter really likes baking with Han, my co-parent, and so they do that together often on the days that she sleeps over. And most importantly, I feel like I have a support that I've never had before. Because I don't have my family of origin, I don’t have anything built in, and I really only ever had my friends, friends and neighbors, to co-create shared-care relationships with. And so I feel like over the last three years, I've really nurtured strong, deep trust with the person that I now call my co-parent. But also, I think in the last few months, I've been able to free up a lot more space that I was using to mitigate the behavior of someone who was behaving abusively, and I have been able to show up more for other kids in my community like I did a few years ago, and that's felt really, really good. Like, you can see, like, there are different kids’ heights all on my wall. [laughing] So like one of our neighbors is here once or twice a week and the kids do homework together, and there’s another kid who is also a little boy who gets along with the 8-year-old, so when I have the 8-year-old I say hey, to the other single parent, do you want to drop off your kid? So now I feel like my network of care is a lot more fluid, and it feels really good.

JC: Yeah I can hear all of the transformation that not only you but the care web, the parents you are co-parenting with, the children who are part of that, how all that has just ebbed and flowed over the last couple of years for you. And, yeah, I hear you mentioned, too, how at first you're, much more comfortable offering care than receiving it and how you really did have to do some intentional work to build a lot of intimacy and trust with this co-parent Han, but I'm sure other people in your life, whether that's friends, neighbors, whoever. Can you just talk a little bit about what that looked like? What were the values that you have that you feel like, okay, these are my non-negotiables, I must be values-aligned with these people if they're going to be in my care web. Or, yeah, what was it like to practice building that kind of trust and intimacy? I'd love to hear a little bit about that, too.

zr: Yeah that's such a great question! In the beginning there were a lot of pieces where there just wasn’t alignment, and I feel like I focused on shared need in the beginning because what I had tried to do in the past was start with values but then I was in relationship with a lot of childless people who did not seem to understand what it meant to account for the needs of a child. And actually I was really burned—I had been planning to build a commune with some close friends but none of them had kids and when I talked about, for example, the needs my child had, or had expressed, I remember people getting really upset with me and saying, you know, well, you said you wanted this and now you want this. And I was saying, oh, no, actually I'm speaking and also, this is a second person who also has needs! [laughs]

So I couldn't start with values, which was hard because they were so important to me. And so those values at that time were like, abolition, and when I say abolition I mean the practice, I don't mean the policies—I mean like believing in co-creating safety and care without policing, without punishment. And what I learned by especially centering that as one of my values, and disability justice is a value—what I learned was that a lot of people just didn't apply that to kids.

JC: That's a big one.

zr: Yeah. Folks didn't realize that kids are disabled. Didn't realize that kids are people who have needs. You know, it was just like truly they just could not hold that my child was a person who had needs and feelings and experiences that they also would need to reckon with and be in relationship with, to be in relationship with me. And so I think that's why when I started at the free school, I actually feel like I put aside a lot of those values and decided to focus on need. And, you know, saw that this person had a shared need and also, and Han and I have had a lot of conversations about this, I didn’t like the way they talked to their child sometimes, I really didn’t. like my daughter and I, because we’re both air signs and we have been on our own for a lot of the time, I check in with her about pretty much all the choices that impact her. Even moving, you know, like we communicate. We're big communicators. And I think now she's 11 going to be 12 so I see her now moving into this place where she is very mindful of how choices she makes might impact me and I really appreciate that, but before that that's not something you can expect of a small child. So really it was mostly me needing to understand my role as the adult and actively communicate with her. And so we would have conflicts over, you know, Han just making choices about food that didn't account for everyone's food needs. You know, just like, just basic little things. And so we've just come back to circle and we've talked about the things and we've engaged in the conflicts. And some of it was also me living with bipolar disorder, living with abandonment trauma, living with the trauma of having experienced abuse both in my childhood but also experienced abuse in adult relationships and so for me it has been really hard to let people close and so it's it's both/and. I was doing a lot of scanning for safety, and it was like well if we’re perfectly values-aligned then will we be safe? Nope! Ok. If we have shared needs? Still no. You still have to communicate and everyone has to be willing to and open to making changes.

The shift that I really saw was probably last year when—Han is deaf and they got a cochlear implant—and so there was a period of time when they couldn't hear at all because their ear wasn't turned on yet. And so we're emergency-learning ASL in like a couple months, which was not helpful because then we're asking like hey Han do you want to go for a walk? like we had nothing useful to say in ASL. What's your sign, Han? And so it was just really clunky trying to figure out how to support Han through this surgery when communication was really difficult and I think Han at that point really had a breakthrough where—oh my gosh this is going to tell you a lot about me—I tried to organize a Pictionary day so that Han would feel in community and we were just not going to use any like out loud words—it was just like supposed to be drawing and writing your response, and Han later shared that it was really overwhelming and that they didn't want to tell us at the time because they saw that we were trying really hard to care for them and and, you know, like, keep doing fun things all together. But I think this experience that they had over the summer helped them just better embrace disability, better embrace and acknowledge capacity and how important that is to be in relationship. And so I think as they've shifted, I've shifted, we're both kind of shifting. I'm able to let them in more when they're more honest about their capacity. And so I feel like last year's conflicts and surgery and ASL and all of that 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. And then when we are able to be more honest with each other, I’m able to let my walls down. So it’s been time—time and practice and conversation and making mistakes and coming back from them.

JC: Yes of course. That’s so honest and heartwarming to hear. I’m just getting such a sense of like, I don't know what the word is, I guess how you've been able to use conflict actually as a vehicle for transformation, and I think that’s so important and impactful and so many people don't have examples of how to do that work in practice that still feels restorative, that can be transformative, that puts people in deeper intimacy instead of like disconnection. So, yeah, I guess I'm just really curious—I know you talked a little bit about circle keeping and how that has been part of your conflict transformation or resolution practice. Can you talk a little bit more about what else is there? Do you only use circles? I was also kind of surprised to hear that in the example of the grief circle, the children were part of that. Are they normally part of your circles?

zr: Oh yeah they’re usually part of the circles.

JC: Okay, that's super awesome. Yeah so I'm just curious about what, like, conflict resolution has been for you, like how you’re managing that in your family and this care web you’ve built. But maybe even beyond if you wanted to talk more about the childcare collective too.

zr: Yes I would love to. So conflict transformation work has been some of my heartwork for the past at least five years, probably before then. So I, as a Libra Stellium, I often ended up being a mediator in conflicts and organizing spaces, probably as far back as 2017. I tended to be someone who held a lot of relationships with different people and could see a lot of different sides. The downside of that is that version of myself was not good at naming my own feelings, needs, and experiences, but I was able to be present with a lot of others. But I got my mediation practice in organizing spaces. And then 2020, I saw a lot of groups implode over rape and abuse and an inability to to address more heightened oppressive behaviors. And that had been my experience, first, with my own experience of being assaulted and then seeking accountability through a transformative justice process and then seeing how that process was used to perpetuate the abuse, and then connecting with other people who were having those same experiences in organizing spaces, and so I started gathering with other folks to share about those experiences to access peer support from each other starting back in 2020 and that was actually the group of people that I thought I was going to be building my life with, and then those relationships also sort of imploded because even though we had a shared understanding of how organizing spaces had failed us in terms of addressing abusive behavior, most people didn’t have everyday conflict skills, and we were all traumatized and it was the beginning of the pandemic. It was a really hard fucking time [laughs] my daughter and I were housing insecure, and I recently had been assaulted. And so I think there's a lot of trauma, a lot of isolation, and we weren't able to move through conflict in this space that I had been so hopeful about. And some of those relationships through one-on-one rebuilding have been rebuilt, and that's been really beautiful, and it led me on this path of actually really wanting to strengthen my conflict skills.

So I gathered with a completely different group of folks who were interested in building conflict skills, and we studied the Interrupting Criminalization, In It Together workbook. There's another workbook called Turning Towards Each Other by Weyam Ghadbian and Jovida Ross. And the Embodiment Institute’s Embodied Conflict workbook. So I spent most of 2021 really paying attention to and practicing conflict in a different way, and then I went to grad school and became trained as a clinical therapist because I was really interested in the ways that trauma also impacts our experiences of conflict. I feel like as an organizer, I had a good lens around how systems create trauma and how we have to change systems to create safety, but I didn't have a good enough lens on what we could do on the individual level. And so I feel like I have the opposite approach that most people did, like, starting with systems and then being like, oh, actually, the individual is the building block it turns out. And so, even though I'm not a licensed therapist—I refer to myself as a care worker, a mental health care worker, and a relationship coach, and still a mediator and transformative justice practitioner. So I've been able to bring those skills into every space that I'm in, into my everyday relationships. That has looked like making sure those circles are intergenerational so, like, from the start, assuming that the kids have valuable insights and conflicts to bring themselves. But I have found that a lot of conflict has to start one-on-one. It has to be a one-on-one conversation, and then Circle can be a way to continue to process the impacts on the group, but I think conflict generally should be a one-on-one conversation. What's hard with—and this was also a conflict with Han and the other adult who was part of our care pod—was that I think interrupting adultism came more naturally to me, and it was a lens that I have had for a long time, and before I even had the word adultism, I understood kids as people who deserve respect. And I came into parenting that way. And that was more of a journey and a process for the folks I was working to raise kids with. And so that meant sometimes kids were raising conflicts that were being dismissed or were being shut down. So I think Circle in some ways helped create a container where kids could bring conflict and then adults had to work through their responses, and it felt important to me to be able to affirm kids' experiences. But I think mediator brain sometimes is like “okay everybody has something valuable to say” and it's so important to have an analysis of power dynamics otherwise mediation can actually enable abusive and oppressive behavior. And so yeah it's been a process! But also having kids in Circle means you know we open with an art activity or a game. It means that Circle can't be two hours long. It means that, you know, Circle has to be co-created and accessible to everybody, to the needs of everybody in the space. And, yeah, that means it should be a little fun. It should be a little silly. And it shouldn't be too long. It should be a little short.

JC: I love that.

zr: The Child Care Collective, for me, feels like the first space where I really feel like I'm in a collective space and people are actively co-creating safety by creating policies that proactively address our safety needs. I would say a lot of this comes from the work I've done independently and with a lot of different collectives and a lot of skill building on my own that I've encouraged other folks to do as well, but it's also that there's interest and excitement to do it within the collective, and that's different. So in the Child Care Collective, we have a People Committee that I am on, and our People Committee, we have a debrief form, so after every child care shift, the member who provided child care fills out the form, shares how it went, and then we have a monthly meeting where we review the responses to that form.

We look at like what issues came up and how we can proactively address them, so one example of that is over the summer we did a couple child care shifts at Pentridge Station which is a beer garden, and most of our child care before that was happening in schools, in libraries, in church basements, so we hadn't been in a beer garden doing child care before. It was really fun. A lot of it was just being at a table with kids doing art, blowing bubbles, but we had a situation that hadn't come up before, which was that a drunk adult was coming close to the table, kind of making folks uncomfortable, grabbing the bubbles, wanting to play with the kids. And we were trying to find the fine line between, yeah, you know adults can play with kids, that's welcome, and also you got your beer close to this table, you're spilling it a little bit, you're like playing with the kids but saying like ‘oh these bubbles are mine,’ so the ways that you're playing aren’t in alignment with the ways that we might play or interact with the kids within the childcare collective, and so those of us who were on the shift weren't exactly sure what to do, like how to navigate it while, you know, just honoring all of these different dynamics.

So we were able to talk about it within the People Committee and have open discussion and talk about what we want to do if we're going to take shifts in the future at the station. And that looks like being in the corner, which we had done in the past where we're a little bit more away from the party whereas like this shift we were kind of at a center table and more in the mix. We talked about having signage with our community agreements, co-creating that with the kids and making sure that those are visible and that we can point to them if anybody in the space, whether members or non-members, like just community members, violate those agreements, but that we have something that we can point to and show everyone this is what we do over here. We also talked about bystander intervention training to make sure that everybody in the collective feels equipped to respond to incidents that might be perpetuating adultism or other oppressive behaviors. So it feels like we're really proactively talking about safety. We don't use child abuse clearances or histories of criminalization to determine whether someone is safe or unsafe to be around a kid, so we don't require those of our members. And we don't look into them. And instead, we have to talk about how we actually keep kids safe. And that looks like, even if there's only one kid signed up to receive child care at a shift, we send two members because we know collective care keeps kids safe. And we also are very proactive about conflict, and that's something that I've learned through studying workbooks, but also practicing in other collectives. We have a feeling space at the beginning of every meeting. So if there's something that happened that made you uncomfortable in a previous meeting that you want to come back to, That space is designated because we assume, especially as a collective of mostly people of marginalized genders, that a lot of people have been socialized to believe that their needs and feelings
and experiences don't matter. And so for a lot of people, a lot of us, it's harder to raise conflict because of what our experiences have been with conflict, and so we invite it instead. And I think that's been really powerful. We also have a policy that you have a one-on-one conversation and then you bring it to feeling space, and then we can talk about what changes we need to make in the collective to address larger issues that impact the whole collective. So I feel like safety keeping is something—I mean obviously, it's not perfect—but it's the best experience I've had in a collective at folks taking collective responsibility for community safety.

JC: Yeah, that's really, really inspiring to hear. And I'm so happy that you're plugged into something like that.

zr: I love it. I love it.

JC: I want to be mindful of our time together. It's about eight minutes to three.

zr: Oh, dang. Okay.

JC: So do you feel like you can do one more question, or would you like to stop here?

zr: I have to make my daughter a sandwich before I pick her up. So if you want to ask in the kitchen while I make a sandwich?

JC: Okay, for sure, yes. [Moving to kitchen] I guess I’ll ask you, what is your vision for the world you're helping to create? How would care be navigated in this world?

zr: My vision is collective care and collective care that is intentional and thoughtful about our different needs and different experiences, and especially pays attention to the specific needs and experiences of Black disabled queer and trans kids. I think that looks like trusting kids, listening to kids, everyone in a community feeling responsible for caring for kids. I see a lot in Leftist spaces of, like, kids shouldn't be allowed on airplanes! You know, and that's not to say that kids should be in every space, but I think there is this general sense, and I think this impacts all disabled people, but especially people with psychiatric disabilities, this general sense that people with big feelings aren't welcome here. And so I think so much of it looks like community-wide unlearning of ableism, community-wide unlearning of adultism, heterosexism, cis-sexism, you know, every oppressive belief. And I think all of us that are learning from kids about how to live more authentically and listen to ourselves and trust our own needs, feelings, and experiences. Like, I really don't think that anyone is straight. Like, I don't actually believe that. I think that people learn to play roles, and some people are able to do it for a longer time. But I think that we could all really learn from how authentic and imaginative children and young people are. Yeah, I guess just that.

And then there was, so, like two or three weeks ago I was walking on the street, and there's this older woman down the street who—my daughter met first when she started walking to school on her own—and she would always give my daughter a dollar if she had a good day at school. And so I was like, you've got an allowance out in these streets! But now I know her, now she's part of our community and you know like when I was cooking the other day and I brought her some food, but I was walking on the street with my daughter a few weeks ago when we were coming from theater and she had said, “you know, if you ever have a problem with your mom and you want somewhere else to go” —like she lives down kind of an alley so we haven't haven't really seen where her door is, she's usually out in the front—she was like, “this is my door”, walks her down, “this is where you can find a key”. And I thought that is exactly what I want community care to look like: I want neighbors to feel invested and to just be available. And for us to be able to acknowledge that the primary caregiver of a child and the child might have disagreement or worse, and that kids need other safe places to go, kids should never be isolated with one single person, and they should have lots of options and be able to roam public spaces freely knowing that everyone's looking out for them, and all of us. That's what I would hope for all of us.

JC: Oh, I love that. Thank you. Well, that's all the questions that I had for you. Is there anything else you'd like to share, like name in the interview before I just end the recording?

zr: Mmm no I don’t think so!

JC: Thank you. Thank you so much for your honesty, your vulnerability, for the work that you're doing and, like, the way that you're modeling a different life for yourself, your daughter, all the people you're in community with. I really appreciate your time and energy today.

zr: Yeah. Yes! Thank you for this project. I'm so excited for it because I think that's what we're missing. I mean, we have models that are mostly like, our ancestral models. I feel like we don't have a lot of examples from the present day of the messiness of collective care, which is probably the big reason I wanted to tell the story of how things fell apart. Even I, and I think so many people around this, really idealized our care pod. And I think that made it really difficult to let go when it wasn't working, and I feel like I learned a lesson there about how keeping it together for the kids doesn't work in radical care pods either. [laughs] Yeah so I feel really excited to read all of the different models and examples and just see how it’s actually working, here and now, and how we can learn from each other. So excited about all of this!