Cultivating Habits of Activism & Care
Last month, I shared some thoughts on the importance of building our individual and collective practices of interaction. Inspired by both a commitment to the relational practice of abolition and the planetary shift of Mercury stationing retrograde, I offered an opportunity to pause - even for just a moment - to consider how we enter into and communicate with each other, especially in our political work.
Incorporating these pauses into my own life has shifted my own orientation to organizing over the past 15 years. Whereas I once prioritized putting my time, energy, and communication toward state and federal legislative policy reform, I’ve become increasingly more hyperlocal, shifting more towards reciprocal networks of direct action, mutual aid, and community care that don’t involve or aren’t led by the state.
I’ve also learned the importance of community building as a sustained practice rather than one that falls into cycles of high activity, overextension, burnout, and dormancy. This isn’t to say I don’t love a mass protest because I absolutely do; they’re incredibly important for raising visibility and awareness, demonstrating power in numbers, immobilizing municipal infrastructure, and expressing emotion in collective space. And it also isn’t meant to deny that some policy changes have tangible, material impacts on people’s lives while also not increasing the scope and power of the prison and military industrial complexes.
But the components necessary for a world beyond policing, prisons, militarization, and imperialism - shared financial, governance, communication, healing, and care resources and skills, just to name a few - won’t come from large-scale mobilizations, electoral campaigns, or legislative victories alone. We need collective pacing and sustained engagement in ways that support each of our individual needs and strengthen our formations as whole.
And so as people are actively looking for new or additional opportunities for activism ahead of January’s presidential inauguration, I want to make the case for a few types of organizing formations that let us build self-accountable habits of engagement, strengthen our connections to each other, and help us understand the social conditions we’re trying to change or end.
Pen Pal Programs: Were you a weird kid like me who started writing to incarcerated strangers after learning about Leonard Peltier (and community defense campaigns more broadly) from the liner notes of an Indigo Girls CD? Oh, you didn’t because you were allowed to go to parties in high school? Okay, cool. So, anyways… Maybe it’s the Xennial in me, but I’m a sucker for letters and mail. I’ve also learned from people who have been doing this much longer than me that sending letters can support safety for inside pen pals by indicating to guards and other staff that they have connections in the outside world. And for outside pen pals who haven’t experienced the violence of incarceration themselves or through others, it can be an eye-opening experience that raises a lot of questions, like: Why does it take so long for my letters to be received? Why are the restrictions on paper and ink so strict? Why is it so hard to send someone money? Why do they have to pay for something that should be free?
If you’re not already connected to a group that sends solidarity mail (such as a local activist’s or political prisoner’s community defense campaign), organizations like Black and Pink (LGBTQ / HIV focus), Sick of It! (disability justice focus), SWOP Behind Bars (sex worker liberation focus), and Survived and Punished (criminalized survivors of domestic and sexual violence focus) can be a place to start. They offer pen pal opportunities as well as letter writing tips, letter writing event toolkits, and virtual outside pen pal support gatherings.
Book Mailing: Since being a pen pal for anyone, but especially a stranger, can be a big commitment of time and labor, I’m also a big fan of groups that send books to incarcerated adults and youth. Participating in this type of correspondence shares a lot of the same benefits as being an individual pen pal - expanding safety, decreasing isolation, nurturing creativity and imagination, growing knowledge - but with a different model. There are book mailing groups throughout the U.S. and Canada, and even one in England. Many of these offer periodic and regular volunteer packing days, where you’ll assemble packages of books with personalized notes and get to meet other people with similar social justice interests. The collective engagement is sustained by the group, meaning that you don’t need to be present at every packing day. You could build a schedule that fits for your life, while still providing a valuable resource for inside readers and learning more about the impacts of the prison industrial complex as an outside correspondent.
Feeding People in Your City / Town / Neighborhood: It’s no wonder that feeding each other is a core method of showing others that we care about and love them. Providing the literal nourishment and sustenance that another person needs to keep living (literally!) is a deeply humanizing act that proves food is a human right rather than an earned privilege. And while there’s an abundance of programs and nonprofits doing the important direct aid of giving people food, I typically encourage people interested in distribution efforts to look for a group that does so as part of a broader mutual aid strategy to change the conditions - like racism, gentrification, xenophobia, capitalism, and colonialism - causing food scarcity, apartheid, and injustice.
It’s probably also another one of my Xennial traits that I will suggest a Food Not Bombs location (of which there are roughly a bajillion) as a potential starting point, or to simply do an internet search for mutual aid projects in your city or town. I’ve been part of Food Not Bombs in two different cities and been fed by them in many more, so although no two locations are the same (hooray anarchist organizing!), many probably have a weekly distribution day with other food collection and sharing opportunities that happen in the interim.
For the more solitary who still want to support autonomous food sharing, checking to see if your town or city has a free community fridge project may bring one up that’s closer than you realize. Not only does a community fridge offer a no-questions-asked and no-identifying-info-gathered model for accessing food, it can be a place to share things like the unopened box of spring mix that would’ve gone bad while you were gone for the weekend or the uneaten sandwiches from that community event. You could set a day each week or month where you stock or help clean the fridge, or host cooking get-togethers with friends on a regular basis to make containers for soup for sharing. Some community fridge projects also have virtual spaces where moderators encourage neighbors to not shame, judge, or surveil those taking or leaving food. In this way, it can also become a practice space for abolitionist organizing, decreasing the habit of relying on police.
These aren’t the only projects that folks who are new(er) to activism and organizing or anyone looking to reconnect to community can get involved with, and they might not be the right fit for everyone’s skills, capacity, interests, or location. They also aren’t mutually exclusive to other activism and organizing that people might already be engaged in. But I provide them as a starting point in cultivating an ongoing, sustainable habit of political work rooted in relationship and community building after years of learning why and how people enter and exit organizing and activism spaces.
It’s also been clear for some time that authoritarianism and fascism are rapidly expanding, regardless of the political parties in power, because of how they’re driven by political, economic, social, and cultural forces that elections weren’t set up to address or eliminate. In the midst of this, reproductive and transgender health, dissent and protest, masking and public health protection, poverty, homelessness, and merely existing in public space are becoming increasingly criminalized.
Ending the scope, power, and harms of the prison and military industrial complexes isn’t the only issue I care about or organize around, but I often encourage people to at least keep it in their sights because of how it connects to nearly every other issue. The decision to criminalize sends a clear message about who the prison and military industrial complexes do and do not view as worthy of humanity. It’s one of the surest ways that society and culture seeks to dehumanize any of us, and therefore provides a clear intervention and interruption point that can be woven into every political strategy, regardless of the targets, tactics, or actions.
The long-term work of social change and abolitionist organizing won’t be simple or quick. But what it often can be is fulfilling and connective. And that’s why the ongoing task of returning to each other’s humanity is so essential to our work; when we disagree, when experience defeat, when we harm each other, when we’re sick or in jail or getting evicted or at court or depressed or deep in neurodivergent burnout and shutdown, we will need to be able to affirm and remember each other’s worthiness as people. It’s also why weaving the actions of social change into the fabric of our lives will make our communities and movements stronger no matter what issues we take on or what tactics and strategies we employ.
The state has no interest in any of us getting in the sustained habit of anything, much less recognizing and celebrating each other’s humanity. I’m sure that they would rather we do our gathering, protesting, studying, fighting, disbanding, and despairing in disparate fits and starts. But I want us to win, and I believe that we will. The more we build habits and rituals to sustain smaller-scale actions like seeing each other as human, replying to a letter, and working it out without police, the stronger we become to take on and sustain larger-scale actions like boycotts and general strikes that will require us to share resources, space, labor, and encouragement. So consider this an invitation to begin (or begin again) with humanizing actions that can become humanizing habits that can become humanizing organizing that will become humanizing movements and humanizing victories.