Hello family! Happy November. We hope you are staying healthy, staying safe, engaging in the ways you are able, making time for rest, and learning how to use your gifts to aid in this fight for sustained liberation.

What We’re Up To

As we near the end of this year, many of us are feeling the pull to further reflect on ourselves, our communities, our goals, and our priorities. It has been beautiful to do this work with all of you; none of this would be possible without all of the support, encouragement, donations, thoughtfulness, sweat, time, energy, and intentional love you all have shared.

As our Director of Community Outreach, Mayra Lozano, always says, this work is not transactional. It is community work, it is community building, it is community love. We continue to show up every week and do this work, not only because it is necessary to provide mutual aid and services to our unhoused neighbors and other vulnerable communities that continue to be ignored, criminalized, and oppressed by those who were elected to protect and serve us all, but also because this work is integral to reimagining what our communities can look like when radical love for each other exists.

The friendships, the conversations, the learning and unlearning, the individual and collective organizing, are all a part of how we work together to show up in the best way possible. These are but some of the tools necessary to achieve transformational, long-term engagement and investment in our communities. 

It is imperative that we express gratitude for all of the mutual aid and grassroots efforts that have informed and amplified our work over the past 4 months--community members working throughout the pandemic to provide essential care, rebuild trust, and demand better for all folks in our world. We also give space to acknowledge all the work that has been done by our ancestors, the work that is the foundation for every piece of community building and organizing we do today. We remember that this gratitude and mutual appreciation must happen year-round, just as our work must be year-round, just as our love must continue always, and not only around a supremacist, colonial celebration. Uplifting each other and uplifting our most marginalized communities is daily, perpetual, eternal practice.

We have worked with and learned from countless organizers and service providers in Skid Row and other LA communities, in spaces like water access, food sovereignty, affordable and sustainable housing, harm reduction, pandemic assistance, immigration defense, environmental justice, farmworkers’ rights, healthcare access, and the intersections of these spheres on the pathways toward racial and social justice. And so, big and abundant love to the following organizations and groups in our mutual aid network thus far and those that we continue to grow with and mutually support: