#community care and mutual aid

[vulpixhoney]

while I will probably vote Biden in November, let's not pretend like he's actively helping any of these causes. Like obviously Trump will be actively hindering these things, but Biden isn't actually doing anything to protect trans people or abortion access or our healthcare or any of that. like I understand that our system is broken and this is are only options but when advocating and trying to convince people to vote Biden after everything he's don't at least be like. honest and realistic of what we're voting for? like you're not voting for someone who cares about and wants to protect abortion access, you're not voting for someone who supports DEI work. you're voting for "Not Trump"

Biden isn't going to save you. Biden isn't going to do anything. He's going to fence-sit on issues he "supports" and turn a blind eye to the people trying to take away your rights. but that's still better than the person actively trying to take away your rights.

the choices are the person leaving you to drown and the person actively pushing your head underwater

Look.

I have made you a chart. A very simple chart.

People say "You have to draw the line somewhere, and Biden has crossed it-" and my response is "Trump has crossed way more lines than Biden".

These categories are based off of actual policy enacted by both of these men while they were in office.

If the ONLY LINE YOU CARE ABOUT is line 12, you have an incredible amount of privilege, AND YOU DO NOT CARE ABOUT PALESTINIANS. You obviously have nothing to fear from a Trump presidency, and you do not give a fuck if a ceasefire actually occurs. You are obviously fine if your queer, disabled, and marginalized loved ones are hurt. You clearly don't care about the status of American democracy, which Trump has openly stated he plans to destroy on day 1 he is in office.

[destroyingangelneveragod]

THIS IS LIFE OR DEATH FOR PALESTINIANS IN GAZA

Making an urgent new post for Feras because I found out they can't get funds out of GFM fast enough to address their needs for water so please donate to their campaign via

Feras is a good friend of my friend's Abby, Olivia, and their mom Hope.

They're trying to raise funds to get a water filtration device/system for their community. The community is dangerously/near-LETHALLY low on water. Please send even the minimum amount donation. It adds up and it's so urgent.

[littlenaughtygarden]

Focus Congo is an organization based in the DRC and Germany that helps get aid and resources to the people of The Congo. They're currently raising money to send two containers full of medical supplies, medical machinery, clothing, shoes, and household materials.

They've only met 18% of their goal. PLEASE donate if you can and share this widely so they can get aid to the DRC. 🇨🇩💛

[caroverse]

Please help protect my sweetheart and best friend ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️

Hi! My name is Carolyn and I'm fundraising for the love of my life, Noor. Noor is a Moroccan trans woman, and in a difficult situation right now. She is currently unable to work due to French Bureaucracy and Visa complications. Between the fear of possible deportation, the weight of racism and transphobia, and the anxiety that comes with struggling with money, she is really having a difficult time right now and could use all the support she could get. She is struggling to afford rent during this time where she is unable to work. Every single cent that is donated will be sent directly to help support her in life.

Noor and I have been together now for years and although we are currently far apart, we are trying our best to support eachother and are working to make sure we can live together in the near future. She is the love of my life as well as my best friend. Noor is kindhearted, patient, and creative in ways I could never begin to describe. She brings warmth and love with her everywhere she goes, and deserves a community just as all of us do.

Noor cooks the most wonderful meals you'll ever taste. She creates beautiful artwork from her own hands, including a hand-knitted blanket that I sleep with every night, and various hand-knitted goods that keep her friends and me warm in the cold. She has a great sense of humor and loves to make jokes, all of which I still laugh at years after she made them. Her smile is contagious and her hugs are the warmest you could ever imagine. Noor deserves the same warmth, love, and protection she offers others, given right back tenfold.

Please consider donating to support Noor, my sweetheart who I love so much. Every little bit helps, even if you can only donate one dollar/euro. Your support means the world to her, and me as well, and we send you all of our love. Let's support eachother, together. ❤️

Sincerely,

Caro ❤️

[leikeliscomet]

Please help me move out

My mum's house has been derelict and hoarded my whole life. It's causing physical problems for my hygiene and health and it's reached breaking point mentally. I don't know what else to do.

I've been looking for work since July and had some interviews but nothing yet. Currently trying to sort out something where I can stay with my relatives but if this doesn't work I'm stuck here. I've been offering art comms all year to support myself but had no orders. Any comm requests, small tips or at least sharing this post would go so far. Thank you.

K*-fi: iamjennaart

P*ypal: iamjennaart

£50/£5,000

[rainbowpopeworld]

Super helpful comic by @deannazandt

Full image descriptions by the author here and in the alt text

[strawbnuy]

This is my best friend Penny, she's a trans WOC trying to move out of Texas for safety reasons after the election. She is not safe there, and could really use your help-

If she can raise even $500 out of her goal of 10k, that would be incredibly helpful!

Please donate, share, b00st, repost on any mutual aid groups you're apart of, etc. Help me get my friend to safety ❤️

You can also donate through c*sh*pp: $PinchePennyy

[chronicallycouchbound]

There is a story told and retold in the Middle East about how to help someone who’s drowning.

The story goes that a man had fallen into a river. He was not much of a swimmer and was in real danger of drowning. A crowd of concerned people wanted to rescue him. They were standing at the edge of the water, each of them urgently shouting out to him:

“Give me your hand, give me your hand!”

The man was battling the waves and ignored their urgent plea. He kept going under and was clearly struggling to take another breath. A saintly man walked up to the scene. He too cared about the drowning man. But his approach was different. Calmly he walked up to the water, waded in up to his knees, glanced lovingly at the drowning man, and said:

“Take my hand.”

Much to everyone’s surprise, the drowning man reached out and grabbed the saint’s hand. The two came out of the dangerous water. The drowning man sat up at the edge of the water, breathing heavily, looking relieved, exhausted, and grateful. The crowd turned towards the saint and asked in complete puzzlement: “How were you able to reach him when he didn’t heed our plea?” The saint calmly said:

“You all asked him for something, his hand. I offered him something, my hand. A drowning man is in no position to give you anything.”

Let us remember not to ask anything of someone who is drowning.

From "How to Reach Out to Someone Who Is Struggling" by Omid Safi

[insteading]

As someone who’s done bereavement care for almost 20 years, I’ve observed again and again and again that it is not staying with grief that cuts us off from other people, it’s suffocating grief and suppressing grief. It’s impossible to repress grief without also repressing all sorts of other things like joy and memory. Actually, expressing grief naturally connects us empathetically to other people. It is not an accident that right now when there is such a profound suppression of global grief, we’re also finding ourselves in a moment of such isolation.

Rabbi Elliot Kukla, in them magazine

I sought out this piece because Rabbi Kukla was quoted in today's sermon in reference to the ongoing genocide in Gaza ("It is lifesaving to mourn our humanity in inhumane times").

But this paragraph about grief hit me so hard I wanted to single it out to share. It is relevant to corporate grief of the sort we might experience when a state is doing harm in our name (police brutality, displacement, execution). It is also relevant to individual griefs.

In the bereavement calls I do for hospice, I have noticed, this is precisely what gets people stuck in grief: the feeling that there is no safe space and time to express grief. Companies tend to give very little accommodation for bereavement, if they give any at all. Culturally we're expected to get over losses in a matter of days. But grief rewires us, and some losses-- particularly losses like war, displacement, and police brutality where a state or institution does the same kind of harm repeatedly-- are complex and ongoing.

Grief impacts sleeping, eating, executive function. (I don't ask people in bereavement calls, "How are you doing?" I ask, "How are you sleeping?" "How's your appetite?" Maybe "Are there moments from your caregiving, or from your [loved one's] dying, that keep coming up for you?" Because of course you're not fine! You just lost someone essential to you. What I want to know is, is your body getting a chance to repair itself as your mind and heart process what you've experienced?)

People have talked to me after a loss about feeling exhausted and overwhelmed by daily life. It's not unlike recovering from a major injury and having a sizable portion of your bandwidth given over at all times to the tasks of bone, muscle, and nerve repair that are not under your conscious control. When tasks you're used to thinking of as having one part suddenly make it clear how complex they are? Cooking a meal takes more out of you. Doing a load of laundry takes more out of you. If you're already an introvert, the cost of social engagement goes up, at a time when social engagement might actually be very helpful.

Doing some of our grief work with other trusted people shares the load. It recovers some bandwidth. But many folks learn early in the grieving process that they have fewer trusted people than they thought. Or that it feels like the wrong time to deepen an acquaintanceship they'd hoped might become a friendship. Or that they aren't as comfortable asking loved ones for help as they thought they would be.

And the bereavement model I'm trained in assumes that a grieving person has experienced one recent loss. We know that a recent loss might poke us in the tender spots left by earlier losses. But that's still different from the experience of a tragedy that affects a whole community at once (as in an entire region's population losing multiple loved ones in a very short time and being forced to flee).

I don't really have a conclusion here, but I'm finding the activism that feels most healing and hope-filled to me has lament built into it: a chance to name the people who've died in our county's jail, while advocating for better communication with families of people inside. A chance to call out the names of people lost to covid while advocating for policies that will mitigate risk to vulnerable people.

Maybe it takes days to name all the people impacted by ongoing genocides in Congo, Palestine, Yemen, while urging our government to end its role in those genocides. Maybe our systems and structures, which aren't even good at honoring our grief for members of the nuclear family we're taught is our primary world, are disinclined to give us that time. Maybe we ought to take it anyway.

[equalperson]

something that far too few people--including other autistics--acknowledge about higher-support autism is the defenselessness that comes with it, namely when you don't have a high-quality caregiver or support system.

so many people only talk about the impairments that come with low-support autism, the things that you can easily cope with through self-accommodation, sensory aids, and understanding; so little attention goes out to those of us who can't help ourselves, at least not enough to remain physically safe and healthy on our own.

I'm visibly dirty (dermatitis neglecta) because I have anxiety attacks when I try to task-switch and bathe. nearly a quarter of My teeth are decayed because I go months without brushing. at the time of writing, I've lost over 3% of My body weight in the past month due to inertia preventing Me from eating more than once a day.

I can't simply use a schedule or set alarms, because I end up not acknowledging either of them (except to turn the latter off). the "simple fixes" that low-support autistics recommend offer little-to-no improvement for Me.

that's ultimately the difference between low-support autism and medium/high-support autism: someone with LSN can accommodate themself enough to stay afloat, whereas someone with MSN/HSN literally needs another person to do some or all things for them.

because of this, people whose caregivers believe they don't need assistance (My situation), believe their autism can be disciplined away, are too careless or busy to help them, and those who don't have and can't easily access a caregiver at all are left in a totally isolated position.

at best, either our caregivers' attitudes or our autism miraculously improve and we're able to get our needs met. at worst, we continuously suffer until we experience a medical crisis from the neglect or seriously injure (if not kill) ourselves for the same reason.

this isn't to say that autism--even higher-support autism--is all horrible, but I really do wish that more autistic advocacy focused on relieving this helplessness, rather than just the self-advocacy of low-support individuals.

[destroyingangelneveragod]

HELLO MY LOVES

Good morning my friends!!!! This is a post for my dear friend Samah. @samah-2 is a mom with very young children and a family she needs to support. They have only 11 percent of their current goal. Can we try and get that to 25 percent by Christmas/Hanukkah????? Please!!! Or even by the 20th! Lets do this. This is urgent, they are in dire circumstances and really need support, especially with the worsening weather and ongoing israeli violence.

Please tag friends on here, send it it to them, share with your families, do whatever you can. Maybe in the tags, say if you donate and encourage a match. Even 5 dollar matches can go a long way if you have a platform.

It goes without saying that I should not have to beg people to donate. I know we are all in rough times but even a tiny amount and direct effort towards visibility can help.

[rebel-girl-queen-of-my-world]

Repost from @lindasarsour

I’ll talk some more later and I won’t hold back and at some point I will be very specific. Right now, I am exhausted.

Proud of the many principled down ballot candidates who won across the country.

We are all we got - literally. Like dr. john powell says, “be hard on systems, soft on people.” We are here because the system continues to fail us and we must once and for all organize accordingly together - in solidarity.

[littlenaughtygarden]

Help Sudanese Refugees Facing Hunger in Uganda

Youth Smile Initiative, a registered NGO in Uganda, is raising funds to provide food boxes to Sudanese refugees in the Kiryandongo camp.

As of today (September 18, 2024), YSI has raised $615 of its $20,000 goal. If you have the means, please donate to their fundraiser. If you can't donate, please share this widely!

Free Sudan🇸🇩🌺

[chronicsymptomsyndrome]

Is there anyone reading this who has ever called/messaged any kind of help hotline and would be willing to share anything about the experience?

I ask because I have been hesitating to do so myself for a while now (with many different hotlines…trans lifeline, rainn, etc) and I think autistic aversion to unknown/unfamiliar experiences is mostly whats stopping me.

[800-dick-pics]

I have food poisoning!!!

Things have been rough for my partner and I. I currently have food poisoning along with some new medical issues im dealing with, my partner has been getting harassed wrt cfunding on twitter which is affecting their mental health. I still have no phone service which is affecting potential money making opportunities for me rn.

I just need to pay my phone bill, get some food and electrolytes and anti nausea meds. I just need to get over this asap!

$0/$125

CA: $sleepyhen or $grumblybear

VN: wildwotko or XochiRose

[tinybackpacks]

and with it, we are everything.