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Intentionality of Gathering

Intentionality of Gathering

In her own words, Ivana Zelaya Avila, the Graduate Intern at the Office of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion, shares her reflections and introduces this mini lesson, which she has thoughtfully curated: “When I applied to Northwestern for my graduate studies, I never anticipated becoming part of something far more significant and impactful than my initial academic goals. These past few weeks have been among the most educational, challenging, and exhilarating of my academic journey. Now, just one month from graduation, I feel more empowered than ever to enter the field of higher education, fully aware of the extensive work that lies ahead. This mini lesson underscores the power of community organizing, offering resources to ensure organizers also receive the support they need.”

This educational series serves as another testament to the power of community organizing and the crucial support systems that enable it.

Over the past few decades, many of us have experienced living in an accelerated social system of organized loneliness. We have been encouraged to feel and act like hyper-individualised, competitive subjects who primarily look out for ourselves. But in order to really thrive we need caring communities. We need localised environments in which we can flourish: in which we can support each other and generate networks of belonging.”

The Care Collective

Learn and Engage

How do communities gather intentionally?

Community gardens are initiatives driven by local communities to offer residents access to fresh, locally grown produce. These gardens have a long history with similar objectives, and over the years, community-led urban farms have played a crucial role in community activism for marginalized groups, which have aided in addressing various forms of systemic oppression (The Praxis Project, n.d.). To learn more about how these community gardens function, The Praxis Project conducted research in 18 community gardens led by Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) through a series of learning circles. The research found that these efforts increase awareness about healthy food systems, offer avenues for leadership and skill growth among residents, support local economic development, and provide healthier food choices in marginalized communities. While the work of these community members is commendable, it has not been an easy trajectory. For instance, the research found that some of the challenges that rise are access to land, staff capacity, racism and environmental racism, and general anti-LGBTQ policies that systematically prohibit queer and trans communities from being able to directly and indirectly access capital.

How is food a medicine and community care?

Indigenous sovereignty is a political, cultural, nutritional, and cosmological movement that advocates for the right of Indigenous Peoples to have access to healthy and culturally significant foods, while they shape and define their own food systems. More specifically, Indigenous Sovereignty involves “control and stewardship of food resources, guards against biopiracy, protects against genertic modification, restores local food economies and trade networks, [ensures that] food is obtained ethically and is appropriate to the environment, focuses on cultural, physical, and spiritual nourishment, and [allows for] Indigenous Peoples to provide for Indigenous communities” (Arizona State University Library Guides, n.d.).

Indigenous sovereignty emphasizes the role of food as medicine and aligns closely with the holistic perspective of the Medicine Wheel. This traditional wheel consists of four interconnected parts: spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical health. By embracing this approach, Indigenous Peoples can use natural remedies to support their well-being. For example, chokecherries offer both nourishment and medicinal benefits—jams from the fruit can support physical health, while the root can be used for healing purposes.

The process of food gathering is a collective and community-focused effort, involving farmers, seed-keepers, fishers, gatherers, chefs, basketweavers, hunters, and other knowledge holders (Melissa K. Nelson, Maya Harjo, n.d.). The act of gathering itself holds a deep sense of medicine, reinforced through communal participation and the prayers offered beforehand. This interconnected approach ensures that food and medicine go hand in hand, supporting overall health and well-being within Indigenous communities.

 Check out this podcast on Indigenous food as medicine, featuring Dr. Daphne Miller from the University of California

Community Care and Harm Intervention

The Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective (BATJC) coined the term “pod” to describe the connections among individuals who seek support from one another in violent, harmful, and abusive situations. BATJC describes “Pods” as the following: “Your pod is made up of the people that you would call on if violence, harm or abuse happened to you; or the people that you would call on if you wanted support in taking accountability for violence, harm or abuse that you’ve done; or if you witnessed violence or if someone you care about was being violent or being abused” (BATJC, 2016).

Pod Mapping Activity

Keeping in mind that everyone’s pod looks differently, Mia Mingus created a Pod Mopping activity for BATJC, used for people to identify who is in their harm intervention pod. The following section is entirely adopted and licensed by BATJC, 2016. You can access their Pod Mapping sheet here.

Steps to Fill Out Your Pod Map:

  1. Write your name in the middle grey circle.
  2. The surrounding bold-outlined circles are your pod. Write the names of the people who are in your pod. We encourage people to write the names of actual individuals, instead of things such as “my church group” or “my neighbors.”
  3. The dotted lines surrounding your pod are people who are “movable.” They are people that could be moved in to your pod, but need a little more work. For example, you might need to build more relationship or trust with them. Or maybe you’ve never had a conversation with them about prisons or sexual violence.
  4. The larger circles at the edge of the page are for networks, communities or groups that could be resources for you. It could be your local domestic violence direct service organization, or your cohort in nursing school, or your youth group, or a transformative justice group.

Your pod(s) may shift over time, as your needs or relationships shift or as people’s geographic location shift. We encourage people to have conversations with their pod people about pods and transformative justice, as well as to actively grow the number of people in their pod and support each other in doing so. Growing one’s pod is not easy and may take time. In pod work, we measure our successes by the quality of our relationships with one another and we invest in the time it takes to build things like trust, respect, vulnerability, accountability, care and love. We see building our pods as a concrete way to prepare and build resources for transformative justice in our communities.

Further Reading