6-7:30 Zoom Call Beginning Thursday, April 9 A time to connect with community in a supportive and positive way. Hosts: Ellen Krag and Dolly Joseph, with support from UVA Student Affairs Click here to register to receive your zoom information: https://forms.gle/4JarZPstivYCm8oW7 Local and National Mental Health Resources
Ellen Krag, LPC, has been working professionally with families and children in crisis for over 20 years, and has extensive grassroots experience connecting community members with appropriate mental health support.
During this community check in Ellen will provide practical tips for calming and grounding to help individuals manage anxiety, stress, and the complex feelings that can result from the effects of COVID-19, social isolation, and our rapidly changing circumstances.
Ellen will present practical tips to our group, and then call participants will break into “zoom rooms” to participate in small group mutual check-ins, using prompts that emphasize positive coping skills.
Forward this announcement to interested parties who would benefit from this free community opportunity.
Zoom Meeting Information
You can meet on your computer with or without video. You can meet on your smart phone with the zoom app. You can dial in on your landline or flip phone without video. Long distance charges may apply.
Shelter for Help in Emergency 24-hour hotline at (434) 293-8509 Shelter for Help in Emergency remains dedicated to providing emergency services for victims of domestic violence and their children with the priority of maintaining the safety, health and well-being of our community. The Shelter WILL remain open and ready to serve victims during this time of uncertainty. Our mission to end domestic violence in our community is strong and unwavering. If you or someone you know is in need of services, please call our 24-hour hotline.
Psychological First Aid (PFA) is an evidence-informed approach that is built on the concept of human resilience. PFA aims to reduce stress symptoms and assist in a healthy recovery following a traumatic event, natural disaster, public health emergency, or even a personal crisis. This links to more information and the training resources for anyone who is interested in supporting their friends and neighbors.
A collection of resources and information related to COVID-19
If you feel like you or someone you know is in immediate danger, you should call 911 or go to an emergency room to get immediate help. Explain that it is a psychiatric emergency and ask for someone who is trained for these kinds of situations.
Crisis Text Line — Text Hello to 741741 Crisis Text Line fields messages about suicidal thoughts, abuse, sexual assault, depression, anxiety, bullying and more. What makes it unique is that it’s entirely text-based, which makes it easy for anyone who doesn’t feel comfortable or safe talking on the phone to use it. You can text 741741, or message Crisis Text Line on Facebook for help. You’ll be matched with a volunteer counselor, who is supervised by a licensed, trained mental health professional.
National Suicide Prevention Hotline — 1-800-273-8255 The National Suicide Prevention Hotline fields calls 24/7 for anyone with suicidal thoughts or who are in crisis. They offer help for Spanish-speakers and anyone who is deaf or hard of hearing. Their website also offers many resources to get help for yourself or someone you know.YouthLine — Text teen2teen to 839863, or call 1-877-968-8491 YouthLine provides a safe space for children and adults ages 11 to 21, to talk through any
Facebook is critically important for how I connect with people who are not in my immediate friend circle. I have a bunch of FB friends that I pay attention to because they are smart, have access to circles that I don’t, and post politically astute information. Clare is one of those friends. We’ve connected over our venn diagram of service work and academia, and apocalypse planning. Clare spoke about her knowledge of the opioid crisis, and harm reduction, specifically Narcan administration.
Takeaways:
The opioid crisis hit in Appalachia and inner cities first, it was only when white suburbia started getting sick and dying did it really begin to be treated in the media and in politics.
Clare had a special talking needle that talked the user how to administer. With insurance and prescription, it was free. Without, it was $4000– this is what disparities in access to health care and insurance means.
There was a lot of talk about the comparative stigma around mental health, substance use disorder, and other health issues, like cancer. What are the things that you feel like you would have the support of employers, friends and family?
Charlottesville can feel stiflingly small. Or it can feel like there’s an overwhelming influx of newcomers who don’t share history or values. So, I’m always surprised and delighted when I newly meet a fellow native who is my people. Remy St. Clair has collaborated with two of my favorite co-conspirators, Lisa Green with Cville Pride and Raven with 9 Pillars Hip Hop Cultural Festival.
Remy is warm, sweet, personable, and funny. I was struck throughout his talk about the difference of access that Black and White people face in the Charlottesville community. This town was made for people who look like me. We gots lots of middling white people art– some good, some terrible, and most just meh. Meanwhile, Black artists are trying to find some space to create that isn’t gentrified or policed by white people. Remy has been working for years to get space for Black Excellence in the arts to shine.
Some highlights:
Remy talked about hip hop is healing. Hip hop is not just the music, it’s also fashion, knowledge, graffiti, and more.
He said about the racial strife within Charlottesville– “It’s been dark for a while, but the dragon doesn’t have to hide his head anymore.”
It’s hard to get events scheduled in Charlottesville because venues say “we’re not insured to have that kind of event here.”
It is critically important that artists get paid for their work.
I’ve been delayed in writing about Community Matters for this week because it’s been such a busy week, and frankly, I’m writing about my guy which has been . It’s been a busy week for the two of us– Tuesday was Community Matters, Wednesday was the first Haiku Slam of the year, Saturday we went to Leni Sorensen’s house for dinner, and Sunday we went to dinner to meet X of the Black Power Station in South Africa– a week full of the things we love most– ideas, community– new and old, the arts.
Raven and I met in August of 2018. He signed up to be part of the community care response to the one year anniversary. Within minutes I recognized that he was smart and observant and “deputized” him to make decisions. After that weekend we started talking. I went to his September haiku slam and recognized that he had created an environment that felt akin to CLAW and BE, but in 17 syllable poetry battles. A year and a half later, we’ve increasingly become partners in plans– plans for the apocalypse, the arts, community, and some undiscovered empty building.
Tuesday, Raven talked about his vision of how writing and the arts can be a path to healing. Here’s some takeaways from his talk:
Thrive vs Survive. Raven talked about how difficult it is to simply survive, and that participating in the arts can push someone over into being able to thrive.
When he was a painter he’d have a stack of 3”x5” cards in his pocket in order to quickly write haiku without getting fussed at for slacking off. Make art in the corners of your life.
I’ll be honest– so much of what Raven was talking about wasn’t new to me– repackaged into the format for the evening, but I was so proud to have some of my best friends witness what a brilliant, creative thinker my partner is.
Raven and Dolly at Community Matters
Wednesday night was Raven’s haiku slam. The 3 top finishers were all under 22. The energy was amazing. The room was full of laughter, righteous anger, and wordplay. Having back to back Community Matters and Haiku Slam, made me so proud of how we support each other to foster the community that we desire and need.
I’m like a dog with a bone when I get irritated; I cannot stop mentally wrestling with all the words I want to throw at someone. I often want to have long ranty diatribes at people who say dumb stuff around me. But I don’t think it’s helpful or effective to do it, cuz they’ve already shown me they aren’t ready to listen. I’ve found flipping the script is cathartic for me. I think about how I’d like their behavior to change. It reminds me of my values, and how I hope to act myself. It completes the loop, and makes it so I can turn off the irritation faucet. So, unnamed annoyance, this is my request to you:
Show appreciation, gratitude, and admiration for someone doing work that you are not doing.
Avoid suggesting additional work that you are not going to do.
Ask opinions about proposed work, rather than make suggestions of future work.
Value expertise that is unfamiliar to you.
Understand and respect that community exists prior to your arrival.
Recognize that your privileged identity or associations have context and history; if you feel that is unfair or unrepresentative, dismantle by demonstrating growth and change in your actions.
Assume less.
Communicate with respect.
Check for mutual understanding.
Listen to feedback.
Respect boundaries and requests.
Understand it’s not others’ job or responsibility to create or disrupt your experiences, particularly if you don’t share a mutual community.
Reject hierarchical thinking that includes notions of charity or help.
Realize that you exist in communities of mutual aid and support.
Have clarity about the lack of correlation between formal education and intelligence and wisdom.
Toni and I are starting our Anti Racism class tomorrow. Race and equity are never far from my brainwaves, so it’s hard to tell if I am more activated or not, but it’s nice to have a focus. I’m excited, but nervous, because I’m so much more prone to anxiety and exhaustion than I used to be. I’m hoping that I’ll continue to feel better as the days lengthen, but I’ve taken to staying at home on Wednesdays with no appointments because I’m so tired by Community Matters on Tuesday nights. I take all sorts of lessons from this– how lucky I am to be able to structure my time like this, how other people are afforded this kind of self-care, and that this is the world I want for all people. It does worry me to take on another high emotional labor event, but we shall see.
All this sets the backdrop for the fact that I have more time on Wednesdays for social media and general catching up on my computer time. Facebook pulled me into a thread about JLo and Shakira and sexuality. The conversation took its predictable twists and turns. And then we went into the land of white fragility. I know in the abstract that it exists, but I don’t encounter it much in the wild. This friend of my FB friend doubled and tripled down on how people were calling her racist, and that her feelings were hurt. Because I’m me, I had looked at her profile page– her profile picture was a picture of her and maybe her daughter wearing large pink sunhats at what was certainly the woman’s march. Her picture, her non-intersectional view of feminism and sexuality, and her fragility all was almost a caricature of white feminism.
In no order here are some takeaways and thoughts I have about this:
I feel conflicted about my balance between calling in and calling out. It hard to tell who is worthy of engaging with. Who, if held to account, and engaged with, will become activated to become anti-racist? I have seen people transform towards equity and justice. It’s long and hard work, but to get more white people activated to be anti-racist in their personal and professional lives is worth it. At a certain point tho, I wanted to say today, are you fucking kidding me?, particularly when this woman started pulling the “people are being intolerant to me” card.
I was reflecting on how there might be power in engaging with people at a social distance– friends of friends, rather than people in your immediate social or professional circle, but then I was blown away by my (relatively new to me) FB friend calmly and collectedly reading her own FB friend on internet protocol and social justice acceptable practices. It was a visible reminder and modeling on how to do the things.
This work is hard. It is hard emotionally and intellectually. And it’s not harder than what Black and Brown Women and Men have to do to survive in our culture everyday.
For me, practicing anti-racism looks like values the well-being of Black and Brown people in my life over the social constructs and constraints of the White dominant society.
Like Lisa, I met Ibby as part of the organizing from the summer of hate. Ibby was and is still a relatively young human. As I said in her introduction last night, she is one of the most gifted facilitators I’ve ever experienced. When I’m in a planning session or a meeting, and I want reassurance that it’s well-planned and organized, I look for certain people; Ibby is one of them.
Ibby wanted to speak on two topics that both came under the umbrella of Mutual Aid: Street Medics and CHIDA. Street Medics are people who provide immediate first aid care during actions and/or rallies. Actions and rallies have health risks inherently built in. They can have large numbers of attendees, face police interference and brutality, and be in extreme weather. Street medics are there to provide immediate care without being entered into the system.
CHIDA has been meeting Greyhound buses filled with asylum seekers released from detention from near the Mexico/US border. Migrants are released from incarceration with nothing but the clothes on their back and sent to their sponsors as far away as Maine or Connecticut. About 60 migrants a day, 7 days a week were moving through Charlottesville. CHIDA made sure that they were able to select water, coats, and snacks. Ibby estimates that 15,000 migrants were assisted in the past year. With the border closed, there is reduced need to provide this support.
Major takeaways from Ibby’s talk included:
Even with the very short layover with the Greyhound bus, it was important to employ radical consent– the idea that you do not do onto people, but that you work in solidarity with people. Rather than thrusting a bunch of objects onto people, asking what their needs are, and providing them the opportunities to choose allows them agency.
There is so much trauma around A12 for our community, and yet it also brought us together in community. There were 6 people in the room last night that I would not know but for the organizing around that time, and the year after– and they are people who I consider to be integral parts of my trusted community. I don’t think you have to have trauma to build organizations and solidarity, but it sure jumpstarts the process.
Ibby was talking about not having a line item on her resume for her community work. I giggled in my head, because I now included it. There’s two reasons; the first, community building was pretty much my full time job both summers 2017 and 2018. I wanted to account for that time spent. The second reason is that at this point I don’t want a job that doesn’t value, or at least see, those skills. To feel that I can include it on my resume is a privilege, and yet also a risk. Below is the text so you can see how I framed it:
Community Builder: Anti-Racism Efforts in Charlottesville2017-present
Worked with a wide range of community members to safeguard our community against the white supremacist rallies of the summer. Partnered with members of SURJ, BLM, Congregate Cville and BSA, as well as mental health professionals, legal representatives, business owners and other stakeholders to prepare for an unpredictable threat against the community. Created and distributed educational materials, facilitated meetings between community members, and communicated concerns with University and City officials. Facilitated resource and fund distribution to people affected by the white supremacist attacks. Designed and taught Anti-Racism course to activate white people to incorporate anti-racist actions into their daily life.
Students and community members ordering food before Lisa Woolfork presents.
Lisa Woolfork presented at last night’s second “Community Matters”. I’ve known Lisa since the summer of 2017 when we were doing preparation and response to the white supremacist Unite the Right rallies. I’ve heard the origin stories of Black Women Stitch and Stitch Please before; each time I hear Lisa talk about it, she brings more layers and understanding to why this is such an important project for Black women and femmes.
Lisa is an amazing seamstress– she’s been sewing and quilting for over 20 years. As part her work she’d pay to go to retreats where she’d often be the only Black woman in attendance. Last night she talked about it took some traumatic events to make her realize that she didn’t want to be part of those circles anymore. Lisa talked about fear, risk, and regret that she didn’t act sooner. Some of my major take-aways from last night were:
It’s not the responsibility of Black people to educate White people about their microaggressions. Lisa disappeared from the White sewing community that she had been part of for 20 years and almost no one followed up with her to check in about her absence. It’s not on Lisa to get them to understand why she is no longer there. Lisa wants to create her own productive, supportive community.
It is unusual and special in Charlottesville for a Black person to be able to share their story and perspective to a mixed race crowd and for their perspective to be honored without question or gaslighting. I hope that we can grow these moments.
By Lisa sharing her full perspective– full of examples of strength and self-doubt, a space was created for younger Black women to share their own struggles and doubts, and to get validation from other community members of what they are achieving.
Lisa’s story is inspiring other Black women in attendance to create and further their own projects.
