Spiritual Talk: Building an Infrastructure of Care

WHO: This online event was for people who want to hear about new structures of care, resourcing and wrap around support that the WildSeed Society has been prototyping for movement organizers and community healers.

WHAT: This Spiritual Talk focused on WildSeed's ongoing Revolutionary Aftercare and Spirit Trust programs as well as how we seek to experiment with even deeper forms of collective mutual aid and radical kinship.

Aaron Goggans and Sandra Kim explored:

• What lessons WildSeed has learned supporting organizers whose burn-out has led to cascading personal crises.
• Practical ways people can build support systems around them for healing and BEing while they Block and Build.
• What dreams and plans WildSeed has to help social movements heal and re-ground at scale by changing the economic conditions from which we organize.

WHY: COVID-19 was a mass disabling event that the movement is just now starting to reckon with. It has highlighted that the decades-long strategy of throwing young people into the gears of Empire in the vain hope that they will slow down the machinery of extraction long enough for us to catch a breath is no longer tenable.

Additionally, the counter-insurgency strategy adopted by local cities like Atlanta or Louisville shows that the state entails to wrap up organizers in court cases it knows it can’t win. The hope is to force organizers into prolong precarity as pending court cases force people to put their lives on hold, make it hard for people to keep or get jobs and thus pay rent.

The current mode of social reproduction of organizers - the ways we expect organizers to take care of themselves day to day - is unable to support movements through this precarity nor is it able to help them wounds the system lacerates them with.

We need to figure out new models of community supported change agents and community healers able to continue the resistance without sacrificing our long term health and wellness. Fortunately new models of care and resistance are being seeded and new prototypes for kinship are available for movements to experiment with.

Please join us in this critical discussion - for ourselves and for our movements.

SPEAKERS:

Sandra Kim is the Spirit Tender at the WildSeed Society - where she helps people learn how to take refuge in themselves, each other, and the land - as the modern world we know is burning down. So they can turn towards the frightening realities we live in and not lose connection to the joyous realities we also live in service of transforming these times of burning into times of possibilities. Sandra identifies as a mystic for the (r)evolution with her spirituality coming from almost 20 years of Zen Buddhism and more recently, as an initiated Korean shaman-priestess (무당 mudang). She is also the Founder of Everyday Feminism and Re-Becoming Human and the creator and facilitator for different online anti-oppression trainings and community spaces offering spiritual guidance and emotional support.

Aaron Goggans is the Steward of the Pattern at the WildSeed Society - where he builds movement infrastructure before people know they need it and helps them achieve things even he never imagined were possible. Aaron is writer, facilitator and organizer working within the Black Radical Tradition to support the Labor, anti-war and Black Liberation movements for almost 20 years.

WILDSEED SOCIETY

The WildSeed Society is a political, spiritual and economic community that is inviting people to build a 21st century Underground Railroad together. We are building a series of refuges from the current exploitative world to new worlds where we all get to belong and be cared for - by focusing on Spiritual Liberation, Social Transformation and Economic Revolution. We seek to experiment and prototype our way into a new way of life - in community and in right relationship with the land.

The WildSeed Society is stewarded by a collective of movement veterans, spiritual teachers, and organizational development nerds. Many of the instigators of the collective were involved in the Black Lives Matter movement before starting WildSeed. It is inspired by the vision of futurist Octavia Butler of gifted misfits finding community together before transforming the world.

If you would like to financially support this work, please consider donating here.