From the 2020 selection commitee:

Selfcare After Series is a community intervention nonprofit that infuses social justice with wellness to equip the community with language to identify the types of injustices that impede one's mental, emotional and physiological health. Subsequently providing healing modalities to combat the stresses of racial discrmination in real time. A week before the George Floyd murder, the SCAS solicited a call of collaborators to create an interactive digital course entitled "Intro to Healing from and Unlearning Internalized Anti-Blackness." The goal of this course is to inform, empower, and heal Black community members by using an interdisciplinary, creative and trauma-informed approach to aid in decontaminating and decolonizing our minds and heart space of anti-Blackness along with providing a variety of healing modalities through our SelfCare Kits! 

The Combahee Collective Fund is a fund for young Black survivors of abuse, borne out of the light and life of Oluwatoyin Salau. We are raising money to help Black girls and GNC individuals escape violent living situations. Our cause is simple: show up for us while we’re alive, not just when we’re gone. 100% of all funds raised are distributed to survivors. Honoring the Combahee River Collective, we are dedicated to organizing around a Black feminist politic. Justice is carving a world where all Black girls and GNC folks are protected and safe.  

The Bodeme River Collective for Community Health and Justice seeks to provide free culturally relevant and culturally competent wellness/care to our Black Trans and Queer peers through mutual aid and support. To that end by responding rapidly to community needs through (as needed) medical transport, client/peer advocacy and other wrap around services we can set a precedent for what gender affirming care could look like. And ultimately, set a precedent for how black bodies are cared for in our community and region. We can fully embody this work of care by holding space for healing circles, monthly food shares, providing medical funds for HRT and other essentials and by just hanging and building community that centers black trans women specifically. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are Bodeme. 

 The #MAP4Youth grant will make possible the implementation of a youth-led service project that will increase access to basic necessities, such as food, toiletries, cleaning supplies, masks, gloves, and baby supplies (diapers, formula, etc.) that have become much harder to come by with the economic and health ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic. The youth (middle and high schoolers in the Norcross, Georgia area) will participate in an interactive educational program introducing them to the history and current necessity of mutual aid before planning and executing a system for care package assembly and delivery (or pick-up) to benefit at least 25 low-income families and 20 elders in our community.  

Our intended short-term outcome is to help 60 community members establish at-home, basic gardens via our modified boxes. Our desired long-term outcomes are to identify interest and participation within communities to spearhead community gardening initiatives within neighborhoods, and develop a city-wide composting program to reduce waste and build healthy soil. Above all else, we want our community to know they are worthy of so much more than what this government is offering them and that we are collectively capable of building long-term, liberatory networks of care. 

 Because history is told from the perspective of the author, we want to make literature that is decolonized and tells of our triumphs readily available to the community. For this reason, we have petitioned to create 10 Liberation Libraries in the city of Atlanta. These small book homes will include literature by Black, Indigenous and authors of color. We are encouraging participants to give their feedback on the material they’ve read and help us implement progressive action items that benefit the community.The desired result is to reintroduce school of thoughts that have aided in the upward mobility, humanization and liberation of Black people and other oppressed populations.
 

With the #MAP4youth grant, I will be providing uterine health mutual aid to Black and Indigenous folks in Newark and Jersey City NJ. I currently provide free nontoxic menstrual products to my community through very few community donations. This grant will allow myself as well as other community members to provide even more uterine health mutual aid such as uterine health herbal support kits, grants for uterine health services such as homebirths, and nontoxic and or reusable menstrual products. This mutual aid will be accompanied with free in person informative sessions so the project will also build community and provide folks essential information. The overall goal of this project is to provide physical, informational, and emotional mutual aid focused on uterine health. 

Liberated Gardens ATL is our plan to transition the Thomasville Heights Elementary School Farm to a mutual aid model that will hold us accountable to inviting our whole community to abolishing food apartheid in our neighborhood. Since June 2018, we have created 2,000 square feet of vegetable beds on an old sports field. Students have grown more than 1000 pounds of fresh fruit and vegetables. We will expand on the educational element of the farm by reinvigorating currently abandoned garden boxes around the school, and allowing parents of our students to come use them to grow food of their choice; thus creating an ecosystem of family growers. This alternative to the typical community garden model positions parents in our community as active agents in their own food system. 

Gender Affirming Surgery Herbal Healing (GASHH) is a mutual aid project designed to ease the physical pains and honor the ritual of surgical transition, while disseminating skills for queer self determination. Specifically, GASHH will offer free herbal medicine care packages to transgender and gendernonconforming individuals (TGNC), prioritizing black, indigenous, and people of color, who are having gender affirming top surgery.

As genderqueers and POC, our indigenous medicine ways have been stolen from us through colonization, while we are also systemically denied access to appropriate - or any - health care. We have lost immense knowledge around plant medicine and autonomous healing with the earth and with each other. GASHH wishes to support our community in remembering our sacred, queer, ancestral medicine. 

 The Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis, primarily BIPOC and working-class, was already a food and basic necessity desert, with one of the highest concentrations of poverty in the city. During the uprising following George Floyd’s murder, nearly every grocery store in the area was destroyed. Instead of condemning this, we have come together to provide aid that was sorely needed in the first place. The Free Store is a collective of neighbors operating out of the Grease Pit, an education-oriented, pay-what-you-can bike shop, that coordinates and distributes donations to be distributed to our community three days a week free of charge. Since May 30th, we have been distributing groceries and household supplies, including baby needs, to 250-300 families, and are currently planning for the long term. 

 Detroit Area Youth Uniting Michigan is the only activist organization in Michigan run entirely by high school aged youth. DAYUM's mission is to fight for accountability from our leaders, justice for our communities, and a seat at the table for all marginalized youth. DAYUM is also a school abolition organization that seeks to resist "schooling" in favor of youth-run liberatory education.  We would like to use these funds to host youth-facilitated Freedom Schools on topics important to young people. We do not know what "school" will look like in the fall - something between dangerous in person classes and isolating online instruction - but either way we are prepared to create space for young people to envision a different type of learning. These may include socially isolated art projects, dialogues, movies, or other projects - whatever form they take, they will seek to build new structures for learning that do not replicate the hyper-policed, coercive, and capitalist models of school. 

 We plan to build shared solidarity gardens around our communities and for individuals in need, prioritizing BIPOC, organizers with kids, and the poorest among us. Growing the plants in Ashfield, MA we would cultivate worms and beneficial bacterial cultures to build the soil, use companion planting methods when possible, and assist in potential distribution post-harvest. We aim to also host educational virtual workshops to teach food preservation methods, including canning, pickling, seed saving, winter storage, and other subjects. We also plan to help redistribute excess food to community members if people find themselves with too much.  

 Our Clean ups are a part of a bigger initiative to build community in Jersey City. In addition to cleaning up our streets and local parks, we also provide those who are marginalized and oftentimes houseless in our community with care packages containing food and essential resources. We are working to create an end of the summer mass city-wide Day of Cleaning. Our mission is to make this an initiative that will spark action amongst the community. Living in the inner-city, and residing on the South side in a predominantly Black neighborhood, our environment is typically neglected when it comes to funds for resources from City officials. Abandoned buildings and vacant lots riddled with glass plague our neighborhood and mock us, for our inability to create spaces out of them. With the help of the Map4Youth grant we will provide our community with the resources needed to clean our streets and support our people so that we can create a force to tackle the larger issues in our neighborhood. 

Since COVID began I have been offering free crafting and healing virtual spaces for Black queer folks through my cooperative Cards by De, which have truly been so incredible and touched people from around the world and I am beyond grateful for that.

My project Together We Heal, aims to get art supplies into the hands of Black queer organizers to decompress, heal, create, and protest.  

 The Assata Collective is a radical punk creative organizing collective dedicated to uplifting the ideas, work, art, and organizing efforts of black and brown individuals. We aim to highlight the work of black and brown organizers in the south and create a community through the documentation of the work that is being done here. We hope that Southern organizers will be able to fund and support work they resonate with, specifically in the South. This collective is for organizers that are looking for a space that allows them to combine community organizing and art/creativity. We’re currently working on prison commissary funds, a book/writing club, and our podcast "Where You At". Lastly, we’re focusing on providing resources and teach-ins on prison abolition. 

The mutual aid fund I have created is to help Black full service sex workers and strippers. I want to help Black sex working mothers get their kids school supplies, books to read, pay for child care for Black sex workers kids, sustain a community fridge/pantry on streets street base Black sex workers frequent, get groceries for Black families, as well as financially support Black trans and disabled sex workers. This summer I have been giving street base Black sex workers condoms, gloves, mask and other material supports they need while working and beyond. This funding is going to keep existing work going and allow new ways to support Black sex workers to flourish such as incarcerated Black sex workers!  

I’m a therapist in Binghamton, NY which is predominantly white and access to mental health services is very limited to anyone but it’s especially difficult for Black and queer people to find competent therapists. I am interested in providing group process therapy for Black women centered around trauma and race alongside a peer facilitator. This group will create a responsible space to process alongside other Black women in the community. The goal is to train peer facilitators to run these groups on their own to create a sense of community and help de- stigmatize therapy and mental illness. We will cover topics such as identity, radical self-care, generational trauma, restoration and healing.   

Believers Bail Out (BBO) is a community-led effort to bail out Muslims in pretrial incarceration and ICE custody. For our Abolitionist Eid Project, the youth of BBO will provide Eid care packages to incarcerated Muslim women. Our mission is to provide material and social support to our incarcerated kin who are forced to celebrate Eid away from their family, friends, and communities. Muslim women are particularly vulnerable to additional levels of violence and surveillance along racial, religious, gendered lines. This project primarily consists of distributing funds toward commissaries, delivering Eid care packages, and uplifting the experiences of incarcerated Muslim women.