A love letter to community,
on the first day of Spring
March 20th, 2026
​
Hey lovelies…wanted to try a spin on an old classic…everyone is holding so much, in their personal lives, and in this crumbling, carceral, genocidal empire, and still so many of us are stepping up to practice care and tenderness and The Future?! Makes ya think….isn’t it time for a LOVE letter? :)
ON CHANGE:
For some of our precious newer organizers, I wanted to say welcome to change! CHMA is going through its next big transformation and what a blessing, and a joy and an honor to survive a transition. Many people in this world are experiencing imperial and capitalist transitions intended to leave no survivors–but a strongly worded critique is not a death sentence. It is an invitation to discernment (!), curiosity and a bright, dynamic future.
Long-term Crown Heights residents who have come to experience CHMA as a source of abundance, resources and new-world-building with new cross-class and cross-generation and cross-race solidarity– please know that CHMA will only deepen its commitments to no-questions-asked resource distribution that connects mutual aid to political realities, police and prison abolition, the end of capitalism and white supremacist empire. So many of you have been leading this work since the beginning of CHMA in 2020, organizing mutual aid through your pods and shaping the kinds of events and convenings that we organize. Though many of you are not available for Saturday morning all-hands, you have continued to be part of the backbone of CHMA’s presence and work in our community. Your commitment and work and care will not ever be erased. CHMA is built by a multiracial, multigenerational and multiclass coalition, yes including white people, and very much including long-term Black Crown Heights residents. Thank you, movement elders.
Black and brown and Indigenous transplants to Crown Heights, you deserve to show up to meetings and see folks that you feel safe approaching, organizing with and world-building with. Your deep courage in sharing what has felt unwelcoming and exclusively white deserves deep affirmation and gratitude. I cannot wait to learn from you all and be led by you…see you in community.
For some of you newer to organizing, these may feel like enormous shifts–but these are actually exactly the size and scale of shift that happens seasonally in nonhierarchical, collectively organized communities. CHMA has been through dozens of these changes over the years. Take a big breath and push away the feelings of shame that this living community we are growing gets feedback and makes changes! We are human beings doing hard things that we’ve never practiced before! You’re safe, you’re safe, you’re safe.
I could not be more excited about CHMA’s many unfolding transformations–for the collective to be grounded by even more Black and brown long-term residents of Crown Heights, to be oriented towards action by even more low/no income folks who have experienced a genocidal state that wants to torture people who don’t hoard wealth, to be even more unrelenting in our commitments to deprogram whiteness as a culture that assimilates us all very cleverly and insidiously to use individualism, extraction, domination, punishment and shame as weapons against one another in our own neighborhoods.
I’m also going to talk about why it is a WIN for the movement to have a space where white people (and other non-white, whiteness-assimilated folks) who are just beginning their deprogramming journey can come and start radicalizing and building anti-empire muscle for the first time, with room to stumble and make mistakes, be corrected through care and not shame, and grow + radicalize in community.
Over the last few weeks, I have watched dozens of people step out of their grief and exhaustion and into care-full action to make room for CHMA’s next big transition. I’ve already heard incredible neighbors start thinking about how we will change the way we do all-hands, start hosting more meetings in the Eastern part of Crown Heights, start printing fliers and flyering for meetings instead of just using instagram, creating BIPOC-only community spaces, etc. What other brilliant ideas will you all come up with? I can’t wait to see. And for the record, a thousand tiny sprouts is how big transformation happens in organizing, especially in nonhierarchical spaces where everyone is invited to attend any meeting, or join any chat…YOU are one of the leaders of this space, so shape it and organize it how you want, precious and hopeful neighbors!
ON ME (OLIVIA) AND WHITENESS-DEPROGRAMMING:
Personally, I (Olivia) am guided by real relationships. Accountability for me is a constant, it is conducted daily in relation with my long-term neighbors and movement elders who care about me and who are quick to correct/support me in growth and have for years. I have tender, intimate, vulnerable (and mutual) relationships with my long term CH resident neighbors. I have attended court hearings, I have attended funerals, paralyzed with grief at the violence of our state. I’ve also drank a LOT of alcohol and eaten a LOT of burgers on my stoop with my neighbors, I’ve spilled my drinks and roared with laughter and one magical summer evening I was asked to prep the chicken for the grill on my block, and that was the last time that I was asked to prep chicken for the grill on my block. (It is a blessing to not be good at things! It is a blessing to fumble and practice and fail and admire that other people are really good at things you aren’t good at!)
I understand many precious transplant folks are learning how to be real and present with their neighbors in NYC–it takes a willingness to be a little embarrassing, a little too earnest. Getting to know your neighbors DEEPLY is the point of all this organizing. Sometimes relationships come first, sometimes whiteness-deprogramming comes first.
This is why the work I personally have done in CHMA has attempted to support people doing BOTH in either order. Because 1. mutual aid is nothing without real interclass, interracial, intergenerational relationships (ie we can't just do this online)….and 2. these relationships are insincere if you are not creating mechanisms for mutual aid to address the reality that many (not all!) transplants in CH (both white and non-white) are massively more resourced than long term residents that have been on the receiving end of genocidal anti-Black housing/policing/economic policy in NYC for generations. In REAL friendships/relationships based in solidarity, you don’t hide this fact; you shatter this fact. You fumble and rage and strike at that fact with a thousand hammers, not as an individual, but with the power of a COLLECTIVE.
CHMA is a HYPERLOCAL, geographically-grounded project. That means that RESIDENTS OF CROWN HEIGHTS are our members. This is part of the strategy of mutual aid–that we commit to the person to our left and to our right. And CROWN HEIGHTS HAS TONS OF WHITE PEOPLE. We are SUPPOSED to be radicalizing and breaking away from our training as the foot soldiers of white supremacy. CHMA plays its specific role in an ecosystem that includes groups that are not geographically-bounded (like CHCC) and groups that are (like CHBB and CHTU).
Stepping away from what role CHMA has had or will have in a healthy and varied ecosystem, I want to talk about myself as a part of an ecosystem made up of all of you. Please understand, I am not part of a permanent “self-improvement project” and I encourage you all to get to a point where you too are grounded in your integrity, open for feedback, but can also move confidently and effortfully in your “right role” in your ecosystem of dismantling white supremacist, capitalist empire. I organize my part of the puzzle with one hundred percent commitment; and I do not hold myself to an impossible standard to organize EVERY part of the puzzle, this is one of the tricks of capitalism, that we are everything and nothing. We are each one part of a massive collective that is being awakened as we speak. What is your part? What will you commit to with your everything? Adrienne Maree Brown, Mariame Kabe, Richie Reseda–these are my movement elders, whose wisdom I organize through. Check them out! Figure out your "right role"!
This being said, my part of the ecosystem is very specific–I personally (Olivia) am committed to deprogram whiteness-assimilated people (which includes most white people) from whiteness as a BEHAVIOR of individualism, coercion, shame, carcerality and cowardice.
The timing is funny, because I am about one week away from deleting this very website I put together in 2023 when I was hoping to create an organization called Better Elders, named for the crisis in white communities of our elders largely being propagandized into internalizing colonizer, capitalist and Christian notions of world-building. In our deeply segregated society, white people don't have many elders to call on to deprogram from whiteness. "Better Elders" was my effort to call on white people to become “better elders” to other white people, and start leading the work in their own families and communities to deprogram white supremacy as a culture and lifestyle, until our white community members could be safe/nontoxic enough to organize with Black, brown and Indigenous beloveds.
Better Elders: www.betterelders.com
Enjoy the (robust and thorough!!!) website until March 24th when the website domain will not renew. (Yes, I am posting this letter on the website, so feel free to poke around at other pages). I’m bad at fundraising so I couldn’t start the organization (ha!), and became a student at CUNY instead, researching whiteness, white empire, white behavior….and what it will take to deprogram all whiteness-assimilated people at scale. (hint….it’s relationships, embodiment, reading Black, brown and Indigenous movement elders, building interclass, intergenerational and interracial coalitions, abolishing the nuclear family, betraying capitalism by undoing generations of wealth hoarding, etc.)
I offer you all this to get some insight on how I personally organize. I bring white people together in cohorts to practice dismantling whiteness as a learned culture in COMMUNITY as opposed to in ISOLATION. My tension even in 2023 was always that I worried that white people isolating in this critical deprogramming work would lead to a masturbatory performance of deprogramming instead of real commitment and action. But I was sure that white people HAD TO focus on deprogramming from whiteness WITH other white people, because doing so with Black and brown folks would be spiritually unsafe for those BIPOC, while white people are still programmed into a toxic white supremacist culture. It wouldn’t work to ask BIPOC to support deprogramming white people, because it is not the responsibility of the abused to heal their abuser–I felt certain that white people needed to be organizing our own deprogramming. Whiteness is a culture of shame and punishment, it is all white people experience inside our communities--it is what makes supremacy so appetizing for white people, we do not have tenderness, accountability, generosity and care inside white culture, instead we are propagandized to believe we are separate from and better than non-white people (so that we never question the deep loneliness, individualism, shame and suffering inside white communities). Undoing whiteness permanently means showing white people that change and growth can happen outside of carcerality and coercion. And since shame and punishment are NOT healing/recovery/deprogramming tools, it became especially important to not ask BIPOC to heal white people and hold them in soft and tender accountability. Can you hold YOUR abuser in a fully humanizing embrace? No, but someone will need to in order to make possible an abuser’s transformation into someone who can take accountability and offer repair. We (not just white people, but everyone) ONLY heal in softness. This is why I am so sure that white people NEED to stop self-infantilizing and start holding recovery cohorts for other white people. It is soulful work. And it requires softness and grace and nuance and honesty, which is not the way that whiteness works. Whiteness is judgmental and supremacist and full of binary-thinking and hierarchical and enforced through punishment. You don’t unlearn whiteness through whiteness’ tools.
I have been thinking about WHITENESS and WHITE PEOPLE as the very clear space in which I personally operate as an organizer for years. That being said, where I am EAGER to personally make change and take accountability and offer repair is in how much space this specific organizing focus of whiteness-deprogramming work was taking up at CHMA All-Hands meetings. (And also, there may be a totally different structure to all hands meetings that we all create together!) How exciting, how DIVINE, to move this work into a more discrete space. It is clear that the work of deprogramming white people is working–I will continue to do this work, however the CHMA collective can decide where it will fit moving forward, maybe a separate working group or maybe as a separate project that works alongside CHMA and other Crown Heights groups. To change and transform and grow is divine!
We white people should continue to talk explicitly about whiteness as a culture and a behavior that we can deprogram from. It is our responsibility to become poison pills for white supremacist empire. Any Black, brown or Indigenous folks who feel that they too have experienced the violence of forced assimilation into whiteness into a behavior are WELCOME to join, or folks can create their own BIPOC-only spaces to hold and be held by other BIPOC folks who are deprogramming from individualism, punishment, shame and coercion as instructed behaviors. This is what mutual aid, under any of the names it has been called for generations, teaches us.
Just to also add: White people in power positions HATE my work and confront me often. Beloveds, it’s okay if people have a critique of you, there are a thousand strategies that we will need to be conducting together in order to defeat capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacist empire.
ON ACCOUNTABILITY/REPAIR:
I considered addressing line-by-line an anonymous letter that was sent on a community group chat accusing CHMA of being a white savior organization and, though we are a collective of neighbors who each have access to every decision-making space, every digital chat and every project, demanded that two individuals, me and (bizarrely) a wonderful but frankly quite new organizer in CHMA be “seen and not heard” moving forward. The letter created a magical portal for deep transformation at CHMA, even if its intention and implementation wounded many people beyond those that were individually named. CHMA is a shared dream--people have poured their hearts and resources and vulnerabilities into this community. Accountability is a gift of generosity and care--it makes room for growth and change. Anonymity is not a community context that makes room for accountability. It is easy to make claims that rely on vagueness and do not reflect reality alongside making critiques that are profound and transformational. This letter did both. The gratitude that CHMA community members will feel for the profound and transformational critiques will nourish this big transition moment. What an honor it is to change.
I think it’s important to give the two known letter writers more time and softness to really reflect on their own purpose, who and what they care about, and who they themselves are accountable to. We are all witnessing the horror of our beloveds in Iran, Palestine and Lebanon being bombed; we are experiencing threats and kidnappings in our own communities by ICE, and are struggling through rent and food feel increasingly unaffordable--our sorrow feels hopeless. If these letter writers are anything like me, I can understand their deep pain and fear and grief right now.
I can only offer empathy to the two letter writers who clearly themselves have experienced shame, punishment and the loneliness of individualism, as tools unto them. These are not tools that I plan to use back at them. However, honesty is a very important part of accountability, so in time I hope that they accept an invitation to an accountability and repair process to make amends to the people that they hurt, insulted and erased in their letter, very much including long-term Black residents of Crown Heights who have been a part of its grounding and structure since day 1.
To be clear, the language of the letter’s demands was corporate, non-profit oriented, using coded anti-Black dog whistles around reducing “dependency” of community members. Mutual aid is about increasing dependency OF all of us, UNTO all of us. This language masked a deep classism and liberal desire to push more community members into the hands of the state and out of the care of community. The letter writers are invited, with tenderness, to join CHMA or to find other community with which to do deep reading on what Black, brown and Indigenous movement elders tell us about what mutual aid IS and what it isn't. We all have so much to keep learning.
CHMA will be deepening its commitments to identifying and obstructing anti-Black racism and in particular Misogynoir (the intersectional violence of anti-Black racism and misogyny specifically targeted at Black women) in this transformational time. The last few weeks have shown us that all residents in Crown Heights are being called to double down on our commitments to the Black fem people and Afro-Caribbean women who have helped to guide and shape our coalition. Here, you are safe, you are honored and you are thanked for the divine and instructive roles you play as our movement elders and leaders. May we continue to deserve being in coalition with you. May your critiques and feedback guide us deeply.
TW: sexual assault
A quick note to all the participants in CHMA’s Accountability and Repair working group: you came together to wrap several neighbors in care, who had survived sexual assault at the hands of a Crown Heights resident who organizes across CH-based groups. In this moment, many of us are reeling from Dolores Huerta’s courageous disclosures about her own experiences being assaulted by movement leader Cesar Chavez. When I think about how radical, generous and protective CHMA's response was to sexual violence in our community....my breath leaves my body. The way that you all have nursed your neighbors back to functionality after crisis and trauma is nothing short of profound. You all came together and wrote a new script for how survivors can be healed through community care. This work continues. You changed my life.
ON YOU:
I will say this–mutual aid is for making best friends and falling in love with your neighbors; it’s about abolishing the notion of the nuclear family. It’s about taking care of other peoples’ kids!
People are starved for magic. I have a theory that magic is when more than two people focus on the same thing and take action. This is why corporations and jobs are so dangerous. The empire has us toiling at a cauldron brewing our own poison. Mutual aid is its opposite.
I look around every mutual aid room and see people sparking with electricity and power. Do you see it? Do you see yourself? You will set fire to this world, if only you turn to your left and to your right and ask people what they care about and whisper back what you deeply secretly really desire—autonomy, community, softness, sunlight, life, and death that is appropriate and in right relationship with life, not a genocidal inevitability, around every corner. The three of you, you and your two neighbors are very very powerful wizards. No need to keep watching me, start to watch your own hands!
ON LEADERSHIP:
When you look at me, you may be tempted to think that I grab at leadership, but I grab at care, I grab at people’s sorrows. If you want to have what I have, do more of this. If you think of me as a leader, I’ll tell you what I do: I show up to almost every Saturday All Hands, I’ve attended dozens of CHMA rent parties/polladas and danced my butt off, I’ve participated in CHMA deep cares, I’ve organized care and celebration through my pod. I’ve made friends. Mutual aid is not work, it is a place where you can really be yourself, and where you can CHANGE yourself. Why not fall in love? Why not ask for help? Why not offer more than you did before? I read books about mutual aid and restorative and transformative justice, and white supremacist empire. I re-read Adrienne Maree Brown’s Emergent Strategy and Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. I slow down when my neighbors need me to (like right now). Maybe some of these things make someone look like a leader! Why not try it. And try other things and become a leader your way. Show us, show us what care can look like!
I will continue to exert my energy to build a world where I am free, and my parents are free and my friends are free and strangers I've never met are free. What you do with your time is your business, but I will lovingly refuse the idea that I took world-building from someone by showing up and caring deeply. The work to destroy this empire is boundless…..get to work, wherever you are. Identify the resources you need, ask for help, become a better organizer. Do not self-infantilize. You are literally magic.
Please also know, just as a final and HUMAN note, that the last few weeks were wounding. Two anonymous letter writers sniped at YOUR neighbors, people that YOU know, who YOU have observed and built relationships with, maybe people who YOU have supported at their lowest, maybe people that YOU came to when you were at your lowest….and their shots landed. In the past few weeks, I laid here quietly decomposing into many parts. My long term CH-resident neighbors reached out to me privately to sit in shock and grief with me, I will never forget that you took real care of me and assured me my grounding is real. The loneliness of the last few weeks, I will admit, shocked me. I am a joyful and ebullient and annoyingly energized presence in a community. What you may not know is that I am not inevitable. I will FIGHT for Crown Heights and all our neighbors, and will bring my energy to every room that has resources and freedom dreams for my neighbors. However, I will also rest. I will decay. I am ended, it worked!
I am patient and joyful that spring always comes after winter, even the winters that left our voices frozen in our throats. Thaw, beloveds! Today marks the first day of this year where there is more light than darkness. Let's sing to the sun and greet her, and warm up our voices to speak truth to power.
As I pivot out of my winter, I remember that change is a collective choice, and that my resilience comes from being a single part of a sinewy community. Thinking about the last few weeks, being isolated out of my collective and transformed through an anonymous letter into a lonely singular individual, was a violence that I would not have accepted unto any of you. The heaviness of the blows felt unreal, out of step with community. The effect on my health felt unreal. I refuse to learn the lesson "run away from community", but I will be honest that the last few weeks had big health consequences for me. EVERYONE here is miraculously part of the problem and the solution. Such is organizing! We are not a corporation with bosses, we are a community garden full of gardeners, breathing life into the cracks in the concrete. I will, lovingly, not tolerate being pedestalized and “made leader” by folks who feel anxious about stepping into their power, again. Instead, I ask that you turn that pedestalizing unto yourself–you are profound, you are generous, you are a part of an incredible collective–make magic, make friends and make every single neighbor in your community more resourced. The revolution isn’t going to come from any of us individually, it is going to come from a community full of well-fed tummies who care deeply about one another.
TO THE FUTURE!
To be clear, I am looking forward to a leader-full phase of CHMA wherein I am delighted and inspired by folks trying new things and wrestling through challenges together! I will be cheering folks on and attending meetings whenever I feel called and being a movement elder that cares deeply about you all. This spring season I will be growing many gardens. Within CHMA, I am excited for:
1. My pod, where we are going to be throwing an absolutely SICK Spring Fundraiser to pay back folks who dipped into their savings when a neighbor had an urgent emergency. COME TO OUR PARTY!!
2. Whiteness-deprogramming support group! (my right role in the ecosystem!!)
3. The accountability and repair group, where I will be receiving support as a survivor
I will be looking for people to organize with who treat me as a neighbor and a human and not their boss or manager. I will not promote you because I don’t work here haha, I will only point to where the garden spade and watering hose is if you are having trouble finding it. Go grow this community garden and teach us what you learn along the way! I’ve already learned so much from all of you.
​
Olivia, just some neighbor
CHMA-grown