Care is a Verb: Finding Our Way with MAPS!

Care is A Verb: Maps!

We didn’t get Care is A Verb last week: sorry about that! Between prepping for travel and actual travel, I wasn’t able to make it happen. This week, I’m excited to bring to you: MAPS! Sometimes, you just need some clear instructions to tell you how to get where you want to go. I am sharing three different kinds of maps with you today:

• The classic Pod Map
• Another community care iteration, the Mad Map
• And the more broadly applied Collective Care Map.

Need to figure out how to survive our tough and messy human interactions while we also survive oppressive regimes? Welcome to Pod Mapping! Per Mia Mingus, the author of the Pods and Pod Mapping Worksheet:

“During the spring of 2014 the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective (BATJC) began using the term “pod” to refer to a specific type of relationship within transformative justice (TJ) work. We needed a term to describe the kind of relationship between people who would turn to each other for support around violent, harmful and abusive experiences, whether as survivors, bystanders or people who have harmed. These would be the people in our lives that we would call on to support us with things such as our immediate and on-going safety, accountability and transformation of behaviors, or individual and collective healing and resiliency.”

Need to make a plan for more intense states of mental health struggle, crisis, or interpersonal challenges? Here’s Mad Mapping! From the NYC Icarus Project’s Mapping Our Madness Zine:

“A workbook for navigating crisis, extreme states, or just foul moods.”

Looking for something more comprehensive, with historical context, worksheets and case studies? Get a load of Interrupting Criminalization’s Mapping Community Ecosystems of Collective Care, by Shannon Perez-Darby and Andrea J. Ritchie. From the toolkit intro:

“As communities face increased policing, criminalization, and organized abandonment; mounting state violence, repression, and authoritarianism; escalating white supremacist, homophobic, and transphobic violence; and climate collapse; building skilled, coordinated, expansive, and robust ecosystems of collective care is only becoming more and more essential to our collective survival. We hope that these shared learnings, processes, and resources will be helpful to communities seeking to strengthen networks of community care and advance transformative justice.”

When the pandemic lockdown first happened, one of the first things that I did was to write a short note on a half sheet of paper, letting my neighbors know who I am and how to reach me if they needed something. I put them in the mailboxes of every house on our block. Not much came of it (besides a neighbor coming to ask if she could borrow a cup of milk. I introduced her to soy milk, and she said it was not bad), but there’s something to be said for reaching out in good faith and letting people know you’re ready to link up.

Social mapping is basically making plans to link up and give and receive support with mutual consent. Raise your hand if you think we’re going to need less and less support in the near future...

Right: Nobody.

When people want to exert power, one of the first things they will do is isolate and disorient you. There’s a lot of that happening right now. So let’s make some maps and let’s figure out what direction we want to move in. Together.

Love and solidarity,

❤️ Atena