Chasyn, her vision of RJ, and the NPIC

As I write this, it’s May of 2024. I have been a resident of Durham, NC for about a year now and I am the happiest version of myself I have ever been. I have become surrounded by new relationships, and engulfed in the love, complexity, struggle and joy it is to be a Black woman living in Bull City. The community I have now has reminded me of the reasons why I ever joined community organizing work: I love my people and I see our ability to be free in all of its capacities when WE are organizing OURSELVES our way. I’ve come home to this place of understanding over the past 11 months because of having to process being ejected from ‘community’ organizing when I was fired from being on staff at an organization. I held a lot of shame around losing my job originally, operating in the programmed fear we’re supposed to feel when losing a stream of income that’s prestigious to some. I am grateful that I was and am able to process such an abrupt and painful transition with the mind, spirit and community that I have so I can share my thoughts here. This blog posting isn’t just my space to explain myself and my position,  it’s to share my reflections as an organizer who was removed from organizing from the outside and beginning to return. 

My organizing journey began and grew out very grassroots. I have created and curated community engagement events, conversations with marginalized people about our life experiences and desires, training young folks on the skill building needed to organize in meaningful ways and reflecting myself/my focusing on being able to build out bases of people who care about each other and connect with a cause. When I joined staff at this organization, I was brought in with high praises around my previous organizing work and experience. I felt that I saw the ways the non profit industrial complex (NPIC) could use its resources to support fighting for people and was eager to bridge those gaps. I had been apart of several organizing ventures with this organization in college (Aggie Pride), and felt confident in my ability to bring more reality to the reproductive justice space. To this day, I don’t think my analysis was incorrect, but built on incorrect assumptions that we were all fighting for the same things. When I first started that role in January of 2023, as a Community Reproductive Freedoms Organizer  So much of my time was spent away from my dogs, away from my home, away from my community, pushing legislative messaging to communities I was foreign to. The goal was to knock enough doors, pass enough flyers, give away enough stickers to try and woo people into caring enough about what was happening in the legislature to speak out. I was constantly in meetings, having formatted one on one conversations that always ended in an ask, flooding my personal connections with an overload of information that they didn’t feel connected to and I began to feel like an undervalued street team member for the NC legislator or silent donors who care more about statistical data than actual community building. The NPIC has an insidious way of making us think that we can bastardize the ways that we build and maintain communities for the ‘greater good’ by industrializing the process for profit margins just enough so that the picture of progress is being painted but not actually created (because how would they get funding if the problem is resolved?). Personally, I was creating a timeline of local events in different cities to learn the communities and build relationships the best way I know how: through mutual engagement and shared space. I didn’t get to fulfill those plans or even contact my volunteers to let them know I’d be transitioning out. Almost all of the relationships I spent time building, crafting and caring about were snatched from me when I was locked out of all of my work communication accounts. I had just moved to Durham a month before. I had a few friends and my sister scattered throughout the area but my job was my life. No longer having access to that life hurt me in a way I’m only recently able to explain: it was an unexpected wave of loneliness. 

I am a walking vessel of divinity and community care, so I can say now that even though I was stressed, I was surviving and shedding. It was through new friends, new city events, getting a part time job at a local adult store and coffee shop while taking the bus with half the income, that I slowly found myself immersing in community, and in myself again. I became a part of the East Durham Community Design Project & felt I was slowly becoming involved in the world around me felt like a valued piece of a whole for the first time since the transition. This realization is what brought me to this one solid reflection around the reproductive justice movement: reproductive justice begs for community participation that it doesn’t even offer itself. Previously as an advocate for change, I was restricted to ‘organizing’ that was deemed valuable by certain metrics. My work was catered  to people who had the capacity to care about legislation in real time (middle/upper  class white women across age demographics). It made me lead rallies broadcasted on news channels in the middle of the day, lead power circles late into the night after long days of political agitation, bully people to show up physically in spaces that were uncomfortable or inaccessible or to be quite plain, annoying (everyone hates phone banking!). The kind of community engagement (read: volunteer engagement) these organizations, these coalitions, this movement spends countless dollars on marketing for, barely even knows the community they’re attempting to activate. It seems as though the RJ movement understands it needs the masses but doesn’t understand what it means to be a part of the masses. Movements aren’t planted or spawned, they’re organic bursts of people becoming organized for a cause. If you’re not able to bring out the masses for your cause, especially if your cause is in support of the masses, it means your movement isn’t including them the way you want to say that it is. The translucent displays of accessibility and inclusion aren’t actually doing anything which is why you get the same cookie cutter types of support unless you rope in organizations led by minorities of marginalized identities who you only include in the photo ops and don’t actually respect. It’s baseless, it’s not working, but door knocking is what brings in the money so what does it matter right? Does it actually matter at all? A year outside of the space and I’m still not sure. If we want reproductive justice to actually be a part of reproductive freedom, these are the scratches on the surface of a much more vulnerable issue that we need to address in honesty and accountability. 

I’m grateful for the Carolina Abortion Fund for their direct engagement with the communities they serve. I’m grateful and humbled to be seen by someone as kind, compassionate and brilliant as Camille, who encourages me to share my thoughts, ideas and woes about something we both love so dearly and can feel so conflicted around. I’m honored to be chosen by the community time and time again as a loved one and held with value. I am committed to staying grounded in reality: we keep us safe and we always will.