an equity practice

🌱 Welcome to the newsletter. If you're here, you've taken a workshop with me – maybe on long COVID accessibility, or on building your own recovery practice, or on maternal mortality. Or, we've hosted a roundtable together, a race and gender equity talkback. Or, you've been supporting my writing since the beginning, back in the tinyletter days (remember those?). However you found your way here, I'm thrilled you're here. Thank you for inviting me into your inbox – and if you're not sure if you want to be here anymore, you can unsubscribe below, with all my love.

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The thing about building an equity and justice consultancy in the year of our lord 2023 is that I don’t just want to do corporate DEI. Don’t get me wrong, the workplace is an endlessly fraught and fascinating study in power dynamics (and I like calling in/out shitty white women as much as the next person) — but what really lights me up these days is intersectional storytelling.

I want to do a qualitative study of the gendered and racialized experiences of osteoarthritic diseases. I want to speak at Take Back the Night events about how there are data on sexual violence for queer folks, disabled folks, brown people, women — but the data fail when you are all of those things. I want to teach about the pandemic as a lesson in public health policy, mutual aid networks, social uprising, queer history, and disability justice, all at once. I want to host a stitch & bitch circle in my local community garden, chat about our grandmothers' soup recipes and our favorite herbs for tea. I want to make art that transforms trauma, handiwork that is as functional as it is beautiful.

This, too, is equity work. 

These days, my equity practice mostly looks like figuring out what it means to build a sustainable business with anti-capitalist values under capitalism. I am learning — taking classes and workshops, listening to podcasts and audiobooks, talking about money with everyone I can, asking a lot of questions, interrogating my own thoughts and beliefs. This is new for me, a growing edge. The learning is never done, in an equity practice.

I’m curious — what does your equity practice look like, these days? What lights you up at your intersections? What tangle are you trying to unravel, and what are you learning? Hit reply to tell me about it — I'd love to hear.

Thank you, as always, for reading.