What Would an HIV Doula Do? is a community of people joined in response to the ongoing HIV/AIDS crisis. Our intergenerational and international collective includes folks who work as artists, historians, educators, health care workers, archivists, organizers, and more. Some of us are living with HIV in our bodies, and some are not, but each of us has been profoundly impacted by HIV/AIDS. We, like everyone on the planet, are living with AIDS.

What Would An HIV Doula Do? is also a question, one that we are more interested in continuing to ask—of ourselves, of each other, of our communities, of culture at large—than we are to answer. The work we do with WWHIVDD requires a trust, built over time and through collaboration and conversation, through shared vulnerability, through doula-ing others and doula-ing ourselves.

I did not choose to begin living with HIV in my body; nevertheless, there it remains and likely will for the rest of my life. Being part of this collective is HIV I can choose. And I continue to choose it, because I continue to choose a life asking this question.

– C. (Constantine Jones)

Working in collectives often means having to balance the needs and desires of multiple people. It is useful, sometimes, for collectives and groups to have a common goal they are working towards.

But the more I think about this collective, and the more I revisit the archives of the work the collective has done—in both the time I have been a member and before—I don’t find so much a goal, but rather a motivation and a process:

We “respond to the ongoing AIDS crisis,” and “foundational to our process is asking questions.”

While the goals of what we are trying to achieve with each project may change, our commitment to the motivation and process has allowed this collective to expand and contract, create unique off-shoots and collaborations, and move forward as the ongoing AIDS crisis continues to shift and evolve.

This is all to say, this collective is no stranger to the creation, deployment, and follow-up of surveys asking for insight, perspective, suggestions, and feedback.

Which is how this collection of responses about being in collective came to be.

The survey was intended to feed two birds with one scone: to create a shared submission of questions around what unique practices of collectivity WWHIVDD does, and to opt in or out of being compensated for the 

 contribution. Recipients of the survey were asked to reflect on the prompts, “What do you get out of WWHIVDD that you don't get out of other gatherings or outlets in your life? Why do you show up to meetings? What is it about WWHIVDD that keeps you engaged?” and respond in the form of question(s). As it sometimes happens, some members (including me) rejected the form of the question and simply answered the question.

What follows are the answers to the first set of prompts, organized by shortest entry to longest entry.

– Daniel Sanchez Torres


What does money smooth over?

What does it mean to share history?

How does money get in the way of connection?

What moves you to act or work besides money?

What if we don’t take our relationships for granted?

What if we led with collective, internal care before all else?

How do we make space for principled activism to take place?

What would it feel like to connect with others who share your concerns?

What if time spent online is just as valuable as time spent in shared physical space?

What happens when HIV is central to a gathering? A work of art? A life? A collective?

What would happen if you committed to expressing the things that feel impossible to say?

What is it like to feel seen and understood in a virtual box in ways you are rarely in real life?

How can collaborative projects be shared collectively by members who choose to participate?

Where else can I go and know deep in my heart that everyone present loves people living with HIV?

Is my presence an act of holding space for others, or is it a plea for a space where I can finally let go?

Can a meeting be a form of caregiving, and, if so, what are we birthing together every time we speak?

Who are the people that challenge you to keep going? To keep questioning? To keep connecting?

Where else can I go where I know everyone present is mourning the dead while fighting like hell for the living?

What do you think would happen if you really, truly let down your guard and trusted yourself and your community?

In a world of transactional exchanges, what does it mean to build a space based solely on radical reciprocity?

How can the larger collective foster and inspire affiliation groups to form organically or out of a separate/shared need?

Does a shared experience of HIV exist and does it hold us together as a collective or does it emphasize our differences?

Where else can I gossip, debate, listen, witness, learn, knowing that everyone loves people living with and impacted by HIV?

This collective honors the multiple movements (body, heart, soul) that may arise at different times as we grieve, live, and thrive.

How can we use one focus—the mission of the collective—to inform a lens through which the collective sees everything, and each other?

How can we build relationships over time via deeply shared values and radical beliefs about the communities we want to be a part of and help create?

Where else can I go where there is engaging conversation that weaves seamlessly between pop culture, lived experience, and deeply held politics?

Is my motivation primarily about receiving support, offering it, or is the value found in the reciprocal dynamic itself—the act of showing up for each other?

What's it like to live with HIV/AIDS today? Is it serious? What was it like to live with HIV/AIDS back then? Was it tragic? What are HIV/AIDS histories? What are the things you don't know yet about HIV/AIDS?

What new possibilities, comforts, and power are generated when individuals are diverse (in age, race, location, profession, sexuality, gender, ability, and so on) but are aligned around a political, health, or personal commitment to HIV/AIDS?

In a world saturated with social networks and professional meetups that often emphasize utility or superficial connections, what is the specific quality of the WWHIVDD space that allows for a different kind of vulnerability and mutual understanding?

WWHIVDD creates space for healing. The grieving of being displaced as a migrant, as a woman who has loved ones who lost their loves to AIDS and overdoses, as a harm reductionist who moves in mutual aid collectives that are mobilizing for community health and well-being.

What if there were a group of folks spotted around the globe who felt like they were living lives shaped importantly by AIDS and whose experiences with the ongoing pandemic were central to their lives? What if this group had folks from so many age groups, creeds, racial and ethnic backgrounds, gender variations, sexual desires, class positionalities, and political complexities that it were the most diverse group to which you've belonged? What if it met regularly, to conduct and share business, but also just to hold and support each other: to be there?

For me, WWHIVDD really connects me to an HIV/AIDS historical lineage. This was not initially what I had joined the doulas for. Initially, I had joined because I was bored and lonely during the pandemic. But as I've continued to participate in the collective it has grown to be a significant part of my creative and intellectual practice as a writer. I show up to meetings because I care about the community and I care about how this network has cared for me and each other. Sometimes in material big ways—like cash and resources and services—and sometimes in smaller ways—like presence and listening and acknowledging.

I enter this collective expansively, feeling the push and pull between art, activism, and community grassroots action. I intentionally embrace gratefulness when I acknowledge and sit with the collective. I can and do embrace my multitudes of being. WWHIVDD members have mighty hearts and continuously fight for recognition, access to care, and the lives of people whom we love. I am part of a generation that makes choices of self care, pleasure, and loving relationships within pandemics. I identify as a doula because sitting with grief and my reaction to it—

 (righteous anger, rage)—is a call to action. This collective honors the multiple movements (body, heart, soul) that may arise at different times as we grieve, live, and thrive.

What if, all of a sudden, you felt seen and heard in ways that no longer required elaborate explanation? What if you came to a group, now, without having to mention and warm into your nearly twenty years of seropositivity; how you mixed up sex and death as a young teen; how your mother keeping her HIV secret for thirty years affects you? What if this group supported you emotionally, intellectually, civically, and even financially through gigs shared and created by the group? What if this non-hierarchical, anti-patriarchal, anti-racist, and anti-xenophobic collective embraced and enacted radical care? What if it made a real difference in your day-to-day experiences in the world? What if it helped you realize we all have AIDS? What would you call this group of folks? Would you call them HIV doulas?

What do I get out of this? More importantly, what do I give? Has what I've given been useful? To whom has what I've given been useful? Why would I spend this much of my energy at work, where I'm paid, if the only compensation for that work is money? Do I not need the money? Who doesn't need the money? Aren't there things worth doing despite getting money? Shouldn't anything be worth doing despite getting money? Why do we all need money? Is money useful in any way beyond the framework of capitalism we've decided, for some reason, to exist in as a species? Is money useful to a blue whale? Will there still be blue whales if capitalism continues? Will there still be HIV if capitalism continues? Will capitalism continue? Why should capitalism continue? Why should I care about anyone else? How can any of us bear not to care about anyone else? Are we not each other? Are we not us? Will we please keep remembering us? Will we please not forget?

Huh? A question in the form of a question? (That was a question!) Also, what is this, AIDS Worker Jeopardy? (Also a question.) Would my response be appropriate if I said: "Since I joined this Doula collective, WWHIVDD, I have been constantly overjoyed and in awe of all of my comrades, from every walk of life, and wondered at the fact that, if not for HIV, I might have never interacted in their circles, never been able to read and study their emails, might never have met and gotten to know and sometimes work with them. Similar to my evolution in how I feel about being queer, or formerly incarcerated, where I've gone from being embarrassed and ashamed to becoming accepting, and then, now, proud of those facts... those thoughts and wonders about WWHIVDD and the love and respect I have for its members have helped me reach a point that I'm grateful for having HIV. I wouldn't be an activist if not for being HIV+. I wouldn't have met all of my incredible comrades. And I wouldn't have learned, not just cultural competency, but to learn to lean into, recognize, welcome, and embrace diversity. To make space for different view points, cultures, languages, experiences. I wouldn't be so ready, as I am now, to go into the streets to defend the rights human beings inherently have, in their core, or soul, to be diverse. An entirely selfish assessment, to be sure, but I find I am a better human being, a better Queer, a better man, a better "American," better neighbor, and a better PWA, from having been a part of this collective. Know what I mean? (And lastly, that too, was a question.)

– What Would an HIV Doula Do?

What Would an HIV Doula Do? is a community of people joined in response to the ongoing AIDS crisis. We understand a doula as someone who holds space during times of transition. We understand HIV as a series of transitions that begin long before being tested, that continue after treatment and beyond. We know that since no one gets HIV alone, no one should have to live with HIV alone. We doula ourselves, each other, institutions and culture. Foundational to our process is asking questions.

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What Would an HIV Doula Do?

What Would An HIV Doula Do? is also a question, one that we are more interested in continuing to ask—of ourselves, of each other, of our communities, of culture at large—than we are to answer. The work we do with WWHIVDD requires a trust, built over time and through collaboration and conversation, through shared vulnerability, through doula-ing others and doula-ing ourselves.

A Circle of Circles

WWHIVDD Collectivity

This year, we’re reflecting on the act of gathering as an artistic form and tool for building movements, distributing resources, and nurturing new futures. In a field as expansive and difficult to define as socially engaged art, the impulse to gather people, collectively organize, and build networks emerges as a throughline amongst a vast array of disciplines and practices. This work cannot happen individually; collaboration is inherent to the process at all scales, from artist cooperatives, ensembles, and mutual aid networks to broader efforts of convening and coalition building across networks and geographies. How can we create intentional spaces to build together and dream together? What are the formats we might create or return to in times of escalating crisis? How can the act of gathering build solidarity and coalition?

Our own rebuilding process as an organization revolved around a series of listening sessions in New Orleans, San Francisco, New York, and online, where we gathered artists, practitioners, and community partners to discuss the needs of the field and the types of models needed to meet them. Participants repeatedly emphasized the deep desire to be together—to think, to build, to rest. Our programs developed out of this feedback, centering support for artist-led gatherings in both our monthly microgrant program, Field Funds, and our fellowship program, In Fellowship. Our Field Funds cycles for artist-led gatherings consistently see the highest spike in applications. Across the country, artists are building schools, organizing festivals, hosting meals, and carving out space, both physical and virtual, to be in community together.

This past year also represented the introduction of our reimagined fellowship program, In Fellowship, which gathers a working group of artists, practitioners, and cultural organizers to collectively explore key facets and processes of socially engaged art. Over a year of virtual meetings dedicated to group reflection and mutual learning, cohort members shared the joys and challenges of collective work within the context of interconnectedness and shared power. Being able to convene regularly with this cohort, even virtually, offered a balm to our team during a year of unending crisis. “This cohort has helped to create a place to think about these questions, to listen to how our colleagues around the country are trying to move,” Alison De La Cruz of Great Leap recently reflected during a group call. “There’s not one solution model to the challenges that we’re facing right now, and more and more I find it deeply radical when people choose to do things together.”

To kick off the issue, we’ll hear from each of the cohort members, both individually and together in conversation, to offer learnings and resources that have emerged from their time In Fellowship. Each issue of 

engages a guest collaborator, and the cohort is assuming that role for the first set of contributions. Later this year, we’ll be welcoming the second cohort of In Fellowship and will invite those members to contribute, as well.

We’ll also be in conversation with artists from across the field who have built practices around the act of gathering, offering a glimpse into their work and process. What models are they developing? How can gathering unfold safely and accessibly right now? How can we build more channels of support for this crucial aspect of socially engaged practices? Welcome to the third issue of 

, a roving exploration of these questions and more from artists, practitioners, and their circles of collaborators and networks. It’s an honor to gather their voices and to share them with you.

This year, we’re reflecting on the act of gathering as an artistic form and tool for building movements, distributing resources, and nurturing new futures. In a field as expansive and difficult to define as socially engaged art, the impulse to gather people, collectively organize, and build networks emerges as a throughline amongst a vast array of disciplines and practices. This work cannot happen individually; collaboration is inherent to the process at all scales, from artist cooperatives, ensembles, and mutual aid networks to broader efforts of convening and coalition building across networks and geographies. 

In the first iteration of In Fellowship, we gathered a working group of three collectives and artist-led organizations to reflect on the strategies and challenges of shared power and collective work. This first cohort included What Would an HIV Doula Do? (WWHIVDD), a community of people living with and/or impacted by HIV, joined in response to the ongoing AIDS crisis; Great Leap, a multicultural arts organization that uses performing arts, cultural practices, and community engagement to empower diverse voices, deepen connections, and transform our relationships to each other and the Earth; and Wild Path Collective, a QTBIPOC-led land stewardship project that is establishing a commons for Black, Indigenous, People of Color, queer and trans folks, and poor and working class people to regenerate soil and our cultures by connecting with rural land.

Over a year of group calls, cohort members shared insights into the origins and transitions of their groups and the questions they hold. This time was meant to be open and flexible, providing a container for group thought and reflection, a rest from day to day operations.

To kick off this year’s issue of 

, we sat down with members of the cohort to introduce their forthcoming contributions and reflect on the year shared together—what each member will be taking away from the experience, what they’ve learned from each other, and how this moment has impacted the ways they are thinking about collective structure.

Alison De La Cruz from Great Leap; Duaba Unenra from Wild Path Collective; and Daniel Sanchez Torres, Michael McFadden, and Theodore (Ted) Kerr from WWHIVDD joined A Blade of Grass’s Lee Heinemann for a conversation early this year.

– A Blade of Grass

How did you approach the contributions you’re including in 

 was a really great opportunity to think about what the stories are that we tell through Great Leap because we’re in a leadership transition period, moving from a founder to a new leader and looking at new possibilities. At the time we were invited we had an intern who had a very different generational take on the work that we do, and it felt like a really exciting opportunity to use this as a reflection period and to have her interview both our founder, Nobuko Miyamoto, and the other two founders of the FandangObon program that we run, Martha Gonzalez and Quetzal Flores. My essay is a reflection as the leader of some ongoing discoveries, moving away from a single founder model and the challenges of doing that. I’m trying to figure out how to name some of the challenges and discoveries in this moment of critical transition for the organization while we’re at this intersection of democracy, representation, equity, justice, and its manifestations impacting diverse demographics that supremacist-led culture doesn’t want to support and witnessing the backlash to it. Part of what’s happened in this last year has been a rediscovery of community and trying to figure out how to gauge what we can say, when we can say it, and how we can say it, while we’re still trying to move forward with our mission.

We’re trying to bring people in at a time when people feel so overwhelmed, when people feel so pressed, when people are managing the siege from ICE and Border Patrol in the cities where many of us are located. We’re seeing how we as culture bearers, artists, culture producers, community gatherers, and healers are deeply impacted. 

 became an opportunity for us to ask what the story is that we want to tell people to help them in this time. Great Leap comes out of these responses, and now more than ever so much of this work is important. What it shows us is that we have to be strategic in a different kind of way than I think we used to in the foundational periods that informed my leadership, which were the ’92 rebellion in LA, 9/11, the housing market crash, and now what we’re witnessing as the rise of presidential authoritarianism inclinations.

You were talking about how this is the moment when we’re all under siege and the people who you’re working with are currently under siege. It’s really distilling why things have been so difficult when I’ve been trying to work with people to make things happen, but also illuminating why I’ve been so frantic in some ways, as well. Oh, yeah, because there are all of these very specific targets that are being put on myself and my community, and there’s not a lot that I can do about it except try to keep things going.

For our 

 contributions, one group is doing a reflection on grief. One of our members, Alexandra Juhasz, made a documentary on grief, and it spun out into an exhibition and different facilitation groups. Alexandra gave us a bit of backstory and a brief of the documentary that they made, and then each member pulled in documentation of their process through the whole experience.

We have a conversation led by JD Davids on the HIV Complexities Project with Gabriel San Emeterio, which I thought was really fascinating from the perspective of adding an additional medical layer of people living with HIV and other things. It also has a layer of the socio-political of all of these things happening in the world that make trying to get care complicated.

Beto Pérez’s piece, “The Cure Is Always in Someone Else’s Hands,” was thinking about the colonial relationship of Mexico and the United States using HIV as a lens to think about the politics and how life has developed under American imperialism. It was quite an interesting piece for me to edit because he originally wrote it in Spanish, and even though he’s translated it, he was very clear that the English was a rough translation and you should go experience the piece in Spanish. It was a negotiation between the two of us about who the audience is and his commitment to trying to speak to his community and from his context. We know that United States American history has been whitewashed, and that means that Americans don’t have all of these references that the rest of the world does. I should also say that Beto and I are really close friends, so we talk to each other a lot, and it’s been an interesting jumping off point for conversations around what it means to write and edit for an American audience. How do I want to help the reader get there? Even as events are unfolding—a cartel leader was killed recently in Mexico and it has kind of exploded, and Beto asked me if I had heard about it. I told him what I had heard based on American news, and he was like, whoa, that’s not what happened. So the piece that ended up coming out of it continues to be something that we’re able to talk about and think about and integrate.

The last piece that we’re doing is the Collectivity piece, which was a prompt where we asked members participating in the A Blade of Grass gatherings to think about collectivity. As Ted likes to say, it fed two birds with one scone because we also had to figure out a way to split the funds, and I think this ties into how we make decisions. There was a lot of discussion within the group, and we ended up sending a survey out to everyone and asked them if they wanted a split; if they didn’t want a split, but to put the money back in the pot to split with everyone else; or they didn’t want to split, but they wanted to keep the money in the doula bank account to be used for some future thing. This was the process that we settled on when thinking about what we wanted to do with the unrestricted funds from A Blade of Grass when this fellowship started.

Riffing off what DeLa shared about being and transforming while under siege, the communities our collective is accountable to in Minnesota are also experiencing an occupation. The safety and viability of being a queer Black, Native, and Brown-led collective on rural land has become more dangerous because of ongoing raiding by ICE in our region. At the same time, we’re in yet another period of activation and there is a resurgence of interest in collective action and community welfare (an alternative term for mutual aid being advanced by Zede Harut) because once again we’re seeing that only neighbors can keep neighbors safe. My submission to 

 is a two-part essay on the life cycle and formation of a collective, informed by the last six years of organizing Wild Path Collective. Given the collective and cooperative response to the siege we’re under in our region, maybe the essay is more relevant now than it would have been months ago.

We got into—or rather are attempting to return to—the practice of commoning because it was an ancestral tradition which was destroyed in order to make way for the kinds of economic, physical, and psychological violence that is now being deployed across the planet to advance corporate and elite interests. It was practicing collectivity and commoning that gave our ancestors lives with dignity. When I talk to people about what we’re doing, they react as if the project of sharing stewardship of land with fellow cultural workers, artists, and farmers is impossible because of some social defect in the human condition. Sometimes they can also see that the indignities we live with under capitalism—things like never knowing or witnessing the process of the food you eat being grown or never experiencing safety inside or outside of your home—are horrible, too. But it’s almost like they see the indignity of their oppression as easier to deal with than the uncertainty of trusting the people close to them to be good cooperators. My hope is the article helps heal some of that alienation from our collective traditions.

DeLa, you’d also shared something with us before about the intergenerational nature of the conversations you’re having.


I definitely feel that there have been moments intergenerationally because we work with elders. Our founder, as a toddler, was incarcerated as part of Executive Order 9066. That history in itself really lays a foundation of where the organization is. Multiple folks within our process have been part of social justice movement work. We had a couple moments last year where Gen X people who are facing targeted police surveillance or feeling targeted in their workplaces because of the nature of their work, not even at Great Leap, were discussing having to form an exit plan and figure out if they should go to Mexico or Canada. I think there have been moments with elders where I’ve witnessed the, “Oh yeah, we’ve seen this, so it sucks,” knuckle up, baby boomer generation response of, 

. But also witnessing conversations and the compassion of seeing that that elder’s also trying to manage their own feelings of, 

We’ve been doing a lot more work around preparing for our convening and in talking history and vision, the thing that became clear is our FandangObon practice is very much grounded in social justice movements, because some of the connections that started weren’t just arts and culture connections, but were also progressive movement connections. Part of what I’ve discovered is there is something deeply in the bones of not just Great Leap, but also FandangObon, that is very much rooted in justice movement work.

We have to be loving with each other as we do this work, and I see we sometimes become stand-ins for people’s frustration. They finally get to a place where people will listen to them, and so sometimes they misplace their feelings of trauma and frustration against the supremacist system or anti-immigrant culture and come at us because we’re leading and we’re here. A colleague reminded me like, dude, you’re so open-hearted, you’ll listen. Supremacist institutions are just like, yeah, whatever, so the fact that you’ll listen, they come even harder, because nobody will listen in that structure. And so I think that’s the caring warrior, the caring accomplice, both C-A-R-I-N-G and C-A-R-R-Y-I-N-G, as I’m saying those words. The poet in me is feeling that moment. The caring person is the first filter for people’s trauma responses or frustration. The varying reactions to the thing that’s hurting them.

For me, recently, part of what I’ve been trying to unpack is as a queer woman of color non-binary leader, there are times when I realize, oh, I’m just a punching bag because you’ve never been listened to before. It’s taken me a while to understand these moments in my career as a community-based person who facilitates, who listens, who’s reflexive. Trying to hold compassion for people, but then also realizing as a soft-hearted person or a tender queer, as a leader who listens and is reflexive, how do I become comfortable with a boundary that allows me to be as open as possible but also, for survival, have a wall.

This cohort has helped to create a place to think about these questions, to listen to how our colleagues around the country are trying to move. There’s not one solution model to the challenges that we’re facing right now, and more and more I find it deeply radical when people choose to do things together. That part of doing it together is also us having to work through all of the things that make us inhale and exhale deeply and that are challenging. If I want to be in community with you, I have to figure out how we can be in community when we’re also trying to survive capitalism and the suppression that is coming. Words that we use to describe ourselves or our communities are being taken down and we’re witnessing a layer of language erasure as a means to erase us all.


You were talking about being the caring and the carrying person in trying to facilitate work forward, and how you develop that boundary. A friend of mine and I have a joke of, listen, we can’t have a meltdown on the same day. We have to switch off or else we’re not gonna make this happen. I’m not gonna text my friend today because they just unloaded on me, but tomorrow is my day.


One of the most beautiful aspects of our collective was its intergenerational character combined with the cross-cultural composition of our collective (just had to make a quick alliterative nod to DeLa). Over the years, I witnessed a Black queer elder mentor younger Black, Native, Asian, and white people. As mid-thirty-somethings in the group, members in my age range frequently showed up as bridge-builders, mediators, and administrators for the collective, while the twenty-somethings focused on caring and carrying the needs of the land and community. It reminded me a lot of the ways age-grade systems in indigenous communities are described: as a person and their age-cohort mature, they “graduate” from one set of responsibilities to another. I don’t remember us intentionally operating the collective in this way, but we just fell into that rhythm organically.

Unfortunately, because there wasn’t a clear and intentional way of honoring intergenerationality, that beautiful dynamic was also lost as deep and longstanding conflicts tore our collective up. Unfortunately, it was a conflict that took on age, race, and gendered dimensions, but the root causes were very, very small misunderstandings that were lost to differences in communication styles, maturity, and lack of clear alignment. Now that the conflict has ended, and we are rebuilding our group, I’ve just realized how important clear distinction and boundaries around age-appropriate expectations for responsibilities are. While we strove to have a balanced distribution of decision-making power in the collective, we didn’t carefully define with each member what they truly had the maturity and capacity to be responsible for. So the presence of intergenerationality in a collective is not something that can be left to chance. And as the “middle child” of the collective, we’re of an age-grade that has to hold itself, younger people, and much older people accountable to their word and work. It can be really really challenging.


Is there anything you’d like to add about how your group makes decisions around responding to opportunities and participating in things?


Daniel’s hard work over the last few weeks is a good example of how through A Blade of Grass and this fellowship we’ve started to work on our leadership transition. There is no doubt in my mind that had the work connected to the 

 publication launched a year ago—whether I had the capacity or not—I would have been steering it. Witnessing how other collectives function created an opportunity for us to shift our practice around how we handle opportunities, responsibility, workload, and capacities. Watching Daniel, I see how the work is so fundamentally different based on who’s steering the ship. I think that the change in how work gets done has been meaningful, and then that changes the work we have going forward.

And what this leads me to think about is how I’m excited to think about how we may still be a collective in the future, but are we actually an ecosystem full of these little collectives or little pairs? Maybe this idea of a collective has outlived its function for us, and we need to find new language to talk about who and how we are together.


Yeah, I definitely resonate on the way the collective is led. Depending on who the leader is impacts the relational practice. Great Leap, we feel like we’re a circle of many circles, we’re an ensemble of many ensembles. I feel like lots of the people we work with, myself included, can sometimes be ensembles of one. We’re seeing it show up in some of our ethnic and racial organizing, having a Japanese American lead organizer or lead artist. That’s where a lot of our base is, and so there have been moments where I’ve had challenges where I feel like people are like, oh, we don’t need other Filipinos here, because you guys are part of Little Tokyo. Well, I still want to do the dance that my community does when we show up to a circle. If I’m helping to lead a circle, eventually, it’s important to me that we get to do something from the Philippines. Yes, I’m in deep community with Japanese American practice and I can do a lot of the cultural protocol, but there still comes a point where as an ally and an accomplice, I need to feel reflected and I need to hear my language. I need to dance in our rhythm. I need to hear our music.

I hear these resonances around the places where our identities and our paths create bridges and opportunities and open pathways for people. How can collective help us make sure that we’re covering everybody? Who are we authentically? How do we manage the complexity of the diverse communities that are engaged in our practices and, at times, their competing narratives or desires or needs? It reminds me that part of my practice is not just blanket generosity, but it also has to be founded in this place of, what does this community that I say I want to uplift authentically say that they need? And how do I help facilitate or manifest that and get out of the way of it?

I also really appreciate the way that my mind has exploded in great ways thinking about what it means to have a collective so big and not all in the same place. I do so many place-based things that I also am appreciating the opportunity to be invited to think more broadly about community, and how to positively use digital community for people. Seeing the way that you all digitally organize, and the way that you digitally flow with each other. And so how do we honor the adaptation of analog to digital?


If Great Leap is an ensemble of ensembles, then I think What Would an HIV Doula Do? is a process of processes, and that really speaks to what you so generously witnessed of us, so thank you.


So then is Wild Path Collective a nature of natures?


Hahaha, Wild Path Collective is a seed of seeds—our logo is a stylized acorn, actually. One small seed that can make an entire cooperative ecosystem when planted in conditions that allow it to thrive. Having been in a deep and fairly well-defined practice of decision-making as a collective, the decision-making aspects of the work actually became the least technical thing we did together. Basically, you could just bring a proposal to the group where you asked for permission to pursue a specific opportunity that was aligned with the group’s purpose. Most times these requests for consent were granted. The person bringing the proposal forward then had to bottomline its implementation.

As I share in my essay, though, it wasn’t the decision-making that was challenging, it was the shedding of the toxic narratives and oppression that we carried into the collective soil of our group. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to deal with those in a generative way—our collective failed in that process and fell apart. It was slow and difficult work, but remediating poisons, composting, and building up good healthy soil takes a long time and a lot of work to maintain. We live in a microwave culture whose agri-culture is controlled by supply chain cartels in the food and media system. The people who are too big to fail fail little people all the time—they just get more support. But this society sees failure as final if you’re poor or Black, Native, or Brown. It makes a mountain out of making a decision together quickly, and undervalues the slow and deep process of healing through cooperating together. We say we want a liberated society. That work isn’t going to come from deciding with one another, but with providing one another with welfare and mutuality. And also with the hard realization that not everyone is in a place to contribute to that.


Something that Wild Path Collective offered our shared group as part of their collective work is the idea of composting, and I remember that resonating. I wonder if you each would take us back to thoughts about compost in this work and at this time.


The conversation that we had as a group about composting was really powerful for me and has stuck with me quite a bit. I think there are some parallels between what you have shared from an HIV movement perspective, where there’s a lot of historical stuff that has gone down that has been really problematic and challenging and hard. Being able to pull from and learn from those lessons historically and try to make good out of them is the fertile ground with which we are currently in. The current time that we’re in is also incredibly problematic and challenging, which is what you had shared, too, about describing the current political landscape, and even what it means to be in relationship with each other. It’s both being able to learn, look back, and pull those lessons to be in communion with each other in a way that allows us to think through and process things differently, and to know that whatever we’re doing now becomes the foundation for the future.

We’ve been having conversations about needing to imagine a future. By coming together as these collective groups and taking space and even, DeLa, what you shared was really important from a somatic perspective—you are dancing, you are using ritual, you are using music, you are getting people into their bodies—which is both a way of grounding, but also a way of remembering. There are things that are stored in our bodies that we can’t think our way out of, and there are ways of knowing that are different than just our frontal lobe. Being able to access some of that is really powerful from a somatic perspective.

One of the things that Wild Path Collective was really generous about and comes up a lot for me is thinking about conflict and how we deal with, show up for, approach conflict in a collective in ways that may be different than what we have inherited, learned, are taught. From a decision-making perspective, as simple a thing as how we are dividing up payment. There are lightning rods or triggers that we represent that compound the ways in which we’re interacting with each other. What are the things that we represent, and how can we honor that and process that together? The composting analogy, I think, is a really powerful one, and it’s been really important in our year together. One of the things that we’ve been thinking about as the doulas is wondering where we go from here. We are taking some time to think about the impact of this fellowship and the conversations that we’ve been having and not just move on to our next projects, but to really pause and think and use the fertilizer from this past year to make sure that the ways in which we’re moving forward are the most fruitful or intentional.


Yeah, that’s super resonant. Part of what I appreciated in hearing about the Wild Path story was the metaphorical composting of helping this white family with good justice intentions shift their understanding of what good justice work or gifting looked like and to be able to break it down even more. What are we breaking down? What is helpful to pass on in terms of nutrients? Depending on how you compost, time is an important part of composting and stillness is an important part of composting. And in these moments, I realized that’s part of what last year was, too—trying to figure out the moments when we were frozen in fear and when we were trying to be quiet and still and figure out what was happening. Figuring out how much more waste was going to be dumped on us. Even to discover—which is often the power of composting—the thing that’s been buried the longest, the surprises that are possible when you actually sit still and let an intentional process happen. And in this moment, I want to distill some information to the next generation of people in my legacy line to really explain the cyclical nature of supremacist culture backlash.

There’s a Japanese composting methodology called bokashi, and when I was working on that project it was interesting to be able to say to people that they could actually put meat in there. So just trying to honor our different or cultural approaches to composting, the different microbes that each of our composting practices offer. In composting, even the stuff you try to bury deep down, at some point, somebody’s gonna take the pitchfork and pull it up to the top, because they have to rotate. And so, in that process, who am I? Am I the pitchfork person? Am I the person who’s been dumping all my waste? And ancient wisdom. As much as we try to speed ahead with AI, the more I feel like we’re coming back to the wisdom that I know to be true. Queer people were shamans, gender non-binary people existed. We come from tribes of people that had solutions for some of what we’re experiencing, and because supremacy culture erased it from our composting practices, we’re now in a crisis.


I’m thinking in the context of how long I’ve been part of the group, where it did feel like for the first couple years I was just just sitting in the room, listening to everybody, and now am in this position where I feel comfortable asking a very uncomfortable money question to some of these people 

 I’ve spent that time with them. I feel comfortable facilitating towards a decision that feels correct for the person, not necessarily for me. There were some people who felt like they didn’t deserve the money because they weren’t as involved as other people, and so it was just having this conversation with them that felt like I was pulling from my experience of being part of the group for as long as I have. Look, I’ve seen many iterations of this group, and in all of those iterations, there have been moments when somebody was doing a lot and there have been moments when somebody wasn’t doing anything, but it ends up all balancing out. It felt like it enriched the whole experience of being with the group for so long because I’ve had this understanding of how it ebbs and flows over time.

But I also think that in terms of composting, there were a lot of ideas, and what I love about what we’ve done as a group is that none of the ideas of any of the pieces that we’re presenting feels like it was an original idea. And that’s not shade. We feel like we’ve had a thousand versions of this conversation about this particular topic, but this was the moment that we could finally put into a shape that made sense. A lot of the things that are in the piece I feel like existed six years ago in some of our earlier conversations, so it didn’t feel foreign, it just felt like it was different moments of maturation that felt really nice.


How do we place financial value on contribution? Particularly when it comes to being in collective, and, Daniel, you mentioned this too, that there was no original idea, right? Because we are in community and in this collective approach, maybe there was a spark, but then it got molded and meshed together and morphed into something else. Who’s to say that somebody who contributes one sentence deserves more than somebody who contributes three paragraphs? And I’ll use myself as an example. I could sit and listen to DeLa talk all day long, because the things that come out of your mouth are incredible, and I learn and I get chills. It takes me three hundred words to say something that you say so succinctly in a couple, and I’m getting choked up because, true story, I feel very lucky and grateful to have spent this year with you. It’s been such a valuable year in a really tough year.

As mentioned earlier, the doulas went through an extensive process around the money which I never would have wanted to have done any differently. I thought it was super valuable. We really didn’t want folks to have to out themselves of needing money and have to request it. We tried to respect that the doulas have existed before. They’re existing in this current project. They will exist in the future, and those contributions are valuable, regardless of whether you’re showing up in that moment. There was this other really tricky component that the doulas have done this work primarily without funding for most of its existence, and there have been little pockets of money for different projects for an installation or for photocopies or to make a sticker, but to my knowledge we’ve never never had a big chunk of money, and we jokingly, but also very realistically, talked about what would an HIV doula do without money because the money was getting in the way of us being able to even connect, be with each other, work, and feel like our focus was on things that were important. Just a really interesting overlap of capitalism onto collective work and really fascinating to be a part of the experience and think about, particularly as it relates to some other collectives that each of us are a part of.


I want to avoid saying that it was the perfect solution from the perspective that sometimes when collectives have to make decisions it’s not about making everyone happy, it’s just about, well, this is the one that’s gonna make the least amount of people upset. I have this real aversion to saying that the process needs to be enjoyable. Sometimes the work is the work, and the work is just annoying. From a project management perspective, where this was really one of the first projects where I had to have a real intimate conversation with everybody about how to split the money, it was not as bad as I thought it would be. But I do think it was because it came out of these growing pains and that we did have this process and that we’d done this before.


It’s really affected me to learn about how much that metaphor and our story has resonated with you all. I talk about composting at-length in my essay, so I won’t bore y’all with all that here—sike, just kidding, DeLa mentioned bokashi! I think what’s most poetic about the questions they’re asking is that in the composting process our “waste” ultimately becomes nourishment. It’s not only that we’re the hands turning the soil; our selves and the scraps of our existence become part of what will feed us again in a future season. Do with that image what y’all will. All that to say, I think taking up a composting perspective in group work is to see that nothing is a waste. Nearly anything under the right conditions can be broken down and redistributed to nourish the larger group.


To close out, is there anything else you’d like to share that you’re taking away from your time In Fellowship with the cohort?


DeLa, your vulnerability is something that I will always cherish. It is a seed that you planted deep inside of my psyche, and I think it did impact my relationship to the collective. It helped me see the ways in which vulnerability already exists within our group and honor that and witness it, and then also remember that if the person doing most of the talking and most of the emailing is also being vulnerable, then that is going to have lots of beautiful rippling effects.


Being a part of the pilot cohort was a very important part of last year for Great Leap. It gave me an additional internal litmus test and collective to bounce ideas off of because of the shift in our ensemble with having Dan join us early on and then after medical things Dan and I made choices together about his participation.

I feel like the doulas have helped to lovingly open my mind to the way in which some of what we’re trying to do is possible. Sometimes in Great Leap, and because I come out of this training, there are certain protocols you have to follow if you’re within a cultural or traditional folk practice. So it was really helpful to realize that you can also engage people in this new way that helps to expand protocol and creates a protocol for when we’re an ensemble of ensembles, or a collective of collectives or a circle of circles, which is how I think of Great Leap a lot.

Because we came from a model of one person holding the torch, it’s been really awesome to witness another model and be in community with you all. With Wild Path, witnessing the real struggle of seeing their progression from 20-ish people to five people, and knowing that sometimes in this work it goes small and it takes a group of people to carry it forward until it can go bigger or you can connect to the next group of people. I think in this moment, as I try to find more people to be with us, I’m trying to figure out what the ask is, because so many people are so inundated. At any given moment people are having to survive whatever the new trigger or issue is, and so people’s capacity is different. I’m grateful for the divine timing that in a year where things went the way they went this was a really helpful opportunity to show up in a digital space with folks. To be able to show up and be around other people who care about not being isolated, not in a hierarchy. We jump in circles because leadership can change in a circle, but there’s not a hierarchy in a circle, and so part of what this fellowship opportunity and these conversations have offered is a deep affirmation that there are so many ways that we are building together.

Part of what I’ve discovered is I’m always in training, because anytime I’m in a group, anytime I’m in a collective as a lifelong learner it’s an opportunity to learn and witness leadership. I’ve been thinking a lot about what my 21-year-old leader self would have to say to my 51-year-old leader self right now. There’s a lot of judgment and anger, but there’s also a lot of compassion and discovery. Now I understand some of the leaders that I had judgment about, now I get it. I get why you were tired, and you weren’t even dealing with ICE raids. They hadn’t even revoked Roe vs. Wade. They weren’t assaulting trans rights and trying to police bathrooms. We’re continuing to be a part of the generation who grew up with AIDS and HIV awareness, and what that life experience is like, being in community and family folks. I have a lot of gratitude in this time right now. What is the wisdom we can give that isn’t about a foundation dollar, but trying to make sure when I’m in community with people, when I’m in leadership with people, I’m accountable, I’m vulnerable, I’m receptive, and I’m proactive with where we want to go.


Affirmation. Being what feels like the youngest group in terms of members—but also at a point of maturation as a collective—coming into the fellowship emerging from conflict and being able to discuss that openly with fellow collectives was really healing. It’s taken a lot to metabolize the pain and grief that was stirred by what our group endured. Many people have felt entitled to our story, our attention, our future visions, and even the land we care for as a result of this transition. All that contributed to this self-protective stance of remaining quiet and not asking for outside help. We were worried that people wouldn’t see us in our fullness, or that what we learned from that experience was nourishing. But you all have already been through that full cycle as a group. So it felt healing to experience that knowing nod, and to have the feelings of grief we were moving through just be normalized. Honestly, it sometimes feels like failure cannot be an option for you as a racialized person. There are some cases where failure on even just a mundane activity can mean death. We still don’t really have a safety net for the work we do, we’re still healing from the transition, as well. Knowing that we’re not alone in this experience and that we’re not exceptional failures in what we experienced has been really lifegiving. We could lay that burden down finally and get back to the creative work we set out to do.


I include A Blade of Grass as a collective as well, given that you’re a collective in a different format but still a collective, and thinking about size, numbers, physical location, and proximity—to be able to spend the year thinking through some of the elements of collectives and what makes them strong, work well, effective. What are some of the challenges that come up? This goes to the idea of circles of circles and even collectives of one. I’m in these meetings as a representative of the doulas, but I’m also in other spaces as a member of different collectives and as an employee and in my relationships. My family is a collective. And so these conversations have benefited me in a lot of other spaces, and I think about the ripple effect that this fellowship, these conversations, this money has had in terms of really being able to have a wider impact beyond my time with the doulas. It’s impacted my work at The Center. It’s impacted my work in a photo collective that I’m in. It’s impacted my work with my relationships and my family. So again, really grateful to be able to think through some of these things throughout the year.

Wild Path Collective

Great Leap

This cohort has helped to create a place to think about these questions, to listen to how our colleagues around the country are trying to move. There’s not one solution model to the challenges that we’re facing right now, and more and more I find it deeply radical when people choose to do things together. 