maowunyo de asis is fundraising
Support Plant Medicine Education for Unhoused Oakland!
Hi everyone. My name is Joyous and Im fundraising to make copies for my book entitled “The Farmacy: Plant Medicine”. It shares info about plants you can find growing around Oakland or you can buy at the market using your EBT card - plants that we can use for medicine! It shares what ailments and conditions the plant helps with and how to turn the plant into medicine. It also shares the spiritual meanings and uses for the plants. My hope is that by using this book, individuals will be able to identify plants and herbs on their own, make their own medicine and have agency in their self-care and wellness.
The books cost $13.70 each (tax included) to print with a sturdy cover and cover protector. I have already printed up 364 copies to distribute for free to unhoused Oakland residents. But the demand is so much higher!
The book is a project of Soul Food Shack, a program I started out of the Village in Oakland (fiscally sponsored by Holistic Underground). I started the Soul Food Shack during the COVID19 shut down. The COVID19 pandemic made the lack of access to medical care to unhoused communities very clear.
My intention is to rebirth our valuable relationship to Earth and her medicine. I believe its important to give this medicine to our people who are in desperate need of health and wellness because we are most impacted by the inequities, exploitation and oppression of this system. My communities - poor & working class, unhoused, Black/Indigenous/Melinated, immigrant, women - bear the brunt of being the communities with the worse health.
Homeless communities face the highest numbers of rising violence, mental health - including addiction and dependency, and disease.
Unhoused people live in conditions that cause us to be murdered at a rate 25 times higher that the rest of the population The average age of death of unhoused persons is about 50 years old. That’s an age at which U.S. citizens were dying in 1900. Comparatively the average life expectancy for housed U.S. citizens is 70 years old. Unhoused people suffer from cancer, heart disease, diabetes, HIV/AIDS - the same illnesses experienced by people with stable housing, but at a rate 6 times higher that housed folks.
Herbal medicine has been used since the beginning of time. It was used by our ancestors for our very day needs - such as food, medicine, ceremony, cleansing arsenals, and more.
We are surrounded by medicine from the plant community. Even many of the plants classified as “weeds'' are some of the most powerful medicines we can find. When we look at the western pharmaceuticals we can see that most if not all pills are inspired by the healing properties of plants. So why don’t we just use the plants instead of pills? Simple answer: free medicine heals people and does’t make money for a multi million dollar medical industry.
My community is going thru a serious mental health and physical health crisis. As unhoused folks, we face discrimination when seeking medical help. Many unhoused people are mistreated or neglected by medical professionals. Many poor folks don't have the agency to advocate for themselves. On top of that, we don't always have the proper support to get the medical care we need due to lack of money, lack of transportation, and housing. And for poor folks, struggling with mental health issues - including addiction and dependency - there is literally no where for folks to go.
Doctors refuse to perform life saving surgeries on unhoused folks, claiming it is against their policy to release patient post-surgery onto the streets. Doctors deny unhoused folks life sustaining and life saving equipment, saying that they will not release the high priced technology to the unhoused because they don’t have a place to live to live.
This inequity of resources and treatment add on to the distrust and even fear many BIPOC folks and poor folks have around the U.S. Medical Industry. This distrust and fear is rooted in the discrimination and experimentation many of our people have experienced when seeking basic and emergency medical care.
Learning not only about plant based medicines but other health and wellness alternatives like yoga, meditation, excercise and peer to peer therapy is crucial for my comnunity.
“Our Creator gave us these plants. No one should be able to keep them from us. Using these plants is part of people’s cultures. No one should be denied their ancient ways. Western medicine is driven by money for profit, and keeping people sick keeps the money coming in. Plant medicine is based on a deep relationship to keep wellness, health, healing and balance not just in humans but in the plant and natural world as well.”
- From the introduction I wrote in “The Farmacy: Plant Medicines
Making plant based medicine to share with the people who are most impacted by the traumas of poverty and the west medical industry is something I am dedicated to. Returning to our Ancestral/ancient relationships with plants as sources of medicine and wellness is a growing trend, which has given me a great sense of hope for our community here in Oakland and worldwide. I’m thankful to being able to constantly learn about our plant family who have been here for more generations than us, and I'm honored to help my community by sharing what I know. I hope that through efforts, people will take control of their health and wellness and will want to learn more themselves or teach others what they have learned about herbal medicine.
thank you for taking time to read about the work I do with plant based medicines and our unhoused folks. if you can't personally contribute to this fundraiser at this time, please share this gofundme with your networks. perhaps someone in your circle can support :)
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