After nearly a year of what I experienced as being consistently targeted and mobbed by many of my coworkers, reporting it repeatedly, watching similar patterns affect others, and speaking up in hopes of creating meaningful change, I was ultimately terminated from my job in the Technology Department on the first floor of the University of Arizona Campus Store.

My former manager, Mike Wang, Manager of Technology Services and Procurement, sent me the termination email and copied Alli J. Howard, Assistant Director, General Merchandise.

I had been seeking help from the beginning. I reported what I was experiencing, tried to address the problems directly, and continued speaking up when I saw similar treatment affecting not only me, but other people around me. At the beginning of September, I lost my job.

I am now asking for support so I can continue to afford rent, classes, basic living expenses, and legal costs while I work through what has happened and continue pursuing accountability.

More importantly, I am asking for support so that I can overcome these challenges without giving up the person I have worked so hard to become.

I want to continue existing authentically and freely. I want my life to demonstrate that conformity is not the only option, no matter how strongly the world, workplaces, institutions, or social hierarchies may try to convince us that we need to become smaller, quieter, or less ourselves in order to survive.

My larger goal has always been much bigger than one job.

I want to finish my degree and eventually build a large regenerative agricultural farm and community with low-income and free housing, where I can teach regenerative agriculture and help make that knowledge accessible to others.

I want to help restore large areas of degraded land and transform them into edible food forests that can provide food for people who need it. I want to help rebuild soil, increase biodiversity, conserve water, store carbon, cool landscapes, and create healthier and more resilient communities.

Most of all, I want to spread that knowledge so that other people can carry it forward too.

If I have ever helped you buy or understand technology, brightened your day, offered you encouragement, shared words of wisdom, taught you something, made you laugh, listened when you needed someone to listen, or left any positive impact on your life, please consider helping me continue forward and continue my fight for justice.

And if you cannot help financially, please pay it forward by sharing my story.

That is genuinely help enough.

The farther my story travels, the more likely it is to reach someone else who has experienced something similar and remind them that systems of power do not have to be faced alone.

I hope not only to find justice for myself, but to make this fight mean something for the people who came before me, the people who were never able to speak, and the people who come afterward with more knowledge, more tools, and more power to stand up for themselves.

I still intend to finish my degree.

I still intend to grow food.

I still intend to restore land.

I still intend to teach.

I still intend to build something that helps people.

And no matter what has happened, I still intend to make something good come from it.

Thank you for helping me continue.