Sending Bev on Vacation!!!

Being located in this place at this time and navigating the world as Black, woman, mother or (insert any exploited identity here), many of us inherit or acquire a certain grace that other’s mistake for naivety, but we find ways to stay grounded and we keep it pushing. Sometimes it’s easier to just keep going. Sometimes pushing through feels like the only choice. When it is your community’s health and wellness you are working to protect, it hits different. When it is your son, your auntie, the children of friends and people you admire, slowing down can feel like giving up. It can feel like failure. When your livelihood comes from pouring life into your own hood, there is no amount of time that feels appropriate. No amount of money or indulgence how ever small feels justifiable to spend on filling one’s own cup, when so many loved ones are struggling. We have to learn, often through hard lessons that pouring from an empty cup is not sustainable. We have to practice slowing down, even if just for a moment, so we can feel into all of the grief and the joy that we are made of. We have to fill our bellies with laughter, breath, gin(ger) and juice. And sometimes we just need a vacation.

Anyone who has spent 7 seconds in the presence of Beverly Grant will attest to the fact that she is grace personified. For 11 years our Bevie has pushed through, carrying an entire community of people while also caring for her family at home and navigating immense grief and hardship. While it would be easy to put Beverly on a pedestal for all the work she has done, it is more loving to recognize that she is very much human. Just because she makes this work look easy doesn’t mean it is. In all these years, Beverly has never taken a vacation so to celebrate this brilliant Libra’s tireless labor for our community we are raising money for an all expenses paid beach vacation for Bevie, her daughter Blayre, a caretaker for Blayre and a friend of her choice.

We are asking for our community to come together now, to give generously in support of Bevie refilling her cup, feeling love from all of us and feeling sand beneath her toes.