Support for Bo Brown's passing and legacy

Update 10/27/21:

Our beloved Bo Brown died at home on Sunday morning, October 24th, 2021, of complications from behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia. Her passing was unexpected and quick. She is mourned by her partner, Etang, and a broad, inter-generational community of family and friends. She is dearly missed. 

All donations after 10/24 will cover cremation and memorial costs and to support Etang through this time.

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Bo Brown needs your love. Bo, who has worked tirelessly for her many strong communities for decades, needs you to show up for her, now.


Bo Brown is a lifelong movement-maker and community supporter who is living with Lewy Body Dementia, for which she requires constant care. If you've never met Bo, you've never seen the profound effect this powerhouse, principled woman has had on everyone around her. 


If you know one thing about Bo, you should know that she knows how to Show Up. Decades of hard work have built an enormous web of community and family around Bo, from the causes she supported as part of the George Jackson Brigade to the people with whom she was incarcerated; the countless families Bo has helped through hard times to the decades-long commitment she's proven to the health and liberation of all incarcerated people. Ask anyone who knows her and they can tearfully describe her ability to show up when it's time and stay in the fight til the fight is done. Bo has changed lives. She has made the world demonstrably, measurably better.


Why am I telling you this? Because Bo is one example of how we ought to live in the world. How we must show up for each other, again and again, until we are all safe and free. In these wild times, under the rise of fascism in this country, as the world's ecosystems falter and disintegrate, now more than ever we need to show that we can show up how Bo has shown up.


Lewy Body Dementia is a brutal, wretched thing with which to live. It affects a person's cognitive function, their motor abilities, their digestion, their sleep, their memory, and their personality. Bo requires round-the-clock care and her main caregiver is her solid rock of a loving partner, Etang. Bo's care, ongoing, is expensive. Costs for daily ongoing care are thousands of dollars a month, more than her pension can ever hope to cover. It is not a treatable disease, so this care is perpetual, as are its costs.


Bo has recently and quickly been dislocated from her dementia day care program, forcing a crisis for Etang to scramble to find appropriate care and to afford the cost increase that comes with this shift.


If we all show up to support Bo a little, we can keep her and her partner, Etang, in good care. We need your help.