Dear Community,

To ask for money, especially now, is terrifying. As many of us rise to meet this moment to support mutual aid projects, buy food, cook meals, and redistribute money, it has always been each other who have kept us safe, housed, and fed. As someone who deeply believes in raising funds to support one another, I cannot say that it makes the uneasiness I feel in my body feel any lighter. To ask for money, time, or even reposting is not something I take lightly, so thank you in advance, this all feels incredibly generous to me.

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m alex, queer non-binary latine person who has been organizing communities of color, students, young people, and working class folx in the Bay Area for the last 7 years, and in 2021, I plopped into a somatics training led by The Embodiment Institute, taught by Prentis Hemphill. I had no idea what would crack open within me, but it led me down a journey of unlearning and re-learning what it means to be in this body. Somatics, coming from the greek word soma refers to the body, the whole body, to feel into the interconnectedness of our emotions to our bodily knowledge, intutition, wisdom, and being, our aliveness. Selfishly, somatics was always a practice for me. I never went in with intentions of what the future could look like. As I turned 30 last year, I could not ignore the longing to be in a more intentional relationship with somatics. Excitedly, I started the Strozzi Institute Somatics Coaching program in October 2025. Healing has always meant the fight for my life, being fully invested in my own arc of transformation, watering the seed that was first planted within me as I became a young organizer. What will it take to transform the world? I don’t know the answer yet, but everything keeps me coming back to our healing, and as bell hooks wrote in 1999, “Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.” I’m drawn to what it means to heal with each other, in community, through somatics, practice, land, ancestral knowledge, culture, joy, grief; it’s a weaving of many truths for me. However, despite my longing to heal and support others in their journey to healing, somatics coaching training comes with a price that is beyond my current means. For full transparency, tuition will cost $12,000, which is just about how much my grad program cost me. Alongside the debt I accrued from my undergrad that i anticipate paying off for the next 20 years, I do not come to the decision and risk to say “yes” to more debt lightly. Because somatics has been the steady stream in my life that allows me to keep coming back home, the home I am always tearing down and rebuilding within myself, i humbly come to my community for support. Through the support of people who love me and encouraged this risk, I have come to realize that asking for help is not only about tuition, but also about the cost of traveling to Petaluma for three additional in-person trainings, which is why I’m humbly fundraising for $10,000. I don’t have any expectations, mostly a lot of humility to be witnessed in a vulnerable way, knowing that a lot of people don’t have the means when there is a lot of scarcity within our communities right now, the govt is shutting down vital resources for people to have their basic necessities met, so I don’t ask lightly, especially with the ongoing fight and resistance to the rise of fascism in this country. These funds would be an investment in my learning as a coach and facilitator, to attend in-person training, continue taking on practice clients at no or low cost to support people in critical moments, bring somatics into organizing spaces, and avoid increasing debt under racial capitalism. Our resistance cannot forgo care and the needs we all have as we collectively struggle towards liberation.

As I’ve slowly worked up the courage to create this fundraiser, I’ve been thinking a lot about Robin Wall Kimmerer’s chapter about strawberries in Braiding Sweetgrass. It is a tender chapter on the gift economy and reciprocity. Strawberries grow at our feet, free, not as a reward but simply as a gift, and “gifts exist in a realm of humility and mystery – as with random acts of kindness, we do not know their source.” Any investment in this program, whether monetary or otherwise, a reshare, will be a gift to me.

In the same way, I hope to give those around me the gift of somatics, with group teachings, trainings, 1-1 coaching, and to bring practice into movement. I hope that in the next 8 months, as I deepen my practice and coaching, I will be in the same reciprocity as the strawberry, the heart berry, full of time, attention, and care for my own/your/our healing and transformation.

Throughout this fundraiser, I hope to offer additional services in the spirit of reciprocity and the gift economy, including sliding-scale reiki sessions, limpias, or herbal support. Still, in a largely inaccessible world, I hope to make as many offerings free or on a sliding scale as possible, knowing that healing shouldn’t be limited to those with privilege or power. I want to deliver healing to our communities who are the most impacted. If you are someone affected by the kidnappings in our communities or the various ongoing genocides, I would be so grateful to connect you to my wider network of healers and practitioners. Our collective healing is possible, I hear her on her way with the liberation of our people.

With care and gratitude,

alex

To read “The Gift of Strawberries” here is the pdf of the chapter: https://indigenous.abbyschools.ca/sites/default/files/3.%20%20The%20Gift%20of%20Strawberries%20Excerpt_0_0.pdf