Dear {{FirstName or 'Friend'}},
We all live in multiple worlds with multiple stories and identities. Even in our daily lives we experience belonging differently from hour-to-hour as we travel between our schools, our jobs, places of worship, and shops in neighboring communities.
Some of us have to navigate between these spaces more strategically than others in order to feel safe, for instance, when walking alone at night, or holding the hand of a loved one in public.
But even then, even if some of us have more places of being othered, we likely have some places where we belong.
While we must be concerned with the suffering associated with not belonging, we also understand that there is a difference between fleeing temporary suffering as individuals, and categorical durable suffering that is persistent across many aspects of our lives and over generations. I'm referring to forms of othering that are enforced by powerful institutions including, sometimes, the government itself.
Instead, we must insist with our words, our deeds, and our care that all belong.
Holidays can be disquieting, because we know that too many of us do not have places of warmth, comfort or belonging—that some of us are slighted, and some even killed.
Still, all lives, even ones with surplus suffering, have moments of joy and love. I also know that these moments can be pushed to the edge of our being as we worry about the plight of people we care about trying to survive bombings, violence, disease and hunger.
I ask us to not assume our loved ones and neighbors are easily inhabiting those moments of joy—we should reach out to them and remind them that they too belong, especially at times when it feels like nobody sees them. We must demand of our governments, institutions, religious practices and ourselves that we embrace belonging without othering, to embrace each other, to embrace life.
There were two great gifts I received from my parents, who raised me and my eight siblings in Detroit’s Black Bottom area, when segregation was still legal, and our resources meager. Those gifts were to share and to care.
Even as I learned not to accept a world where we were othered, I also learned gratitude. Maybe it was easy, even natural with my family.
As I reflect on the year leaving and the one coming, I have deep concerns, but I also have gratitude. Especially now, in this time of radical uncertainty, I know we can and will bend the long arc of justice when we act together.
I am grateful to you for all of the countless ways, big and small, you join me in insisting this does not have to be a broken world, and help to make sure everyone belongs and no one is othered.
I am grateful because I know this is not my work, or the Institute’s work, or your work alone.
It is our work.
As we say goodbye to 2023 and to the people we lost over the past year, I invite you to remember to care for the small and the large, while at the same time enjoying the many gifts of being alive.
Below you’ll see just a fraction of the countless ways all of us at the Institute have been doing the work of building structures of care.
You may not know this, but all of our funding comes from good folks like you and the foundations who share our vision. So if it's within your means, I hope you're able to make a gift to allow us to push forward with our mission of creating a world where everyone belongs.
