A few years ago - let’s call it 12 years ago - I made the decision to really dedicate my life to understanding what collective liberation looks like. Not just for me and the people I care most about, but for all people. For all of us. How do we achieve such a thing?

When Erin and I met in 2020, we hit it off pretty instantly. I’m not going to say that we were fast friends, but we were fast peers in how we related to and respected one another and what we were looking to achieve in the world. She had been on her own learning journey for a few years; deconstructing what white womanhood is and how it is wielded in our society. Once we started doing a few smaller projects together, we gained an even more in depth understanding about our shared hopes for our world and future. And thus, after about four years of sporadically working together, the Liberation Nexus Lab was born.

So, what is our mission and vision for this work?

That could be complicated to answer for a few reasons, but honestly, our mission and vision at its foundation is: to create a better world for as many of us as possible, through shared learning and creation and community building. We go about achieving our mission in a lot of different ways, but what we finally settled on is: we have to be in proximity to one another in order to build ecosystems of understanding and care. This was the paradigm shift for us. We have to do this work (whatever it is) TOGETHER. And we have to show others HOW to do it together.

Our guiding ethos (I’ll write more about this soon) states:

“The current culture of division and spotlight on capitalistic outcomes and productivity has succeeded in divorcing us from our own humanity and the humanity of those around us. The Lab is a place for us to center our collective humanity. In The Lab, we will attend to the needs of the individual while acknowledging the importance of the collective journey to abolish oppressive systems and expectations and create the conditions for the liberation of all people regardless of race, color, creed, religion, gender, or any other identity marker. Through this work, we hope to create a community and network to create meaningful moments of connection in people’s lives.”

… and we wholly believe and live this ethos. Erin and I are trying to live our lives in such a way that our existence helps to shift the paradigms of what relationships, work, collaboration, collective care, learning, decolonization,and community are. That’s why we’re doing this. That’s why we decided to build something together. We believe that the ONLY way we survive the violent structures that have been raised around us, if for us to all survive together; and that is, fundamentally, a paradigm shift.

-Emerald Anderson-Ford