Study group was lovely last night. I’ve been thinking about how we build sustaining and sustainable worlds and magic. I love that coming together under the grape arbor feels comfortable, familiar, and easy (in some ways). I love that new people feel comfortable coming into our space. And it’s OUR space. I’ve been organizing it and thinking about the ingredients for a while, but I am ready to have more of you to feel more stewardship of the communal space. What do I even mean? I’m using the same plates each week. They don’t live in a cupboard. Some of y’all know where the forks live. The glasses are often still out from the previous week. All that stuff could be put into place without much direction from me. 

Study group feels better when people are engaging their hands and not just their mouths. Making sure that the copious art supplies are taken out and put away can be a shared task. (Here’s a secret: molly organized the art room. I actually don’t know where and what everything is, I’m happy to learn together).

 As I try to learn how to share leadership better, I want to say that it’s not magic that there aren’t (more) weeds or debris in the gravel. There’s a lot of maintenance to create this space that we love and need. And it’s not that I’m trying to ask you in a way that you can’t. I already see people carpooling and arranging rides, carrying dishes, and putting away things. I see the rituals of greetings, settling in, and departing from one another. I  I know that you’re coming from your own intense jobs and lives. I don’t want study group to be a burden for you to come to. And I often don’t know how to ask for help, especially when people are trying to be helpful at the last minute, and haven’t thought through what tasks they could already do without asking me. And study group and the compound should be an oasis of peace for each of you and your loved ones. I literally see y’all come in stressed and leave refreshed. I don’t want to change any of that.  How do we model balance between rest and responsibilities? What rituals do we create to honor spaces and the work done to make them? 

All this is said in spirit of modeling and learning to be better together. 

from Julie:

Hi, all!

I chatted with Dolly recently about all sort of things, and it’s obvious that she’s a bit exhausted by all that she’s handling these days Community needs are big right now, for sure. I know that Study Group is a special place for all of us, and really don’t want to see it become a burden for Dolly. I told her I’d write everyone, using my bossy middle-school-teacher skills, to see if we could help out in a more organized fashion. 

These are the things that I think need to be covered for study group. If you are a regular, it’d be awesome if you could take on one or more of these tasks, or suggest something if none of these work for you. Please note that if we don’t do these, it will all fall to Dolly. And, I surely do feel more ownership in things when I’m involved in the labor of love! Don’t feel that you need to “sign up” at the moment – you can jump in when you get there or before you leave, depending on that time!

Early tasks (5:15 -5:45 at most)

• Clearing study group space of debris
• Bringing down plates/cups/silverware
• Bringing down food/drinks
• Bringing out art supplies

Duration tasks (off and on during the study group)

• Refilling food/drinks
• Clearing dirty dishes
• General tidying up as we go

Later tasks (7:15 on)

• Final dish clearing to the kitchen
• Trash clean-up
• Dish-washing
• Collecting and putting away art supplies

Did I miss anything? Any other suggestions for systems/tasks are welcome! 

Joy Menagerie purposely works towards liberation and healing. Over the past few years connecting with food has been the work we’ve about shared the most. While we’ve been feeding bellies, we’ve also been feeding and fueling mind, soul, and spirit. Sometimes the off-grid support we offer is within the “surviving” mode. Just this week, Dolly and our extended team have offered crisis counseling to people suffering suicidal ideation, dealing with being fired without cause, facing loss of housing, and grieving sudden and traumatic death. The disintegration of our societal safety net means that there’s not a readily available structures to help people navigate these crises. Sure, there’re crisis lines, but they’re anonymous and overworked. Having a known sympathetic ear and connection to networks can be the difference between surviving or falling deeper into financial and emotional despair. Joy Menagerie provides triage support and networking so that our community can survive and begin to thrive. 

There is thriving every week at Joy Menagerie too. We’ve been celebrating college acceptance, straight As, new jobs, and reconnecting with ancestral home places. These surviving and thriving supports interweave. We all are experiencing highs and lows in this time of upheaval. If we don’t acknowledge and celebrate the highs, we can’t survive the lows. If we don’t survive the lows, we can’t thrive and contribute to our community.  We’re normalizing mutual community support.  We openly discuss and dismantle systems of oppression, including racism, white supremacy, and the structural hoarding of resources. 

Surviving is necessary, thriving is joyous. We support both. Your financial support is needed to allow us to thrive in our work. 

Give directly –friend to friend– (not-tax deductible)

• Venmo @dollyjoseph,
• PayPal or Zelle dolly@dollyjoseph.com or
• check to Dolly Joseph

Give via Virginia Organizing (tax deductible) 

• check to Virginia Organizing (memo Joy Menagerie) or
• via this link.

On March 29,2020, we received our first donation for our community produce drive. On March 15, we passed $50,000 raised for this project! We began by delivering shares to individual homes when we were social isolating, and then moved to the neighborhoods model. That money has gone towards:

• $44,469.02 in produce and eggs from Standard Produce and Bellair Farm CSA distributed weekly– since May of 2020, I would guess we’ve missed less than 4 weeks!
• $5835 in stipends to neighborhood partners, and to weekly drivers. 
• $331.25 to our Joint Project of Work partner, Virginia Organizing who handles tax deductible donations.
• $138.31 in the bank. 

This money doesn’t include separate emergency community funding that goes toward: real estate taxes, gas bills, rent— all funding that goes towards strengthening and stabilizing our  community. 

We don’t have to wait for permission— we can practice reparations, solidarity, redistribution of wealth, and mutual aid and support now without institutional authority or permission. I so greatly appreciate this web of love and support we are building. I appreciate how you trust me and my partners to steward money and resources appropriately and with integrity. 

Thank you for your ongoing support. It was amazing to realize that our community supports this work to the tune of $50,000. It would be totally okay with me to get to $60,000 this month.  

Give in magnitudes of collards for our weekly food distribution: 1 case = $30, a month of collards = $180 Venmo @dollyjoseph To give with PayPal, check or for a tax deduction please contact me. 

I’ve been doing a complete rehaul of my vegetable garden. In all of my years, I can’t remember a year that I haven’t planted something. I am so lucky to have a plot of land that I know so well. Gardening has been a huge connector for me– with birth family, chosen family, community, immigrant families with their own farming cultures, and the shuttle driver earlier this month at Settle Tire. 

The big house at our family property is a central staging area for the goods from here– eggs and produce from the garden– and from afar– quantities of venison from my sister that she carefully puts up from the Martha’s Vineyard hunting season. — fish that she cleans, smokes, and freezes. — about-to-expire food stuffs from pantries. –bushels of mostly usable food discarded by grocery stores. –aspirational dried beans that no one got around to cooking yet. –gleaning from various farms, including Bellair Farm CSA. 

Some of this food goes to our regular Ridge St or North Garden regular distributions, but some just isn’t appropriate to go there for a wide variety of reasons. It’s unacceptable to me to have usable food go to waste. Mom was a child during the Depression. She told of the silence of the Tennessee mountains due to people killing the birds in order to have food to eat. I remember my own times in childhood where it seemed there was nothing to eat. My resourceful and imaginative mother created memorable meals of chef salads and a “girl scout” rice and hamburger one-pot dish out of what seemed to be bare refrigerator shelves. 

It’s been 30 years since I cooked my first entire Thanksgiving meal for our large family (I was 18, and it was delicious). I’ve been in the service industry for almost 3 decades, and have learned a great deal about food safety, preparation, and storage. An unseen part of my community food work is the many ways that I share my prepared food and knowledge with my people. Everybody eats. Food is love. I love sending a young mom home with a bushel of a combo of soups, venison, fish, and veggies ready to get turned into meals. I love to have a parade of friends come through and “shop” cast offs. I love when in return I get the cake or stew that some random fruit or vegetable has become. 

All of this is within the context of uncertainty and struggle. It’s the 3 year anniversary of the declaration of the global pandemic. My response to COVID-19 was to focus on food, because I understand it. I remember my own fears about how I would access food– how I would be able to afford or find it– would we even have enough as our supply chains, farms and processors got shut down. While there was suffering, it was lessened by both community and governmental response. This month, the emergency food assistance supplement to SNAP will be ending. This means that households will lose $95-$250 per month in food stamps. This is in addition to the rising food costs that we have all seen at the grocery store. We do not ask about the income of any of our participating community members, but I am sure that many receive SNAP benefits and will be losing this supplement. While many of us on this email list might have to tighten belts figuratively, we enjoy relative stability– we own our homes, have access to generational wealth, and/or have professional class jobs with health insurance and paid leave. Many of our neighbors have less or no access to these privileges. This is not the only way to support community– there are many ways, and as always, if you can, we appreciate your support of our weekly food distribution, but understand if you cannot. 

It’s been a while since I’ve written a comprehensive piece of the community projects I’m working on. I have been sharing asks and updates across a variety of media streams– so you may not even be aware of some of these inter-connecting community projects. Here’s what’s going on in my world:

• Food Distribution
• Emergency Community Funding
• In Person Events
• Mentoring and Consulting

Food Distribution

May will mark 3 years of weekly food distribution. In the 33 months of doing this, we’ve likely only missed maybe 5. I work with Black Elder Women on Ridge St in Cville and North Garden. These grandmothers have long and deep connections within their communities. They provide the location, some delivery and the contacting and networking of participants. I do the fundraising, the purchasing, and networking with donors and partners. We order wholesale and from Bellair Farm CSA. Bellair also generously donates produce and meat. Gleaned food is shared from a variety of other sources. Friends share clothes and household goods to be freely distributed. Extra goods and food from Ridge St are shared with communities in Buckingham. W

Over 2.5 years of distribution, we’ve raised and distributed $46,074.79. In 2022, we distributed $13,980.20 of food. We have had 117 donor since we begans. Currently we have a balance of $334.99 or a little more than 1 week of food. The primary mode of ask is through my curated email list. 

Emergency Community Funding

Through food distribution and mentoring, I become aware of financial need within our community. I ask for, and our community supports: money for rent, lawyers, gas bills, cars, car repairs, tuition, real estate taxes, and many other requests. 

I do not track this as closely as the food distribution asks because this is as needed– I am working to get meet an ask, and once it’s met, I move on. This is the sort of help that I have relied on and received within my own family — I want my family and community to be expansive. I would estimate that we raise about $8-10,000 per year in emergency funding. This offering has been made more difficult by not being on Facebook much anymore. The algorithm hides any post that includes any asks for community support. It’s been increasingly difficult to figure out how to share information effectively about individual community need. 

In Person Events

After a hiatus of about 3.5 years, we’ve resumed study group. This was a big offering of Building Experiences, our young adult-centered community support non profit. Each week a group of us gather to work, laugh, and support one another. It’s a pro-Black, pro-Queer, pro-immigrant, pro-introvert, pro-human space– and also not saccharine. It’s a genuine, multi-generational space. 

I also support my partner Raven Mack’s Southern Gothicc Futurism Haiku Slams. He’s got 4 slams planned for March, and I couldn’t be more excited. Raven and I are also curating the “Studio Gallery” at my family property– with art and displays for sale and for show. The vibe is a colorful old country store filled with ephemera. 

Mentoring and Consulting

I spend a great deal of time talking through life challenges with young (and older) people. I often forget how much energy I spend doing this because it’s so integrated into my time. I want to be a barrier-free resource to young people figuring out finances, health, school and jobs. I do this with an anti-racist lens, always– this looks like understanding where they are developmentally, with the further burden of a system that does not want them to succeed. Many of these hours is spent with young people who were BE participants. I’ve known some of these friends for 14+ years. I know their family structures and the context of where they are. I also provide individualized support to white people who want to put their ideals into action and become more involved in supporting community.  

To stay connected

If you are not receiving food distribution updates, let me know if you would like to be on that email list. 

To support emergency community funding

Some people have begun to give monthly community support funding. This is a huge help as it frees me from having to ask– there is always need. 

To support me financially

All of the work I’ve described is freely given. While I have few financial obligations, I do have some. Supporting my patreon is an easy way to contribute monthly to work– and you get writings, pictures of silly animals, and photos of my ongoing art-making. 

Also!! I’m always looking for short term consulting work– I’m good at analyzing, summarizing, writing and presenting, as well as a vast range of other tasks. Keep me in mind if you or others need quick, competent work. 

Giving

Make sure to give between friends. NOT as a service. Make sure to mark it food, or emergency or something clear

Venmo @dollyjoseph (last 4 of phone 2509)

PayPal.me/dollyjoseph

Through an agreement with VO, I can accept tax deductible donations for food distribution gifts.

Give in magnitudes of eggs: 15 dozen = $50, a month of eggs = $300 Venmo @dollyjoseph To give with PayPal, check or for a tax deduction please contact me. 

Christmas week we had a most glorious spending spree of shopping. We bought cases of sweet potatoes, potatoes, green beans, apples, onions, oranges… the fixings for many families to have the celebrations that they wanted. What a joy to be able to share. I am grateful for each of you who makes this work possible. 

Dignity– that’s one of my watchwords. There’s nothing wrong with a food bank– they are a wonderful and friendly community resource, and I’m pretty certain that none of our participants would go. While our participants may not choose to get emergency food, every bit of easing of financial strains means there’s a little more for family, housing, emergencies, or joy…

Eggs at the grocery store can be $5.50 to $7/dozen. Our cheap, accessible protein isn’t as cheap as it used to be. By purchasing wholesale, we paid $3.26/dozen. Of course, our participants don’t pay that at all. A family of 3-4 could easily use 2 dozen eggs per week with breakfast, snacks, and baking. That could be $50/month just on eggs. We are buying 15 dozen eggs per distribution– Ridge St, and North Garden. A case is $50, and we’re spending $300/month just on eggs. 

We’re all in community when we’re in the front yard– whether unloading, shopping, swapping recipes, or discussing what we’ll be making this week. You are part of this community when you support this work. You’re giving health, wellness, and hope. Thank you.