Introduction

As Grimalkin has progressed, it appears now to be probable that we do have a future, and a potentially amazing one at that. I have been thinking a lot about our future, and as a white organizer and founder of Grimalkin in the executive director role, I felt it imperative that I make it known publicly what my intentions are regarding the future of Grimalkin and seek the approval of our board, collective, and several connected community members. This statement and essay was first reviewed and edited by Eli Owens, and then it was sent to our board, collective, and several connected community members for feedback and approval before we made it public.

I believe everyone in our collective and on our board already are or could be great facilitators. I prefer to use the word facilitator over leader.

Facilitation

According to the Oxford Dictionary, a facilitator is a person or thing that makes an action or process easy or easier. Facilitators encourage, support, and share. Facilitators make referrals to other knowledgeable people depending on someone’s needs, share their life story and lessons, while also trying to create more authentic spaces in this world that are accessible and safe, and most of all, a facilitator supports and motivates others to take additional actions towards making progress in their particular field, growth and learning. In short, they bring people together to make things happen and make positive change in their community.

Facilitators also try to do and be better as human beings by supporting and listening to the most marginalized in their community and from learning from their personal and professional mistakes and errors in judgment so that they can continuously grow, learn, do, and be better for themselves and for their community.

Facilitators are willing to accept when they are wrong. They embrace failure as an opportunity to learn, grow, do, and be better, as much as they do from their successes, and they hold themselves accountable when they’ve done wrong or harm regardless of whether their intentions were good. Lastly, facilitators inspire others to do better by example and through how they care for their community and themselves.

I strive to do these things and to show it through my actions. I make mistakes. I’ve learned most of what I’ve learned through my mistakes and bad choices. In the past, I clung to self-hatred, and I was constantly triggered because of decades of trauma starting from close to birth to well into my young adult life, but it’s so much better now, because I’ve finally gotten to a place where I can be kinder to myself when I make mistakes or poor decisions, and I am also able to hold myself accountable while being compassionate to myself. That is so much easier to do when you’re not beating yourself up and feeling triggered most of the time.

As Grimalkin has evolved, I feel like I have continually re-committed myself to doing this work and to continuously learning to be a better facilitator. Since this project began, I keep learning, and then I keep working to do and be better. I see how our work has progressed, and that is what led me to make a commitment to myself and my own mental health. It became clear that I had to do that if Grimalkin was going to have a chance at success.

I am very grateful for this opportunity to do this work and that so many people have believed in it and supported how we have evolved, and I think it is truly a remarkable and beautiful collective effort.

I am determined to see this project to a place where it will be much easier to manage in terms of labor, workload, resources, and money. I want it to be at a point where all of us can say that what we have created is a great gift to ourselves and our community, and we will have created much stronger channels, structures and networks for future generations to keep adapting and shifting to keep moving it forward. I want to leave this world knowing Grimalkin is on solid ground and in good hands.

It’s a life commitment, and no matter how hard it can be sometimes, and there were a few hard times already and likely more to come, this work is something I regularly recommit to doing, and those moments of recommitting myself come often. As we have progressed, more often those things are from great experiences and moments of tangible success, but it’s also been true in our darker moments. This work motivates me to always strive to be better. Our faults and our mistakes can be powerful motivators to do better for ourselves and others if we can be compassionate and kind to ourselves while also holding ourselves accountable.

It makes you better and stronger because you are facing your demons in a productive way. All of us have some kind of demon from some kind of trauma. Some have a little and some have more. This work is when I feel I can be my best and my most real and authentic self. That brings me happiness and a sense of purpose, and for someone like me, that is everything.

When I think about the idea of where we will be in 20 years, it occurs to me that I will be 70 or 71. That blows my mind. It also was a tremendous motivator to really think through how we can get to a sustainable place in 10 years or in 20 years. I’m seeing the potential this has as we keep moving forward. I believe we can do it. Now that we have already accomplished some really awesome things, many of which have been difficult, I can see a better future that is not as far out of reach as previously. Grimalkin could even sustain past my life and hopefully past all of our lives.

In 15 years from now, this project that we all started together can go as far as everyone's potential, I hope we are in a stable place so that rather than having an executive director, we have a small group of committed people and on equal footing in terms salary and decision making, and they’ll collaborate with one another by bringing ideas to the table for us to think through and determine if we can make those ideas work effectively and if they are viable solutions. We then would bring those ideas to the board and collective (as I do now) to hash out ideas even more and develop them to a place that everyone approves.

We can call ourselves Executive Facilitators or just Facilitators. It would divide the workload and put more of the visionary creativity in the hands of more people, and through collaboration and coming together to do this work, we could do far more than we have already. This approach within the more typical and traditional hierarchy of nonprofits feels right to me.

It obviously means people on this team have to be very flexible, and they need to be people who are not only committed to this work and our mission, but also committed to doing the mental health work needed for themselves to be and do better for the community.

That’s who I want and intend to work with and who I know from experience that I am able to work with well. Life experience has shown me so. No one is perfect. We all fuck up, but we must deal with our personal failures, mistakes, demons, trauma, etc. productively and compassionately to have any chance of making a better world for ourselves. We also need to keep in mind that there isn't one way to focus on your mental health, but it is absolutely essential to this work, any organizing work, and it is the only way Grimalkin can be successful far into the future.

I'm striving to embrace failure in my life. It really is an opportunity for growth or for something new and different. Until facing and acknowledging the ugliness in the history of our community, city, country, and ourselves, we will never be able to do better collectively and no one can truly heal, especially the most marginalized.

Also, this is most important for white facilitators. We must work together and compassionately hold one another accountable and support one another, especially when we fail, cause harm, make mistakes and poor decisions, regardless of whether our intentions were good. It’s our responsibility to do this so that Black folks and other people of color do not have to do this work.

White organizers with good intentions (and some with likely bad intentions) have caused so much harm in organizing spaces, in our communities, and within the nonprofit sector. This has to change if we are to be successful. It has to change if we want a better future. We have to continually recommit ourselves as white organizers and facilitators to doing this accountability work, especially during difficult times. All people of course should hold themselves and others accountable, but white people have a critically important responsibility to do that with other white folks within mutual aid and organizing work.

One of the many reasons that Eli, Carla and I work well together is because of our commitment to doing the mental health work for ourselves, and because we hold each other accountable in a compassionate way. We inspire one another creatively and in progressing Grimalkin’s mission, and we also encourage one another to continuously do better for ourselves and our community.

When it comes to Grimalkin, it’s obvious that it is going to take more people doing more things- not just things Eli, Carla and I happen to be doing now, but if we had additional committed folks, we could focus more on improving and having more focus on the things we are already doing and also coming together to dream of new ways to make progress in fulfilling our mission.

I also want people on this core facilitator team to be matched up with their particular set of strengths and skills in terms of their work and labor. I believe each of us has some kind of calling because we are creative people and we are making music and art. That in itself is a calling. At the same time, there are some other skills, strengths and things we all individually enjoy doing and sharing that can be a great asset to our community. We should be building on that as much as possible. Imagine being paid properly and taking good care of yourself and the community while doing it. I think we can reach that turning point in 10 years.

My intention with this project is that it will have reached solid ground, have proper structures in place to make the work manageable for everyone, and that we are in a sustainable place in terms of workload, resources, salaries, health resources, and effectiveness in no longer than 15 years, but that we will see a solid progression in 10 years from now. By then, we should be on the cusp of sustainability in terms of finally making it happen.

I believe in 10 years we will have a solid team in place. We can then hopefully be truer to our values by leveling the hierarchy within this work and the nonprofit and business world by making our leadership (facilitating) continuously more horizontal.

Eli had the idea of calling ourselves an anti-profit rather than a nonprofit. Of course, we still need to publicly promote and use our nonprofit status to mobilize money and resources back into our community, but we can make a short public statement on our website’s home page about being an anti-profit if folks feel this is a good idea.

Our collective work and connection means something. It's evolved from a DIY label to something so far beyond me or any one person or any one person's music, skills, etc. I believe that. We are building a grassroots community and caring for ourselves. We can't rely on the government and grants or individual wealth, but we can leverage and mobilize those things in ways to help our community. That's how I see our move to nonprofit (anti-profit).

There's money and resources out there and some will help us along the way, but something that all of us have is our collective power to make a difference for ourselves through our own talents and skills. We have so far to go, but we are creating something that has the potential to be a better future for ourselves and for all of us involved now and going forward in an ongoing capacity.

I strongly believe knowledge in the real world is better than from institutions, but we can leverage that privilege to get some of that generational wealth and government money and resources.

In my opinion, our festival is a celebration of queer joy and the redistribution of funds. Everything we do has mutual aid and the redistribution of wealth, knowledge and resources at its core. There's so much potential and opportunity for the future. At least until the world ends from humankind's stupidity in some way...that's already happening.

But that doesn't matter because all we have is this moment in time and what feels best and most just in the present, and once you see, feel and know that, you have to do better for yourself and the future for those in your community. What else is the point of living? How else can you find peace?

I see the potential in our collective and know we very well could have an amazing future in the hands of many amazing people.

There have been so many lessons in this work about how I need to be doing better or could be better, and it's inspired and motivated me to be a better person, and this led me to the realization that it's my anxiety, mental health and past traumas that have prevented me from even wanting to be my best self for myself and how doing that work on and for myself, first and foremost, is required to do mutual aid, community and organizing work well.

I lived most of my life believing I didn't deserve to feel good or good about myself. If I cannot feel good about myself, I cannot be an effective leader (facilitator) and organizer. I can’t be effective at anything.

I spent most of my life never giving myself a break ever. Constant misery. There's anxiety. There's depression that the anxiety is masking. There's intrusive thoughts, and I would struggle to do positive self-talk even though I knew I should be practicing that over negative self-talk. That has gotten a bit easier now that I’ve been back in therapy again for the past 2+ years.

I’ve developed skills through therapy. That in conjunction with the medication I started a few months ago has made all the difference. I tried at least 4 other therapists, a support group, and 2 different kinds of medicine in the past, but I don’t think I was ready to want better for myself. Grimalkin’s progress and working with everyone made me truly want to do better for myself.

It’s working because I want it, but it hasn’t been easy, but now my brain finally has the space to pause when triggered or when emotions are on high. Fighting those impulses and striving to do better was just so exhausting and difficult. Once I started doing better by myself, I was doing better by my community.

Grimalkin's mission, progress and everyone involved and everything we've done collectively over time has gradually opened my eyes to how the work we are doing is so important in the larger scheme of things and in a much larger sense than any one person. I need to take care of myself so that I can see Grimalkin into the future. The more we progress, the more I believe we will get there.

It's beautiful that all of the people involved in Grimalkin saw the potential in what we are doing. I continuously learn how to be a better leader (facilitator), friend, mentor, and healing and resource mobilizer from doing this work with everyone who has been part of it. This opportunity to do this work gave me the chance to cultivate, grow, and improve upon this idea of what Grimalkin could be and do through our work, services and mission. Our work keeps blooming in different ways, and that motivates me to keep going and to keep striving to do and be better for myself and our community.

We want our community and artists to feel like they've grown in some way from working and partnering with us, and that in turn, inspires them to want to do that for others. There is something so human in that, and as ugly as we can be as humans, capitalism and all the isms drive and divide us away from our true selves. It severs our ties and connections. It breaks down and suppresses our history and relationships that were once rooted in community care. It prevents us from feeling connection and empathy, and it often prevents us from being the best in this life.

I am focused on the future of Grimalkin and this has the potential to be something that grows far into the future. I'm also going to be a lot older in 20 years. I'm determined to make this thing last past my life and hopefully past the lives of everyone involved in Grimalkin at this time.

My mom died at 68. Reaching that age is now a future turning point for me. Will I make it to that age? Will I go past it? It's so weird to think about. It's both morbid and fascinating. I'll never know so I might as well keep trying to be better, so that when my time comes, I'm at peace and know I made the most of my time while I was here.

I believe Grimalkin can be the better model for using the nonprofit system to better navigate capitalism. I believe it can result in truly and effectively caring for our community.

Most of our current systems are so corrupt and biased and unbalanced- our schools, hospitals, prisons, social work, vocational counseling, and various other institutions. Some of our current systems are impenetrable. You may make individual differences in the lives of children and adults, but in the wider picture, you're just a tool and they keep trying to use more and more.

That’s what being a teacher felt increasingly like over my teaching career. It felt similarly with vocational counseling, but I felt like it was likely the best I could do while making a living. It was less confining than teaching, but I'm glad I was laid off. It's exhausting having to constantly hide and mask who you are daily as someone marginalized in any way- queer, trans, neurodivergent, and with various health struggles in my case.

I know I helped many children and adults, but both were highly imperfect systems and structures. So much of the time was spent feeling like many things were unfair, unjust and futile, but that's how capitalism has corrupted socialist and community oriented ideas and tendencies, because it is a tendency and a human instinct to care for your community. I think capitalism in many ways is unnatural for humans, but we are born into it and force fed that it's the best way to live.

It's a very strong human instinct to care for others and that makes us human. These systems that are larger like schools allow us to help others but they confine us to what degree we can really care for our community and the people in our lives.

As much as there are hollow and frivolous people, more of us mean well. Capitalism divides and dissects and blinds us so we no longer can effectively have community and community care, and so we are often here selfishly looking out for #1, especially at the expense of others.

The way nonprofits interact in our society under capitalism has been fraught. The "successful" ones are mega giants. If communities found ways to link together with other communities, the nonprofit structure can be used as a tool to help your community, and then if we connected and created networks with those other communities/small community-based nonprofits rather than try to become a collective giant of a nonprofit, we could have strong networks of communities working together who have common ground to help all of us collectively, and by staying small, we can better help the folks local to us by sharing, respecting, celebrating, and considering those perspectives within our work. That could lead to more distribution of wealth and resources.

I believe that's a possible way for our communities to take back power and control while existing among the mega giant capitalists. There's ways to use the system to benefit our goals, and since It's the only show in town that has a viable sustainable future, what choice do we have?

I think we made the right choice in going to a nonprofit. There's enough leeway in the structure for us to make the most out of it financially. There are folks with disposable income and also wealthy people, privileged people, but compassionate people on some level (maybe some more so than others) that can donate funds, resources and skills to us, and many often run foundations and our government. Our government takes from us and often actively harms us and owes us more than they currently give us. We can use our collective power to help redistribute wealth, knowledge and resources back into our community and to initiate and create paths for healing those most affected and marginalized and our community in general.

I believe the community we have created so far can evolve even further and make an impact towards creating a kinder, more compassionate, just, and fair future for ourselves.

After our festival, we will reassess our finances and propose a plan for spending funds for the rest of this year and into next year. That will be presented to the board and collective at a scheduled future board/business meeting. After the board has approved our budget, and after the board and collective approve our financial goals, we will have that information made available to anyone who would like to review it.

Our board and business meetings are open to the public, and if you are interested, please follow our calendar on our website. You can add it to your own calendar within Google Calendar. There are directions on how to do that above the calendar on that page. Then you will see when our board and business meetings are scheduled and you will have access to the links and information about all of our meetings, as well as our releases, anniversaries, virtual hangouts and listening parties, interviews, workshops, shows, and other events.

I appreciate and thank everyone who has been part of this project and journey. I would love to hear your thoughts on the future of Grimalkin and on what I have shared within this statement and essay. -Nancy Grim Kells