Thank you to everybody who has reached out to check in. I’m okay, I am safe, and I am also exhausted, spooked, and expecting more. For those who don’t know, I started my community organizing in Brooklyn Center in 2018. Our organization has moved our physical office to Brooklyn Park but continue to serve and…
Black History Month Ends; Black History Continues
February is set aside as Black History Month in the United States and it can be a great time for us to remember the importance of going back and checking what we learned and expand on that knowledge. Black history is American history, but it’s often left out or reframed when talked about on a…
Martin Luther King Jr. – A Reminder for us White People
“Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance. It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn.” Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or…
“I Saw That You Are A Christian…”
When I got to the States after Peru, I was looking for my fifth therapist in less than a year. At the time, I was starting to believe there was something super wrong with me even though all logical evidence pointed to different situational factors (ex: the contract with IJM ending meaning the therapy with…
Update: I still really, really want to see human trafficking end
Ending trafficking I will always credit Dressember with my introduction to advocacy. I mean, I had first heard about human trafficking at a panel event at church, but I didn’t think there was much I could do about it until I got older and at least finished high school or something. Then, scrolling through Facebook…
Dressember 2020: Snow Excuses
“The greatest mistake of the movement has been trying to organize a sleeping people around specific goals. You have to wake the people up first, then you’ll get action.” Malcolm X Starting Point: Dressember I “woke up” when I found out human trafficking was happening in Madison, Wisconsin and not just in third world countries….
“Are You Excited and Celebrating?”
My friend asked if I was celebrating as he met me on the patio for coffee. I looked up from my drink with tired eyes as cars passed honking and took up the space I had to answer. I wasn’t sure what to say. He knew I had come from a march, but didn’t he…
A Year in Review or About to be Recreated?
I’ve warned you about long posts in the past, but this one is by far the longest. To celebrate my birthday, some friends I met while in Bolivia came to visit. As you can imagine, whenever you have friends from one aspect of life step into another, it becomes surreal, and although we’ve visited each…
Ali’s Voice
This has been a daunting post to put together. Does anybody else ever get to the point where it’s scary to open your mouth because you’re so aware of how little you know and understand that you don’t want to take steps in the wrong direction? Or accidentally cause a lot of harm? That’s me…
We Need to do More
I have multiple drafted blog posts from the past few months that never got published. They felt pointless when everybody was experiencing the same pandemic. And then I remembered we are not all experiencing the same pandemic. Different communities are facing different difficulties, and all of those are valid. In elementary school, I first learned…