Quick Treats For Care & Kinship

An antidote to inbox horrors for parents who need a glimpse of hope

Raising Luminaries Quick Treats! Featuring a hand holdign an ice cream cone wiht bright sprinkles across the whole image.

Hey friends!

Are you feeling panicked, horrified, or numb?

Well, of course you are! February isn’t pulling any punches! The latest barrage of executive orders is as horrifying as we feared, and it would be easy to sink into the weight of our own despair. But luckily, we’ve come prepared, and we’re ready to respond.

The Year of the Snake brings us the energy we need at a time like this - resilient, strategic, and willing to strike when courageous action is needed. This is your reminder that you’ve laid the groundwork for these past four years, and you’ve got what you need to make life a living hell for bigots and fascists.

As you’ll see below - we are not powerless. We are ready. And we are certainly not alone.

So, take a breath. Acknowledge the exhaustion, the bruises, and the terror. And use these little wins of collective action, small joys, and quick treats below to keep you rockin’ & ready for action.

Here’s to finding opportunities for resistance!

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February 2025 Quick Treats

Instead of demanding action, these treats are for you - with no expectations, no obligations, and no guilt if you’re not up for it right now

1. Good News

2. Cool Things That Exist Now

3. Oh, Hey We Found The Helpers

4. A Goofy Thing Just For You To Enjoy

5. Helpful Stuff To Keep In Your Pocket For Later

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a giant raccoon demolishing a Klamath hydroelectric dam with a sledgehammer. A giant crack in the dam releases a flood of fish, waterfowl, predators, and plant life to restore the ecosystem

1. Good News in environment & health

I know it’s hard not to get overwhelmed by VERY BIG SCARY EXECUTIVE ORDERS. But one way that helps seasoned stay activists motivated is the knowledge that big changes always start small, start local, and are built with the flexibility to fly under the radar until sustainable progress has become the new normal.

We don’t have to ignore the horrors coming down from the federal government to acknowledge that even in this past month of awfulness, advocates like you have made a deep impact in decolonizing, reversing, and protecting each other - creating a path of liberation for the rest of us to replicate on a larger scale.

For example, the Hoopa, Karuk, Klamath, Modoc, and Yurok tribes successfully advocated for the removal of the Klamath Dams, the largest project of its kind in US history. This made way for the restoration of 263 miles of plant, animal, and Indigenous ecologies, setting a precedent for more restoration projects like this around the globe.

Credit reporting agencies are now wiping medical debt from credit reports, allowing millions of Americans to secure loans for housing, education, and economic stability.

And while we’re alarmed by the fascist US movement to cut citizens off from health press and information, almost all of us have the internet, so it’s impossible to keep us fully ignorant. Anyone who has access to this newsletter can directly access alerts and news from the World Health Organization.

Even if you don’t have enough energy to read more newsletters, you probably have a friend who loves to hyperfocus on these types of things. Tell them about the newsletter so they can keep you updated. This is not just alarming stuff but also hopeful progress - for example, nine countries completely eliminated devastating diseases last year.

While we know ‘ceasefire’ is only a small step toward ‘peace’ amidst the Israeli Government’s continued attack on Palestinians and Trump's threats to take over Gaza - it sure does give me a moment of solace and hope to watch Bisan return home.

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raccoons working together in a post-apocalyptic neighborhood using stationary bikes to power medical devices while they teach each other to crochet. behind them, a single ray of sunshine pierces gray overcast skies.

2. Cool Things That Exist

‘A Year Without Sunshine’ by Naomi Kritzer is a short story antidote to the dystopian hopelessness of what happens after our civilization falls apart.

Our honorary Raising Luminaries Head Librarian, Lena H., always shares great resources at just the right time. She shared this with the Summer Collective last year, and I kept it in my pocket as a beacon of hope for this exact moment.

Visionaries imagining a resilient response help us see how, even as we face disaster and loss, we can build a future together and establish safe, loving, and liberatory communities.

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Four mischievous cartoon raccoons are making an ICE officer’s job so hard he can’t *even* by pulling his hair, tying his arms, and generally causing chaos. Each raccoon is labeled with ‘red card distributor,’ ‘nerds who know tech stuff,’ ‘la migra trackers,’ and ‘everyday neighbors, friends & upstanders.’

3. Oh Hey, We Found The Helpers…

Red Cards help people assert their rights when interacting with immigration officials. The Immigration Legal Resource Center offers free printable red card downloads in 19 languages, including Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Hmong, and Tagalog.

As we scramble to protect our immigrant family from Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids, the uneasy truth is that fear and urgency are the perfect stew to spark community-led infrastructure for collective care.

While I still haven’t found a comprehensive tracker for ICE raids (aka ‘La Migra’ trackers), it’s clear that many smart, dedicated people are putting their brains and hearts together to create better warnings for undocumented immigrants when ICE is in the area.

In 2017, when Trump first started separating migrant families and deporting my neighbors, I had no idea how to use apps like Zoom or Padlet. And I suspect this is the case for many parents who were forced to learn this tech for distance schooling three years later.

But now that everyday parents do have some familiarity, we have a lower barrier to access when using People over Papers padlet trackers and the subreddit r/LaMigra - giving everyday parents an easy ability to share alerts and keep each other safe.

Have you found an effective La Migra tracker for your state? If so, share it in the comments so others can use it, too.

See more resources to protect immigrants from being criminalized in the comments

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4. A Goofy Thing For You To Just Enjoy

Thanks to the hard work of Asian youth advocates in my city, our family celebrated our first Chinese New Year with an official system-wide day off from school.

I had no idea how much of a difference this could make—getting to wake up and actually spend the holiday with my family instead of trying to squeeze festivities into one family dinner after school with two exhausted kids.

It’s still hard to fit 15 days of Spring Festival festivities into one day off and a couple of weekends, but seriously - even that one day to celebrate together without fighting over homework was a huge joy boost.

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[Video description: Comedian Clare Brown plays out ‘If European Americans were the cultural other: Holidays Edition, flipping the script on standard microaggressions we face when asking for time off for holidays like the Lunar New Year.]

@clarabellecwbANOTHER holiday?!

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5. Helpful Stuff For When You Need It

Children’s book ‘The Boy Who Didn’t Believe in Spring’ by Lucille Clifton, which I still maintain is one of the top best children’s stories of all time, encompassing a firm grip on that first experience of awe and bridges the gap between a young child’s jaded expectations, an adolescent need to perform ‘coolness’ and that moment when you realize that the world can really be an amazing place full of wonder

Right now, the world is a hard place to be in, and yes - it’s reasonable to expect things to get worse.

And yet, still - it’s even more reasonable to have hope.

We’ve gotten through the unease and uncertainty that came before. Our ancestors survived and helped us find safety. And we survived the most bitter days of not just this winter but times when we were terrified and powerless, and still, we kept going.

So, as we turn toward spring, I’ve compiled my kids' favorite spring stories of hope and inspiration that helped guide us through those dark days of uncertainty and fear during the first Trump administration, before winter broke and released the sun.

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Coming up next:

We kick off Black Futures Month amidst an onslaught of anti-DEI attacks and calls to criminalize advocacy for Black liberation. So I’ll be back next month with our Black Futures toolkit a quick primer on following Black-led organizers who have led the way in modern resistance against fascism and hate for decades.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Shannon and I are working on a Transportation Equity tool kit, finding great resources to help connect our kids’ love of cars and things that go whirrrrr with social justice.

In our research, I found Charles T. Brown’s podcast, Arrested Mobility, showing us how we can reform our local transportation systems as we strive for disability, class, education, healthcare, climate, and racial justice.

with you,

Ashia