SEEDED GROUND INTERVIEW WITH TINU ABAYOMO-PAUL
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JUSTICE: Welcome to your audio companion formed in support of access and in the spirit of community. I’m Justice Shorter. And you’re listening to the Disaster Justice Guidebook for People of Color with Disabilities.
Each companion is comprised of remarkable reflections and recommendations gathered from interviews with incredible People of Color. This creative collaboration is brought to you by Seeded Ground, the Adult Advocacy Centers in 1217 compound. May this offering be a salve and a sought-out source of solidarity for all those most impacted by disasters and crisis. This particular companion is guided by insights from Tinu Abayomi-Paul. Tinu is a Black disabled woman attempting to live outside the bounds of capitalism. Her community work is founded on centering the most vulnerable to achieve equity. And just outcomes for the highest good possible.
She is the founder of Everywhere Accessible and a mutual aid organizer. Tinu has helped to cultivate a climate of collective care across online spaces in ways that offer direct support to disabled folks when navigating disasters and crisis on a daily. Here’s Tinu kicking us off with what it means to save our own lives.
TINU: We save our own lives means that we’re not only aware that we must save our own lives because there isn’t necessarily anyone out there coming to our rescue, but that we’re prepared to save our own lives, that we are creating plans, strategies, test runs, and all of the things that we need, not just on our own though, but as communities, as families, as citizens to save ourselves whether that’s emotionally, physically, mentally that we are the people that we’re waiting for and that we are the ones who would be put upon to do the work of the saving.
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JUSTICE: Collective care, that unwavering commitment to saving our own lives is manifested in many ways. For disabled folks dealing with multiple crisis, mutual aid can be a crucial life line. Here Tinu explains how she has come to understand mutual aid in the context of care and culture.
TINU: Well, first my definition of mutual aid is anything that is community-based ways to help each other thrive, not just monetarily, it can be bartering. It can be emotional investments in each other, where we checkup on each other at certain intervals. It can be sharing of resources that we have that may not necessarily be set up for sharing things like, even things down to over-the-counter medications or knowledge that we have that other people don’t have. Or cultural sharings of things that we may have from say, for example, if we have a Gullah background or a Creole background, or African, Caribbean background, cultural things that we can share in wisdom.
The ability to help each other financially, of course, is essential to that. Where I came into it is, it’s hard to say where it started for me, because it’s part of my culture as being a Nigerian descendent. And it’s odd for me to say that, I know from an American perspective, I mean even though I was born in America, I am also Nigerian.
And when people think of Nigerians, they think of the 419 scam, unfortunately, where it’s also very much Nigerian, and I would say primarily Nigerian, for us to take care of each other. And for us to have certain things embedded throughout or culture that make sure that we take care of each other.
For example, there’s a few, a few years ago, I think it was, I think it was Wale, he got in a little bit of hot sauce online because he was, he was photographed spraying his daughter, which was giving his daughter money, you know, usually, pressing bills to the forehead of his daughter while she was dancing.
Now, through an American lens, that seemed like are you treating your daughter like a stripper, but from our perspective, it’s one of the ways that we circulate mutual aid in our communities. We have all these parties, we’re known for the partying, but we’re not known for the fact that when, the parties are a form of mutual aid. We all get dressed up. We all go to the parties.
We all bring money to give to the celebrant and also to people in the community who are in need. So, instead of, you know, if you, you know, missed your car payment, instead of having to beg your friends, you go to the parties. And the people who are in need stay near the celebrants and they receive money. People who have extra will be giving the money.
So that’s naturally circulated in the community instead of there being a formal kind of setup where people have to go, go around asking everyone for money. It’s kind of a natural thing that removes the shame element from it, that moves the, that removes the screening element from it, because we’re all already in community. We all already know each other. We all already can vouch for each other.
Also, when I was very young, my mother was always putting together help for other people. One of the forms of help that was formalized, she had a social club where her and her sister friends, her friends that were close enough for me to call them aunties, would put together parties where they would give away food for free but then charge for the drinks. And the drinks, whatever they made profit off the drinks, they would send to different charities or different people who needed help back in Nigeria.
And so, I learned about, you know, how they set this up and I would help them with all the administrative stuff that they were doing and also be part of, you know, labor part of it, as far as serving the drinks and just being involved at all levels of the organization to see how does all of this work. And how does this, how do we keep this money circulated in the community to make sure that everybody is okay.
A lot of times mutual aid entailed letting people stay in our house until they were stable when they came from overseas. So, I always count mutual aid not as monetarily, but any kind of assistance that you can give to your neighbors and your community, and people that you know or know through other people in the community, in order to keep them thriving, in order to keep the community solvent as a whole.
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JUSTICE: Tinu’s organizing is shaped by her lived experiences as someone who has survived turbulent times and who fiercely advocates for the safety, dignity and belonging of people with disabilities. Here Tinu talks us through how her mutual aid work emerged into a successful strategy for collective survival.
TINU: As I came online after a bout with cancer, I didn’t really have anything else to do to occupy my mind, so I started formalizing process for myself of, I see all these people who need help, and I also need help, but it seems to work better if we’re all requesting at the same time. So, I would organize, on Fridays I would organize people all listing their health needs together and facilitating needs and also making sure that we all knew each other throughout the week in the community so that on Friday, when the ask happened, that everybody wouldn’t be saying oh, well I don’t know if I trust this person. I don’t know if I want to give them my money, because I don’t know who that person is.
Because, the best way for mutual aid to work is for the community to be, people in the community to be aware of each other and to prescreen each other. I also find that the people who receive that help also come back and build community and build mutual aid and build bridges for other people to receive help. I’ve seen that over and over and over again.
I just had a young lady I was mentoring, come out of homelessness through this mutual aid network. And then, also, now she’s also helping somebody else, not be homeless any more while she’s also trying to find — she just found a permanent shelter that she’s raising the last bit of money for. So, it’s not just the saying that what goes around comes around, if, as we help each other and, it builds a kind of trust that allows us to build together bigger and bigger things in our community that are not just about the financial or resource sharing that we do, but also building the bigger things that we need as a opportunity that are outside of mutual aid, things like policies and things like voting blocks. All can stand on that first willingness to trust somebody who is new to the group.
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JUSTICE: Disasters are frustrating. They have a way of making you feel both invisible and hyper visible at the same time. Tinu and her family lived through the cold snap that hit Texas a few years ago. And although they experienced moments of community connection between other evacuees, they also felt ignored and abandoned by government officials.
TINU: Mutual aid can say I see you. I acknowledge you. I believe you. I support you. I remember one instance when I had to be the recipient of mutual aid was, you know, during the Texas freeze, our family had to evacuate from our home because it was, there was no heat. There was no power. We spent the night, you know, throwing curtains and coats and whatever we could find over the children to try to keep them warm, as we tried to figure out what was our game plan going to be for the morning. Because there was not a solution based from the government as far as, you know, we knew they weren’t coming to our house. We knew possibly we could go somewhere. There were possibly going to be warming centers, but everything was still just talk at that point.
So, we had a friend who helped us with hotel points so we didn’t have to come out of pocket for it, which we weren’t prepared to do. And as we were booking those things and finding, you know, a hotel to get to, once we got there, we found ourselves among other people who also had evacuated, but weren’t as prepared as we were, because, of course, we are functioning as a family unit, but some of them were just, you know, bunches of young single people who happen to be nearby each other. Or families that just had the bare minimum things with them.
So, we were able to extend some of the things that we had to other people just as an acknowledgement. Here’s some water. I see you. Here’s some food or here’s where to go in this hotel to get this thing. Or maybe we can coordinate with you for other people to pick up supplies from the hotel, since we have extra of this.
And then, it also became a mutual kind of acknowledgement of our shared grief that we had been left behind, overlooked. Because until me and a couple of other people started talking about, insistently, what was happening online, there was no press coverage. There was no government action local or federal. It was just, oh, it was cold out in Texas I guess they’re going to be okay. Oh, the power went out.
And what they weren’t saying is, was the power was going out in the poor areas, in the Black areas. The white affluent areas were getting their power back just fine. Or it never went out for them. So, they weren’t having the same emergency that we were having.
And us just being gathered together and seeing each other, and being able to do small things for each other, it was affirming, because we were being erased from the picture of what the disaster was or even that it was a disaster. And being able to see to each other and give small things to each other, even a greeting, a hug, a bottled water, a blanket, it allowed us to be seen and heard and acknowledged and recognized as people who had come under this disaster and not seen, and just not have been recognized as people who needed help, that help was even required to us at all. I just remember, distinctly, the confused look of everyone in the hotel like, yes, we’re privileged because we were able to evacuate to this place, but I had to abandon my home. I’m here, but I don’t have any food, no.
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It was like a very strange level of privilege, but not privilege going on. And there weren’t really words for it until we started to express to each other why we felt in this, why everything felt so precarious. So, being able to provide to each other, even when you feel like you don’t have anything, being able to give a little bit to somebody, it’s, it’s self-affirming in a way. And also, receiving from others when you feel forgotten, or worthless from your community members, it can be very restorative.
You get hope from it. You get hope and you get to see the light at the end of the tunnel and it reinforces your faith that you’re going to get through the situation, because you don’t feel so alone anymore. You know, that there’s people out there somewhere rooting for you to survive and it takes away that invisibility factor that you sometimes feel when you find yourself in a crisis suddenly without warning and it isn’t being acknowledged by the people who normally would be expected to rescue people like you from a crisis.
When we had to evacuate, I knew that me not being able to go, might come up and when I verbalized that, it shocked my family that I would even think that they would let me be left behind. So, I don’t think that we, in the Black community, need to be as afraid of that as other people. And I’m grateful for that.
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JUSTICE: Without a doubt, dealing with disasters can be overwhelming, isolating and downright terrifying, depending on the circumstances. So, we asked Tinu to share a few of the lessons she’s learned over the years about solidarity and survival.
TINU: All right, so, a list of things to think about for mutual aid in disaster situations. First lesson, we are the help that we’re looking for. There’s nobody coming, just assume that nobody else is coming. A lot of the times somebody will be, but just assume that nobody else is coming.
Operate from that assumption when you plan how the mutual aid is going to be set up. What it’s going to do. What the needs of people are and how you can organize with other people to fill them. I wanted to add something about the Texas freeze again to contextualize that. I don’t think that a lot of people are aware of this, but most of the aid that happened for the Texas freeze was by grassroots organizations, the vast majority of it because the state was not prepared. The local area was not prepared. The federal response didn’t come until after we forced the issue that there’s something happening on the ground.
So, we had to be the people who said, okay, where are we going to get water from? And just figure it out. And sometimes that’s what happens. You have an idea. Get as many people involved as possible, and then just figure it out as best you can. There’s really no failure, because you’re just people doing your best, and whatever your best is is the only solution that’s available. So, that’s generally going to be measured as success anyway.
The only thing that you can do is your best. And that kind of fits right into the second lesson, which is in disaster situations, the only thing that you can count on is that it’s going to be over at some point. And so, every disaster ends. So, but ever mutual aid that you facilitate that starts with that, with that incident doesn’t have to.
Be prepared to either continue that aid or to pass it off to someone else who can continue what you started. It doesn’t have to be, and it usually shouldn’t be a closed-ended project. Think of it as the start of community building, rather than a one-off event, because more than likely, whatever mutual aid that you start doing a disaster is going to become part of larger community building and mutual aid on an ongoing basis. There’s always going to be people who are going to need shelter, water, to be warm, to get cool. Whatever was needed during the disaster, the reason why it wasn’t available is because there’s some gap somewhere in the system that is not being covered correctly.
So, as you meet those needs, just be aware that those needs will continue to exist after the disaster. They’re just more heightened during the disaster period. So, try to stay organized, would be the third lesson. So, that if you’re keeping track of things, even if you can’t be the person to continue the work that you started, that somebody can pick up after you and continue what you’ve been doing.
One of the things we did back during Katrina was set up websites that contained the information that we were recording, things like here’s some places where, here’s some people who are looking to house people. It was very easy to find it in the very initial days of Katrina. But as time went by, those resources where people would put things up would expire. So, having a place that organized that information, like a directory, some of us built directories, some of us just built a list of links.
Having a way for somebody else to continue the work you started, or for you to have, to get more people involved in what you are doing is very helpful. Try to be more of a facilitator. Try to think more like a facilitator while you’re providing the aid. Always be thinking about organizing for the future.
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JUSTICE: Mutual aid can teach us so much about life and the various links that hold us all together. Here, Tinu offers a bit of advice on how a practice of interdependence can help us shed some of the shame we may feel when having to ask for money or other forms of material support.
TINU: The first thing is, the first lesson I would say is that you’ve got to get over your shame. There’s no reason to be ashamed to need help or to ask for help or to need more help than you initially thought that you did.
For some reason, it’s built into our culture to not want to ask for help. It’s part of the individualism. It’s part of the capitalism. It’s part of that idea that you are supposed to pull yourself up by your bootstraps when meanwhile you don’t even have shoes, you know. And that concept, I don’t know that it’s just outdated. I think that it was never a completely well thought out, cause, in the first place, nobody does it alone.
Just absolutely nobody does it alone. So, you can’t let your feelings of shame interfere with you asking for the things that you need or being willing to accept help from other people, or else, you will find yourself in a rolling state of emergency, because the shame will make you not ask for enough, which will make you not have your needs fulfilled, which will result in you having to come back and ask again.
Usually, before you’ve even been able to exhaust the resources, well, actually, let me rephrase that. You will find that you almost always need more than what you think that you need. So, those resources will be exhausted before you think they will be. And then you’ll find yourself back asking for more with even more shame feeling like, okay, I messed it up the first time.
So, to keep that rolling boulder of, you know, gathering more and more nonsense, it’s best to really start thinking of yourself as part of a community that’s always flowing in and out resources. You’re constantly giving resources into your community. There’s going to be times when you’re constantly receiving resources from your community, and that’s okay. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.
It’s supposed to be give and take. It’s supposed to be constantly flowing back and forth, not just in one direction. And you just have to get used to that idea that you’re worthy, and that you’re worthy of that support that you are, that needing help doesn’t make something wrong about you, that everybody needs help at some point, and we’ve, we just have to get rid of that idea in general that you should refuse help, for example, because somebody else needs it more. Everybody needs, needs to have their needs met. Period.
We all just have a different level of need, that’s all. And so, the second thing would be, once you get out of that shame area and know to ask for help, make sure that you’ve assessed exactly how much help that you need. A lot of the times, we look at getting assistance for things based on what we need when we’re stable.
For example, when you are stable, and you have a regular paycheck coming in, and you’re paying your rent on time, you’ll need the amount of money to pay your rent as the rent is. When you are not stable and you don’t have a resource for rent, you often have to think about late fees. You have to think about if the money is given to you in four different places, when it transfers, are there going to be fees involved that takes that money out.
So that if you, for example, needed to get a thousand dollars, but it comes from four different places, and each of those four places charges a fee, by the time all the money gets to you, you have less than a thousand dollars. Then you have to transport that money to the place where it ends up going to.
Really think, rethink all of the avenues by which you’re going to receive mutual aid and if, through those avenues, in your non-stable status, I guess, is the cost, is the situation, is everything going to add up the same way as it does when you’re stable. It’s something that people overlook constantly. I’m seeing it in my mutual aid work. And it seems like a very simple thing that, oh well, you know, having to come up with an extra $25 doesn’t seem like a big deal when one is getting consistent income. But when you’re not, $25 dollars is like a fortune.
So, it’s always best to be thinking, am I going to have to pay that late fee; if so, I should include that in my ask. So, I guess that second lesson is, make sure you include all of the incidental things that aren’t normal in your ask.
And then the third thing would be track everything that’s coming in, because you’re not going to want to think about it now, but there will come a time when you have to talk about it in taxes. And currently, there are different rules for donated funds than there are for earned funds. You’re going to want to talk to a lawyer, well, not necessarily a lawyer, but definitely an accountant about whether or not you have to pay taxes on things that, things and money that was donated to you and also, how to reflect that, so that it doesn’t flag an audit or something for you, cause a new problem later when you’re solvent.
I think those are the three, the three mutual aid lessons for disaster preparedness when you’re receiving help. Don’t be afraid to ask for what you need or ashamed. Secondly, keep in mind that your needs are going to be different when you are in need versus when you’re stable, and include all those extra incidentals when you make an ask. And third thing is, make sure you’re documenting everything correctly so that when tax time comes, you don’t get massively screwed.
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JUSTICE: So, what are people crowd funding for? Well, Tinu explains that for those of us living at the intersection of multi-marginalized identities, funds are needed to deal with crisis that come from all directions.
TINU: So, there’s different, so many different things that people crowd fund for, that have to do with mutual aid, and a lot of times people get pushback or sometimes even attacked or shamed because, well, why weren’t you ready for this? So, I’m going to list in a couple different categories the kind of things that people end up needing crowd funding for that it is so hard to have known in advance that it was going to happen.
So, let’s talk first about women. Divorce. You don’t always know when you’re going to get divorced and women end up usually out of, after the break up, having less financial stability than the man. Even now. Leaving an abusive relationship, it is very difficult, financially, to leave an abusive relationship, whether it’s emotional abuse, physical abuse or any other kind of abuse, because a lot of the times, leading up to that abuse, people don’t realize the financial abuse comes first.
So, if somebody has, say somebody has control over your pocketbook, how are you going to run away, especially, you know, if there’s kids or something involved. Then there’s disasters like your house burn down, even if you have insurance, sometimes they don’t pay out or they don’t pay out enough. There could be, you know, your car breaks down and you don’t have enough savings to cover it. Your house is compromised in some kind of disaster or flooding. The power goes out for an extended period of time, and the food in your house spoils. It’s too cold or it’s too hot for you to live there comfortably. Then we can talk about disabled people or chronically ill people. You might have insurance, it doesn’t cover everything. You might not have insurance and not have expected to get sick. The whole age of COVID, who saw that coming really? Even if you could have predicted, yeah, we’re due a pandemic because it’s been a hundred years.
In this ongoing crisis of COVID, who could have predicted that if, if you have a compromised immune system, now you can’t go outside because you can’t, because other people won’t mask, so now you can’t work outside your home. You could find out that you have a disease like, you could get cancer diagnosis. You could get a chronic illness diagnosis for something that you just had no idea even existed.
You could lose your job because you can’t meet this disability requirement. You could lose your job for any reason and not be able to return to work because you became ill in the meantime. If you are looking at the communities of colors, especially Black communities, there’s all the ways that racism can impact your life, which can also sometimes be job loss.
We live in areas that are less environmentally sound. For example, we have less trees on our blocks, and it causes all kinds of problems. We have, even when we have good healthcare, if you live in a Black area, our hospitals, which are funded by taxes, which are a result of income, which we often are paid less, especially Black women, we get paid 64 cents on the dollar of what a white man would get paid for.
Death in the family of one of the other people who earns income. It could be car accident happens to you. It could be a sudden other loss of incoming, such as something eats up your savings and then subsequently, you have an accident that is covered by whatever you have in savings, but then something else right behind it happens.
For example, the landlords are gentrifying your area and it results in eviction because your rent is going up. And people will say, okay, well, that’s illegal. If you don’t have the money to sue then, you know, there’s nothing that you can really do about it but pay your rent or get put out on to the street.
So, there’s people who are fleeing abusive homes. Again, that’s not just an issue from spousal abuse, sometimes it happens with people who, who are disabled and depend on the income of family members. It could be a non-married abuse situation. You can get an expense while you’re covered in healthcare, the expense of something that’s not covered is greater than the amount of money that you make per month.
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JUSTICE: Tinu’s work alongside, and on behalf of People of Color with Disabilities has been a labor of love. Speaking of love, here’s Tinu’s love message to our people.
TINU: As Black disabled people, sometimes the disabled part of our identity is minimized. And of course, there needs to be, at some point, a conversation with the rest of our larger community about the fact that our value is the same as everyone else in our community. In the meantime, we have each other and we can love each other and amplify each other and tell our stories and each other’s, as a way of showing the joy of being different from other people and what it has taught us and given us as part of the gift of life. Rather than as we are so often regarded as being people who have been given less through our various adversities.
Because we often receive just as much, if not more, through our disabilities and our pride in them.
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JUSTICE: We have each other, and together, we save our own lives. I hope this entire interview served you in whatever ways you needed it to. Thank you so much for listening. For more information and to access other audio companions or the full written Disaster Justice Guidebook, go to JusticeShorter.com or AdultAdvocacyCenters.org.
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Transcribed by Michelle Houston
Justice Shorter 