Vigilant Love 2020 Year In Review

January 2020

In January 2020, we had our first monthly Artist Collective meeting of the year in Los Angeles’ Chinatown!

Vigilant Love’s Artist Collective is a space for politicized artists in the community to come together (in person or online), break bread, share our arts-and-healing practices, and build capacity to organize and culture shift through creative approaches.. Our Artist Collective is made up of multi-disciplinary artists and creatives in the greater Los Angeles area and is co-led by VL staff and alumni of our Solidarity Arts Fellowship.

May 2020

In May 2020, Vigilant Love introduced our #ServicesNotSurveillance campaign to address racialized profiling and surveillance of Muslim patients in therapy, social work, school counseling and other related spaces by the Department of Homeland Security.

To protect our communities against state surveillance, #ServicesNotSurveillance (#SNS) provides tools and training to understand how the national security apparatus endangers the safety, confidentiality and accessibility of trauma-informed mental health care for Muslim communities. As a community of mental health providers and grassroots organizers, Vigilant Love is mobilizing a coalition to protect our most vulnerable spaces, and to resist the rising trend of state surveillance in the mental health field.

June 2020

On Juneteenth 2020, Vigilant Love facilitated “Unpacking Anti-Blackness in our Non-Black Families & Communities” with some of our partners. The workshop was a conversation for non-Black people who wanted to go deeper to process and strategize around undoing anti-Blackness wherever it shows up – starting with our own communities.

We invited participants to bring friends, family, community members, or pod-mates who they may want to strategize with – or come as an individual and build with the larger community. This workshop included teach-ins, personal storytelling, a questionnaire of reflection prompts around anti-Blackness, and small group breakout rooms that allowed participants to be open and curious around long-term next steps for resisting anti-Blackness. The event was very popular and led to the creation of a part 2 in September.

September 2020

Vigilant Love hosted our first public #ServicesNotSurveillence webinar for mental health providers and community members in September 2020.

Vigilant Love’s first #ServicesNotSurveillance webinar in September provided attendees with: insight about the history of CVE (Countering Violent Extremism), information about how  mental health is weaponized and criminalized by CVE programs, a map of risks posed to individuals, communities, and the mental health field based on case studies, as well as resources and knowledge to know their rights and self-advocate to ensure the mental health resources they seek are safe.

September 2020

After the success of our Unpacking Anti-Blackness workshop on Juneteenth, Vigilant Love joined with partners Nikkei Progressives, American Friends Service Committee – Roots for Peace, Palestinian Youth Movement LA-IE-OC, and Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation to create a 3-part workshop series called “Unpacking Anti-Blackness in Our Non-Black Families & Communities.”

This community workshop series was a supportive strategy and practice space which featured rare teach-ins, small group reflection spaces, practices, and resources for ongoing resistance. The workshops were oriented toward non-Black people of color. For the cost of attendance, participants received: teach-ins from longtime, non-Black community organizers and leaders around anti-blackness & white supremacy, joint struggles for liberation, first-hand accounts of the impacts of Black power movements on other movements, and more; coaching on going deeper to notice and unpack our own internalized anti-Blackness, and that of our family and communities; supportive and open large and small-group spaces to reflect, strategize, and develop a plan to resist anti-Blackness on an ongoing basis in their own lives – both with the pods developed through the workshop and in their own larger communities; and resource guides with recommended readings, practices, action items, glossaries, and more.

November 2020

In November 2020, following the 2020 presidential elections, Vigilant Love held a community event remembering how much wisdom and strength our ancestors embodied to survive a multitude of difficult times – from the brutality of incarceration to the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in WWII to the endless War on Terror today.

While we awaited the outcomes of the 2020 elections, we remembered that our ancestors are with us in the resistance against Islamophobia and state violence. We lifted up local measures, propositions and abolitionist organizing work by partners in Los Angeles, as well as the need to resist against bi-partisan national security community policing programs. We acknowledged that threats of profiling, surveillance, and criminalization will continue, and this is why we committed to honoring that we all needed space for healing and community as we continued the work of fighting for justice and liberation.

January 2020

In January 2020, we launched our second cohort of the Solidarity Arts Fellowship with 13 incredible young leaders interested in arts, activism, and healing justice.

The Vigilant Love Solidarity Arts Fellowship is an arts, activism, and storytelling-based program for college-aged Japanese & Muslim American youth to explore cross-communal solidarity, critical anti-Islamophobia, and the value of community-engaged arts as a medium for powerful transformation.

We’re currently in the process of interviewing candidates for our 3rd cohort, which will begin in January 2021.

May 2020

In May 2020, Vigilant Love hosted our 5th annual Bridging Communities Iftar – and our first-ever virtual Iftar!

Vigilant Love’s Bridging Communities Iftar is a multicultural and interfaith community space that convenes hundreds of community members to break bread, enjoy art, build community, and renew our commitment to healing and liberation together. The Iftar features speakers, performances from the Solidarity Arts Fellows, opportunities to learn about Vigilant Love’s upcoming campaigns, and opportunities to support the organization's work.

Our 2021 Iftar is on April 29, 2021. Click the button below to save the date!

June 2020

In response to a call-to-action by Black Muslim community leaders, Vigilant Love hosted a Day of Outrage on Instagram Live in June 2020, just days after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police.

The Instagram Live program was a conversation with Vigilant Love co-directors traci ishigo and Sahar Pirzada on the importance of solidarity with Black lives, a teach-in around the surveillance of Black activists, and an informational session about upcoming action items in Southern California and how to plug into local organizing for Black lives. 

June 2020

In June 2020, we launched our blog and published our first ever blog post, “If Justice is the Destination, Abolition is The Only Path” in response to the countless murders of Black people in the U.S. and abroad. The following is an excerpt from the blog post, written by Vigilant Love’s organizer, Yazan Zahzah:

“In order to envision the end of police violence, we have to first understand that these brutal deaths are tragedies we can expect to recur so long as a government built on genocide, slavery, and war is in power. This country is founded on principles and ideologies fundamentally incompatible with justice and community. In this context, we can understand police to be the protectors of the interest of the state. Thus, while police departments like the LAPD boast the motto of “to protect and to serve,” the creation of the police was a state tactic used to monitor, punish, and kill Black people.”

July

Vigilant Love and our partners in the #NoPVEinCA coalition celebrated a big win in July 2020 when the state defunded the CalOES PVE program!

In July, the California state legislature rejected state funding for a racialized surveillance program called Preventing Violent Extremism that has roots in DHS’s Countering Violent Extremism (CVE). This was a huge win thanks to political pressure at the grassroots level!

September 2020

In September 2020, Vigilant Love partnered with HEART and Justice for Muslims Collective for a conference, panel, and convening on gendered Islamophobia .

Gendered Islamophobia consists of the ways the state utilizes gendered forms of violence to oppress, monitor, punish, maim and control Muslim bodies. It includes the ways gender binaries and gender constructions are used to prescribe negative social constructions on Muslim women and girls while erasing the existence of femmes, trans women, gender nonconforming, and nonbinary Muslims because of the assumptions that Muslims are inherently homophobic and queerphobic. Vigilant Love is one of the few Muslim-led organizations doing work in this field and is now part of a larger coalition of organizations and individuals working to end gendered Islamophobia through a gender justice lens.

October 2020

In October 2020, we published a report entitled “Why Treating White Supremacy as Domestic Terrorism Won’t Work & How Not to Fall For It” addressing why white supremacist surveillance tools to fight hate don’t work. The following is a quote from the report, written by Professor Nicole Nguyen and Vigilant Love’s organizer, Yazan Zahzah:

“The spectacular white supremacist violence that makes headlines misses the systemic sources of racial violence and death in the United States. Chipping away at white supremacy’s most extreme forms through ineffective and unscientific interventions--rooted in a racist antiterrorism framework--does little to address the mundane social processes that kill people of color every day.”