Tending Futures

08/04/2025

We’re so excited to be back again for our third hear with this offering! If you are within two hours driving distance of Africatown, AL and would love to have Assata (or any of our team members depending on availability) speak at your school or event, please send an email to assata@tendingfutures.org with “Native American History Month” in the subject. This offering is only available during the month of November and is open to ALL with a preference given to Global Majority schools or communities.

08/04/2025

📖✨ TENDING FUTURES PRESENTS:
Living Library Series
🗓 Every 1st Saturday | 12PM – 3PM
📍 1260 Dauphin Street | Studio 250
Central Midtown

One Saturday a month. One Living Book. Infinite wisdom.
Join us for an ongoing series where story becomes medicine. Each month, the Tending Futures Living Library features a new guest (a Living Book) sharing personal stories rooted in identity, resilience and community care. These intimate conversations are an invitation to listen deeply, ask questions and break down the walls of assumption.

💬 A Living Library is where people, not pages are the books.
Where lived experience becomes a sacred text.
Where listening becomes a form of healing.

🧠 Why It Matters:
In a time of division, the Living Library creates a brave space for curiosity, empathy and connection. It’s a practice in unlearning stereotypes, honoring story as knowledge and tending the roots of community through conversation.

📚 While You’re Here:
🌿 Explore our growing Community Library of radical reads
🍵 Sip seasonal healing teas from our Savage Daughters Apothecary
🧡 Connect, reflect and root deeper in community

Next Session: September 6th with Assata Dela Cruz on Reconnecting
Come sit, sip and listen. You just might leave changed.
✨ Free & open to all ages with donations welcome to support our work ✨

And if you’re interested in contributing to our community library, here’s our wish list: https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/2U3SN55YK78DD?ref_=wl_share.

07/20/2025

🌱 ROOTS is now accepting applications! 🌱

Looking for a fresh start in a safe, supportive environment? ROOTS (Reclaiming Our Own Transitional Stability) has 35 private rooms available and offers wraparound services to help you thrive.

🛏 Safe & private rooms
🍽 Affordable rent with meals included
🩺 On-site support: Talk Healthy check-ins, primary care, medication assistance, life skills coaching & more!

ROOTS is designed for individuals transitioning from homelessness or housing instability who are ready to invest in their health, growth, and stability.

📍 Located at Overflow Health Alliance – 2200 N. Palafox, Pensacola, FL
📞 Call 850-741-1228 or apply here: bit.ly/ROOTSinterest

Let’s reclaim our stability—together. 💜

07/16/2025

This is what mutual aid looks like in the Gulf South.
Every week, we distribute 20,000–30,000 lbs of food (fresh fruits, veggies, meats, grains, etc.) to families who need it most.
Food deserts, mobility issues, hard times… we got you!! But we need YOU to keep this going!

✨ Become a monthly donor today and help us grow this work rooted in love and nourishment:
🔗 loveallpantry.org/donate

To support all of our families, we purchase all of our food through relationships with Feeding the Gulf Coast. Our weekly cost is usually around $2,000. Which gets us between 20,000-30,000 lbs of fresh veggies, fruits, meats and grains (and canned goods - to use when we cannot source fresh foods).

Becoming a monthly donor increases our capacity to offer good foods for people who live in food deserts, have hit hard times and need support and/or have mobility issues and need food delivered to their homes.

We are so thankful for all who are joining Love All Pantry at Central as monthly donors!

Https:loveallpantry.org/donate

07/06/2025

As Muharram begins for our Muslim community, particularly Shia, we remember not just a moment in history but a call to the heart.

Imam Hussain (AS) stood at Karbala and chose truth over power, love over fear and sacrifice over silence. His stand echoes across generations.

As Black and Indigenous people, we know this story. We know what it means to resist empire with nothing but faith and fire. We’ve lived our own Karbalas from the Middle Passage to the plantations, from Wounded Knee to Attica.

This sacred month, we grieve, we remember and we recommit.
This is not just mourning, it’s a roadmap to freedom.

Every day is Ashura, every land is Karbala.

07/02/2025

At Tending Futures, we carry forward ancestral wisdom that teaches us to love through action. To defend the land is to love the Creator. To protect life is to practice prayer. Our presence at this convening is a declaration that no one is free until Palestine is free and that faith must be a force for liberation, not domination.

06/29/2025

At Tending Futures, our mission is to heal, protect, and reclaim the sacred: our bodies, our lands, our children, our stories. We are a faith-rooted organization grounded in the teachings and traditions of Black and Indigenous communities, where spiritual practice is inseparable from the fight for justice. That is why we are proud to be a convening organization for Interfaith Action for Palestine (IAP) this summer in Washington, DC and online.

From June 29–July 1, 2025, IAP will gather a coalition of faith-based organizations to mount a bold, truth-telling counter-presence to Christians United for Israel (CUFI), the largest “pro-Israel” organization in the U.S. built on dangerous Christian Zionist theology and white supremacist empire. Tending Futures will be there because this fight is not separate from our liberation. It is deeply connected.

CUFI’s political project is not just about foreign policy. It is a theological and colonial assault on life itself. Their belief that Palestinians must be removed from their ancestral lands to fulfill a prophecy mirrors the genocidal narratives used to dispossess Black and Indigenous people in the Americas. It is a theology of conquest, not communion.

We understand this violence because we have lived it. From the Trail of Tears to the transatlantic slave trade, from police killings to poisoned water, the tools of empire have always masked themselves in the language of righteousness. As people of faith, we reject that lie. Our faith teaches us that all people are sacred, that land is not a commodity and that freedom must be collective.

Standing for Palestine is not charity, it is kinship. It is honoring our shared struggle against erasure, against occupation, against white Christian supremacy.

At Tending Futures, we carry forward ancestral wisdom that teaches us to love through action. To defend the land is to love the Creator. To protect life is to practice prayer. Our presence at this convening is a declaration that no one is free until Palestine is free and that faith must be a force for liberation, not domination.

We believe in an interfaith movement that is unapologetically anti-Zionist, anti-racist and deeply rooted in love. A movement where faith is not weaponized against others but used to tear down walls and build a new world.

https://mailchi.mp/thesavagedaughters/why-tending-futures-is-standing-with-interfaith-action-for-palestine

06/25/2025

Tending Futures is proud to be a convening org for Interfaith Action for Palestine, a powerful faith-rooted gathering countering the largest pro-Israel org in the U.S., CUFI, June 29–July 1 in DC & online.

As a Black & Indigenous faith-based organization, this work is deeply connected to our mission. CUFI pushes a violent theology that mirrors the same colonial logic used to justify the displacement of our ancestors. Their belief that Palestinians must be removed from their land to fulfill prophecy is not faith, it’s white Christian supremacy.

Our traditions teach us that land is sacred, all life is sacred and liberation must be collective. We stand in spiritual kinship with Palestinians fighting for their right to exist in dignity and freedom.

This is more than protest, it’s a declaration that our faith will never be used to justify genocide.

This summer, we invite you to join us in the spirit of principled resistance and spiritual courage. Whether you walk beside us in the streets of DC or stand with us virtually from your community, your presence matters. Your voice matters. And together, our prayers become power.

interfaithforpalestine.com

06/23/2025

This July, we’re asking you to make a choice.  Not just a choice of where to be but a choice of who we are and what we choose to remember.

While the rest of the country lights fireworks and waves flags on the 4th of July, we know the truth: that freedom did not arrive for our people in 1776.  Our ancestors were still enslaved.  The Declaration of Independence did not include us.  And today, as our stories are being stripped from textbooks and our history is under attack, we must decide: will we celebrate a freedom that was never meant for us?  Or will we honor the sacred truth of who we are?

This year, instead of celebrating a holiday rooted in exclusion and hypocrisy, we, the Clotilda Descendants Association, invite you to join us in Africatown for the Landing Event & Ancestors Festival (LEAF) commemorating the landing of the Clotilda, the last known slave ship to bring kidnapped Africans to Turtle Island long after the transatlantic slave trade had been outlawed. This isn’t just history, it’s our history.

Africatown is sacred ground.  It was built by the 110 survivors of the Clotilda who, after enduring the unimaginable, founded their own self-sustaining community right here in Mobile.  Their descendants still live here.  Their legacy lives in our bones, their strength is our inheritance.
In this current climate where our stories are being erased, our ancestors renamed and our traditions suppressed, we must make a firm and unified choice to remember.  To reclaim.  To resist.

The LEAF event is more than a gathering. It’s a declaration:
 We will not be silenced.
 We will not forget.
 We will not trade truth for fireworks.

Join us in standing for the legacy of the Clotilda and the brilliance of Black resistance in the Deep South.  Let this be a tradition rooted not in false freedom but in real liberation.  Our ancestors are watching and we honor them when we honor ourselves.

06/19/2025

If you’re not willing to protect our people, can you really call yourself a leader?

Black and Indigenous communities have been disproportionately harmed by COVID since day one. That hasn’t changed. Our movement spaces must be built on care for our elders, our disabled kin, our immunocompromised folks.

Masking is the bare minimum.
Air filtration, ventilation, CO2 monitors, virtual options: these aren’t “extras,” they’re necessary.

If you’re organizing events and not centering COVID safety, you’re not building safe or liberatory space. Leadership means protecting our people not just from the state but from preventable harm in our own spaces.

Care is the strategy.
Protection is the practice.
Liberation doesn’t leave people behind.

06/11/2025

🌕🍓 Learning from the Strawberry Moon 🍓🌕

Tonight we witness the rising of the Strawberry Moon, the full moon of early summer.

Among many Native nations, moons were traditionally named not for abstract ideas but for what was happening on the land, guiding us in how to live with the seasons. The Strawberry Moon signals the time when wild strawberries ripen. These berries are one of the first fruits of the season, known for their sweetness and for their teachings.

In Indigenous teachings, strawberries are a symbol of the heart: of love, forgiveness and the importance of moving forward without bitterness. They remind us that healing is not about erasing the past but about tending to it with care.

In Black diasporic traditions, too, the cycles of the moon and land were crucial knowledge for enslaved ancestors who farmed by moonlight, navigated escape routes under full moons and gathered for celebration in secret beneath them. These moments of alignment with nature were acts of resistance and survival.

Today, for Black and Native communities, honoring the Strawberry Moon is a way to reconnect with this ancestral wisdom:

🍓 To notice what is ripening in the land, in ourselves, in our relationships
🍓 To honor the seasons of rest, growth and harvest
🍓 To reclaim joy, gathering and connection to land as part of our healing
🍓 To remember that cultural knowledge lives not only in books but in the skies, the soil and the stories we share

As we stand under this full moon, may we remember that we belong to the land not the other way around. And that there is profound wisdom in paying attention to its cycles.