Grant Applicant: Lead to Life

The feature below is brought to you by Lead to Life, an organization that is in the running to receive a See Beautiful Grant. For more information about all of our giving initiatives, please click here. 

To learn more about Lead to Life, please visit their website: here.

We live in a time of intense social and environmental injustice, and these issues are not separate. We are re-membering that the interconnectedness of social and environmental destruction are rooted in the same cultural underpinnings: from deforestation to the prison-industrial complex. We dwell in a myth of separation, separation from each other and separation from the Earth. This is how some can kill so easily, consume so mindlessly, and how life can be paved over on the planet.

Systems of oppression interrupt our possibility to grieve and honor those we have lost to violence - we find ourselves in the wake of violence fighting for freedom -  in resistance, in protest, in the courthouse, on the news.

Our collective, Lead to Life was born to embody that freedom, that breath - inviting communities together in ceremony to grieve, to heal, to restore, to repair, to reconnect, to be. We are transforming weapons into shovels and holding ceremonial tree plantings at sacred sites and sites impacted by violence. We accompany our plantings with offerings for popular education centered in disrupting environmental racism, reimagining violence and inspiring radical imagination.

This past April, in Atlanta, GA, we held our first ceremonies in honor of the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s assassination; our work will continue into the fall of 2018 in Oakland, CA with a similar arc of gatherings rooted in healing justice. In Atlanta we held a public alchemy ceremony where we transformed weapons into 50 shovels with families directly impacted by gun violence. And over the next two days, we planted 50 trees around Atlanta at sites impacted by violence and sacred sites - the trees were planted with soil collected from the lynching site of Mack Brown in GA in service to the National Lynching Memorial work by Equal Justice Initiative.

You can read about some of the stories that came out about our work on Upworthy, HuffPost, and Truthout.

Lead to Life’s ceremonies are committed to radical aesthetic - beauty that brings us towards justice. When we utilize radical and aesthetic in their etymologies, we engage our senses at the root or root our senses. This rooting our senses brings us into a deeper attunement to repairing our relationship to environments impacted by persistent-traumatic stress. Making healing work a visible intervention grounds us in Cornel West’s prayer that “justice is what love looks like in public.”
Through intergenerational ceremony, we live into the declaration by Mark-Anthony Johnson that “black wellness is the antithesis to state violence.” By centering the wellness of the most marginalized and weaving together activists, community leaders, faith groups, farmers, scientists, healers, environmentalists and artists we witness the ways repairing relationship and connection invokes liberation for both the human and more-than-human world.

Our physical act of "turning swords into plowshares," creatively fulfills the prophecy Dr. King invoked throughout his speeches— gun metal is liberated from their histories of murder and the soil & air where violence took place is remediated by the trees. Following February’s mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida followed by the shooting at Santa Fe High School in Texas, millions in despair are empowered to continue their commitment to nonviolence at the personal, community, and systemic level. After our April gatherings, we have been met by a plethora of folks asking us how they can liberate themselves from their weapons who previously did not know what to do with them. They are able to connect to a direct channel to transform a material of violence into a material of life!

And now we are gearing up for another momentous gathering - A Time for Healing Justice in Oakland this November - mobilizing hundreds of people to wield shovels made from melted down guns to plant trees and other food-producing plants at sites impacted by violence and colonization, as well as black-led urban farms and community gardens across the city.

We invite you to join us to co-liberate in Oakland or from afar! Check out our website and sign up for our newsletter and see how you can get involved!

Written by Brontë Velez, Co-Founder and Creative Director of Lead to Life