where care meets political education

ESOC is committed to building infrastructure for intercampus student organizing and providing learning experiences that foster critical consciousness. Our work is aimed at nurturing holistic wellness through political education, care ethics, and spirituality towards collective liberation.

Check out our team here!

Dear ESOC Community,

As we move into summer, we're reflecting on the people, practices, and traditions that help us sustain life during uncertain times.

While Mother's Day has come and gone, the work of mothering continues. Every day, mothers, caregivers, aunties, elders, birth workers, community builders, and chosen family members perform the often unseen labor of nurturing, protecting, and holding communities together. Their work rarely fits neatly into a single holiday or moment of recognition.

This season, we find ourselves asking deeper questions: What does it mean to care for one another in a time of political upheaval, environmental crisis, economic uncertainty, and ongoing violence against historically marginalized communities? How do we continue creating spaces for healing, joy, and collective survival when so much around us feels fragile?

As we also recognize Pride Month, we honor the countless queer and trans people who have long practiced forms of mothering, caregiving, and community stewardship—often in the face of exclusion, discrimination, and erasure. Across generations, chosen families, elders, healers, artists, organizers, and spiritual leaders have created spaces of belonging and survival where traditional institutions have failed to do so. Their contributions remind us that care is not limited by biology, gender, or legal definitions of family. Care is a sacred practice of sustaining life.

For many communities, the answers have always lived in our relationships—with our ancestors, with the land, with spirituality, and with each other.

In this issue of Between the Lines, we honor the ongoing labor of caregiving and community building through art, storytelling, and conversation, crossing the sacred, the political, the ancestral, and the everyday.

We're excited to feature artist Leilani Banday's work, share updates from Executive Director Trinice Ìyá Fábùnmí McNally's Mother Is Gold project, and invite you into our upcoming Reimagining Spirituality series, which explores how spiritual traditions, ancestral wisdom, and collective care can help us navigate the challenges of our current moment. This month's conversation, Queer & Trans Wellness Through African Spiritual Cosmologies, will explore how African and diasporic spiritual traditions can offer pathways toward healing, belonging, and wholeness beyond colonial binaries.

As always, thank you for being part of this growing community.

With gratitude and vision,

The ESOC Team

Leilani Banday

Leilani Banday is an artist, writer, and spiritual practitioner born and raised on Tongva land. As a woman of color, her work explores the intersections of memory, ancestry, healing, spirituality, and the human experience. Through visual art, spoken word, and community workshops, Leilani seeks to cultivate a deeper awareness of the sacred, inviting individuals and communities into greater connection with themselves, their lineages, and the world around them.

Her creative practice is rooted in the belief that art can serve as a vessel for remembrance, healing, and transformation. As a member of the artist collective A Stage of Our Own, Leilani has presented works such as Earth Mother: A Letter to My Daughter, a spoken-word and installation piece that personifies Mother Earth as a nurturing guide speaking wisdom, affirmation, and resilience to her child through life's challenges.

Today, Leilani's ancestral art practice centers the unique spiritual and emotional needs of individuals and communities. Through intuitive artistic collaboration, healing circles, and ceremonial offerings, she creates works designed to support reflection, alignment, and personal transformation. Her work continues to uplift and nourish Black, Indigenous, and communities of color across the globe.

Featured Art: Māmā

Mixed Media: Acrylic and Natural Materials

This piece was created to explore mothering and birth as acts of remembrance. Drawing upon the sacred symbolism of water—an element associated across many Indigenous and ancestral traditions with both creation and destruction—Māmā reflects on the many births that occur through motherhood.

Beyond the birth of a child, the work invites us to consider the birth of memory, the birth of self, the emergence of new spiritual pathways, and the unfolding of deeper ways of knowing. Through its layered textures and organic materials, Māmā honors motherhood as a threshold experience—one that transforms, reveals, and reconnects us to ancestral wisdom.

As we move through this season's themes of care, survival, and collective flourishing, Māmā reminds us that motherhood is not simply an event, but an ongoing journey of becoming.

Exploring Black Motherhood, Memory & Survival

As we reflected on this season's theme of care and survival, we wanted to highlight a project emerging from our ESOC community, led by our Founder and Executive Director. 

Mother Is Gold is a storytelling, research, and cultural preservation project exploring Black motherhood as a site of resilience, creativity, spiritual knowledge, and collective care.

Inspired by the Yoruba proverb, "Mother is Gold, Father is Glass," the project asks: How do Black mothers sustain life amidst rupture?

Through oral histories, artistic collaboration, film, photography, and reflective storytelling, Mother Is Gold documents the ways Black mothers create systems of healing, safety, continuity, and survival for themselves, their families, and their communities.

While ESOC's work has often focused on reimagining safety within institutions, Mother Is Gold extends that conversation by examining one of the oldest forms of community infrastructure: care itself.

The project invites us to consider what becomes possible when we recognize caregiving, mothering, and community care not as private responsibilities, but as essential practices of collective survival and liberation.

Follow the Journey

This summer, Mother Is Gold will begin sharing reflections, interviews, and stories through its growing digital archive.

▶ Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0NNINMRfpk 

Are you a mother who is interested in sharing your story or collaborating? They’d love to hear from you, so reach out via YouTube channel!

This month, ESOC is launching our Reimagining Spirituality Series, a community conversation series exploring the intersections of spirituality, healing, justice, identity, and collective liberation.

As attacks on LGBTQ+ communities, reproductive freedom, immigrants, and historically marginalized people continue to intensify across the United States, many are searching for practices and traditions that help us remain grounded, connected, and resilient. Through this series, we hope to create space for reflection, political education, storytelling, and collective imagination.

In honor of Pride Month, our inaugural roundtable will explore how African and diasporic spiritual traditions have long offered expansive understandings of gender, embodiment, intimacy, and sacred purpose.

Prior to colonial intervention and the imposition of rigid Western binaries, many African societies recognized diverse expressions of identity, spiritual responsibility, and community belonging. This conversation will examine how queer and trans people have historically existed within African spiritual cosmologies and how those traditions continue to offer pathways toward healing, wholeness, and liberation today.

Together, participants will reflect on questions of ancestral belonging, religious trauma, spiritual reclamation, and the role of faith and cultural memory in supporting queer and trans wellness.

As we celebrate Pride Month, we honor the resilience, wisdom, and leadership of queer and trans communities whose contributions continue to shape movements for justice, healing, and collective freedom.

Date: June 24, 2026

Time: 6:00 PM – 7:15 PM EST

Location: Virtual

“The sacred is not outside of politics”

This month, we honor M. Jacqui Alexander, whose work reminds us that healing, spirituality, memory, and political struggle are deeply intertwined.

Throughout this issue—from Leilani Banday's Māmā, to reflections on Black motherhood and survival, to our upcoming Reimagining Spirituality Series—we find ourselves returning to one of Alexander's central teachings: that liberation requires us to remember what colonialism taught us to forget.

At ESOC, her work helps us understand that spirituality is not an escape from the world, but a practice of transformation within it. Through healing justice, cultural memory, political education, and collective care, we continue the work of crossing between the sacred and the political, the ancestral and the everyday. 

As we move into summer, may we continue the work of remembering, healing, and becoming. Want to go deeper? Explore M. Jacqui Alexander's Pedagogies of Crossing, a transformative work that invites us to remember what colonialism sought to erase and imagine new pathways toward healing and freedom. 

Reimagining everything is not just a theme.
It is a practice. A discipline. A commitment.

It asks us to build differently.
To care differently.
To lead differently.

And most importantly—
to do it together.

If you believe in this work, we invite you to:

• Partner with us

• Share this newsletter

• Contribute resources

• Join our upcoming programs

• Follow our socials IG: envisionsafetydc_md Youtube: www.youtube.com/@EnvisioningSafety 

  We are building the conditions for our survival—and our liberation.

Reimagining everything means refusing fragmentation. It means understanding that spirituality, political education, creative expression, and leadership development are not separate lanes — they are the ecosystem required for Black futures to thrive. Through our Reimagining Spirituality Series, our North Star tributes, and our expanding Alumni Network, ESOC is building living infrastructure for liberation — spaces where we study deeply, heal collectively, strategize boldly, and sustain one another beyond the moment.

If you believe in a future where campuses and communities are safer, spiritually fortified, and politically awake — we invite you to partner with us, reach out at esocnow@gmail.com or leadership@esoc.org to connect. If you believe in our work, we ask that you donate through our fiscal sponsor CTWO here and communicate that you’re donating in honor of ESOC’s work in the contribution information. Your support allows us to provide stipends to organizers, compensate healers and cultural workers, expand programming, and strengthen the care systems that sustain this work long-term.

Give. Partner. Reimagine with us. 

Where care meets political education.