06/19/2026
We celebrate the Black joy, rest, defiance, resilience, and persistence because they’re ours - but the reckoning is still owed and we won’t ignore the contradictions.
Yvette and Sunny met in person for the first time this week. We’ve been trying to build liberation strategies across screens and virtual spreadsheets, doing work that demands much more than that.
In-person relationship, shared space, and the ability to conceptualize together without a business-day-lag sometimes feel like unattainable luxury to us. But this is basic infrastructure. And infrastructure requires resourcing.
Most are by now aware that Black-founded orgs receive a fraction of the “philanthropic” monetary support that flow to white-led counterparts, and that the gap widens for the unrestricted funding that actually lets an org breathe, plan, and survive. In the animal rights sector, we watch millions flow to orgs built on demonstrably misleading claims about saving animals - groups funneling massive funds to celebrities willing to eat plant-based for a month.
We are not imagining the scarcity. It is engineered, and it is directional.
The deeper contradiction is that the nonprofit industrial complex shouldn’t exist. It is a symptom, and APEX is part of the proof that the state has refused to resource the liberation of the people it spent centuries extracting from. We’ve done grassroots, unpaid work for decades, pouring ourselves into the gaps the state left open. Mutual aid shouldn’t have to exist. Fundraisers shouldn’t have to exist. But here we are, building lifeboats because the ship was designed to drown us.
Our message to you is that material solidarity is what solidarity actually looks like. And ‘material’ isn’t synonymous with cash (though we need it and we’ll take it!). It can look like registering to our events or actually showing up to the event you registered for. It can look like sharing our posts so the work travels further than we can carry it alone. It can look like donating items for a fundraiser. Ultimately, it’s you, internalizing that solidarity isn’t a feeling you have, but a practice you keep. You show up in whatever ways you can.