Origins of T-MAPs

As global chaos erupts in so many ways and places, I feel pressure (on myself) to write about that, as I would have in the past.

(There is information below about a Friends Committee on National Legislation event, Calling for a Ceasefire: Israel-Palestine Briefing.)

Instead, I’m led to continue to write about transformative mutual aid practices (T-MAPs) because we need to support each other, especially in perilous times like these.

---

T-MAPS and Mutual Aid

Some time ago, at our Des Moines Mutual Aid food project, one of my friends asked how I was doing. Which turned into an opportunity to share about T-MAPs. She agreed that no one asks how those of us doing justice work are doing. At least, no one outside our Mutual Aid community, where checking in with each other is an important part of our work together.

---

The Icarus Project

T-MAPs was originally dreamed up in the early years of The Icarus Project (TIP), a community of people working at the intersection of mental health and social justice. Over the years, TIP has created peer-based mental health support groups, alternative publications and educational resources, and new language outside the conventional “mental illness” paradigm. One tool developed by TIP, which has partly inspired T-MAPs, is called Mad Maps. Mad Maps began as creative and supportive conversations on the Icarus website about strategies for friends and strangers to communicate about how to take better care of each other. Mad Maps has evolved into a set of guides on navigating different topics like intergenerational trauma and madness and oppression.

https://tmapscommunity.net/the-origins-of-this-tool/

The Icarus Project is now the Fireweed Collective.

Fireweed Collective offers mental health education and mutual aid through a Healing Justice and Disability Justice lens. We support the emotional wellness of all people and center QTBIPOC folks in our internal leadership, programs, and resources.

Our work seeks to disrupt the harm of systems of abuse and oppression, often reproduced by the mental health system. Our model for understanding ‘severe mental illness’ is community and relationship-based and divests from the prison industrial complex and psych wards.

Healing Justice (HJ) is a framework rooted in racial justice, disability justice, and economic justice. Healing Justice provides us with tools we can use to interrupt the systems of oppression that impact our mental health. Fireweed Collective uses HJ as a guide to help redefine what medicine is, and increase who has access to it.

We are honored to be a part of a larger community of organizations guided by the  principles of Healing Justice:

• responding to and intervening in generational trauma and violence (Kindred)  
• collective practices that can impact and transform the consequences of oppression (Kindred)
• imagining a generative and co-created future (Healing By Choice!)
• being in right relationship with ourselves, each other, and the land (Healing By Choice)
• centering disability justice, people of color, and economic justice (Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s history of healing justice)

Fireweed Collective

---

Calling for a Ceasefire

---