by Tabitha Hamilton (they/them/elle)
Hello allgo friends and family,
It’s me, Tabitha, allgo’s newest team member coming at you in true long-time-listener- first-time-blogger fashion. While I am moved by the newness of this chapter, I feel familiar and grounded in this role. I’m excited to embark on this continuous journey of Health and Wellness with a community I care so deeply about.
Over the past few years, while we’ve been living in this mess, I would find myself constantly feeling stuck in it. Feeling like the mess was absorbing me, claiming me, swallowing me. There would be days where I couldn’t remember, or couldn’t muster the energy to cope healthily. All the self care/self regulating tools I had felt readily equipped with in the “before times” just felt too heavy to pick up. Forced isolation can be so disruptive to community building.
However, in that unmoored mess when I felt bereft of connection, the warmth of community would eventually find me. Virtual panels and discussions, online breath and body movement, journaling workshops, BIPOC community check-ins, coalition building, thoughtful conversations on expanding the possible, gardening, and online queer dance parties and kiki’s were just some of the things that kept me going and helped me to reconnect to community care and assured sense of belonging. Alone but together.
I know this pandemic isn’t over (though it feels less intense and really we’ve all just adapted) so I’ll approach my role as Health And Wellness Coordinator with intention, creativity, and care. My goal is to recreate that warm and welcoming environment I always felt when I walked through the doors of allgo, said hey to Priscilla, and entered that cozy red and yellow room. I hope to continue the allgo mission of fostering a safe space for queer communities of color to engage in the expansiveness that is wellness, through an informed lense. I hope to bring more tactile and hands-on moments, and encourage stillness within the programming. I’ll be focusing on making wellness more accessible and relatable to Black and Brown LGBQTIA+ communities, and doing that with a holistic approach. I want us to redefine what medicine means and looks like as queer and transgender people of color living in central Texas. While I’ve been decolonizing my sense of health and wellness I know there is still so much work to be done and I look forward to growing that with you all. I hope my intersectional perspective as a Black, Tejanx, queer, and non-binary artist adds value to the allgo legacy. I feel honored to contribute to this historic organization in a whole new capacity and am eager to collaborate with other organizations that fall in alignment with allgo’s passions.
I’d like to invite anyone that feels called to contribute to allgo’s health and wellness program to connect with me. Please reach out with any dreams, goals, questions, concerns, or needs that you might have. You can shoot any messages to Wellness@allgo.org or to contact me directly please send your message to Tabitha@allgo.org .
If you feel curious about the work that I do alongside and outside of allgo you can find me on social media at @TheNativeDream.
Thank you for showing up and I look forward to connecting with you soon.
Xoxo
Tabitha
