I believe it is important to honor and lift up those who support us while they are still with us. It is with great joy that I have named the Seed & Spiral Scholarship Fund after my friend Robin Radford!

Robin was the first person to help fund scholarships for my offerings—despite not being a member of the owning class, and despite playing a financial support and care-giving role for family and friends. After many coffee meetups following an event she attended, Robin became a movement elder to me. I have learned a great deal from Robin’s curiosity; her willingness to name when she doesn’t know something; and her deep commitment to intergenerational care, friendship, and learning.

 

Deeply influenced by Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Framework of “beloved community,” Robin is a dedicated community-builder who has been engaged in social justice work since she was nineteen years old.

 

Her commitment is shaped in part by her experience as an agricultural worker in the Dole Pineapple fields in Hawaii. As the only white woman working with a team of Filipino women, she was moved by the generosity and commitment to community welfare she experienced with her fellow workers, which contrasted sharply with her experience of white US culture on the mainland. It was there that the harms of capitalism became elevated as pesticides were sprayed, contributing to ongoing health issues throughout Robin’s life. After Hawaii, she lived and worked in segregated Black communities in Tulsa and Oklahoma City and again experienced radical care that shaped her imagination and spirit.

Robin served as International Student Coordinator at a private high school for eight years, building a large volunteer support organization around supporting international students in finding their place and their power within the community.
 

For years, Robin served as a Literacy Coordinator for Ferguson Florissant school district, where she recruited and trained over fifty volunteer tutors to give individualized attention to adult literacy students. Ninety-five percent of the adult students were African American and the volunteers she assembled were almost entirely middle-class white women which led to profound lessons regarding race and class. Addressing these racial dynamics with care helped make Ferguson Florissant Adult Basic Education program the most successful program of its kind in the state.
 

Robin was also the senior member of the Witnessing Whiteness program, where she supported the on-boarding and training of new facilitators. She facilitated over eighty groups in her ten years with the program.

 

Robin holds a deep commitment to justice, strong analysis of power and privilege, and a desire to continue learning as movements for liberation grow and evolve. She has become a core supporter of Seed & Spiral’s efforts to create embodied practices for the sake of collective liberation. She writes, “I see clearly that interdependence is the truth and that a new vision of community needs to be embodied based on inclusivity, respect, and mutual support. This will be
an antidote to communities built on fanatical individualism, competition and exploitation which produces so much suffering, injustice, and inequality.”