Don’t be afraid of math.

I have often heard a tone of concern when I say I want to approach liberation mathematically. But don’t worry! You use math all the time for doing positive things. When you shake someone’s hand, you and the other person are coordinating two objects to arrive at the same place at the same time, with the right pressure and rate of oscillation. When you throw a party, you think about how many people are coming, how loud the music is gonna be, how much water to buy, snacks to get, et cetera. And when the party happens, you’re all dancing to the same beat. Math is beautiful, and math is emotional! Never fear, empathematics is here. :P

But cereal, when we talk about collective liberation, we are talking about billions of people, and that’s just a static population. In all complexity, we are talking about billions of people over time. On top of that, our level of consideration grows with our power as a community, so we will be considering fluctuating and overlapping sets of people over time, and it gets a little kooky. Statistics and set theory will need to be our friends. Yay, more friends! So in the process of building collective liberation, there are numbers involved, and it’s beautiful. Honestly, I think the fear of math comes from the trauma surrounding high-stakes testing, and the passionless teachers we had in our industrialized education. Time to heal and look at math anew. :D

Design your projects for impact.

When you figure out what strengths you want to contribute to liberation, determine your impact. How many people do you want to empower, and in what way? Also, how many people over time?

For example:
• I want to empower eight femmes of color this year by educating them about boundary setting.
• I want to check on them throughout the year to see how their boundaries are holding up.
• Next year, I want to empower 64 femmes of color by improving my process and making videos.

With your intended impact, you can now design your time and budget to make this happen. This seems simple enough, but more often than not, we think about what we’re gonna do, rather than what for. You can also find and activate the wisdom of people who have done this in the past. Draw on experience. This can save years of effort for the same amount of impact.

Activate wisdom.

This means taking books, articles, stories, or advice, and incorporating them into your project plan, process, or to-do list. With every sentence, ask yourself: “When in my project will this show up?” When I was co-designing the project plan for the upcoming California Beehive Design Collective poster, we utilized the wisdom of past Beehive projects, and literally stopped at every sentence to incorporate lessons learned into the project plan and routines. I like to call it sophopraxy, putting wisdom into practice. And this is how we can compress the timeline for liberation in our lifetime. That's matheradical! ;D