Vigilant Love’s Closing Message to Community – Thank You for a Decade 

Vigilant Love was founded in December 2015 in response to Islamophobic violence, anti-refugee racism, and rising right wing fascism with Trump’s first election. We came together as a multi-ethnic, multi-faith/spiritual community in the ancestral and unceded lands of the Tongva, Fernandeño Tataviam, Kizh, and Gabrieleño peoples (colonially known as Los Angeles) – with a vision of embodying vigilant love to create pathways of healing and liberation together. 

As a racial solidarity organization, our mission has been dedicated to challenging structural Islamophobia and white supremacy while creating spaces for connection through arts, political education, and healing justice programming. After nearly a decade of existence, we are closing our organizational doors, and opening new possibilities for how the legacy of Vigilant Love will continue on.

Our journey and achievements

This Ramadan, we have been reflecting on the life and impact of Vigilant Love. We’re proud of the work we did at the intersection of the War on Terror, structural Islamophobia, surveillance, mental health, and white supremacy – both as a Muslim and Japanese American-led organization and as part of abolitionist coalitions with our incredible partners across the U.S. 

We will always remember the power of the people, especially from times of organizing direct actions – the thousands of people who joined us to flood the Los Angeles International Airport to demand that detainees be released back to their families and an end to the Muslim Ban in 2017, or the hundreds of people who pressured LA City Council and Sacramento politicians from 2018-2021 to reject Countering Violent Extremism surveillance funding from DHS that continues to threaten and further securitize our city and state. We are also proud to have co-anchored the Partnership to End Gendered Islamophobia, Muslim Abolitionist Futures Network, and the Stop CVE Campaign. 

We will always remember the moments of community healing that took place in our arts-based vigils in Little Tokyo, where we held space for connection amid isolating state sanctioned trauma, and how we strengthened our bonds of solidarity through reflective storytelling, poetry, and political analysis. We will always be proud of how we safely gathered hundreds of community members during many difficult political moments and pandemics at our eight annual Bridging Community Iftars during Ramadan, renewing our solidarity commitment each year. We’ll always cherish the heartfelt exchanges and connections made between Japanese American former incarcerees, their descendants, Muslims, indigenous Bishop Paiutes, queer and trans folks, and immigrant and diasporic communities on our multiple Vigilant Love buses to the annual Manzanar pilgrimages. We are proud of our five incredible cohorts of the Solidarity Arts Fellowship, which brought together over 70 youth alumni from Muslim and Japanese American backgrounds. These fellows fostered relationships with each other, their ancestors, and the transformative power of art, and they continue to engage in community and social change movements today.

We are also so proud of our dynamic and far-reaching racial justice education series, Liberatory Lineages. This series created virtual spaces for our communities to learn and engage with BIPOC-led and centered workshops to move our communities into stronger joint struggle and racial solidarity, specifically around resisting anti-Blackness and supporting Palestinian liberation. 

Lastly, we are incredibly proud of our program, the Artist Activist Fellowship, which hosted 10 emerging and talented Muslim and BIPOC artist activist fellows. This program provided each fellow with six months of mentorship from 10 seasoned multidisciplinary artists and community peer support to hone their voices as artist-activists, as well as stipends to support their time and creation of politicized artwork around themes of abolition, community care, and healing justice. Their political art projects were exhibited at “Pathways to Liberation: Artwork of Struggle, Joy, and Resistance” at Art Share LA in November 2024. 

We will always appreciate the political home we co-created with all of you who have been part of Vigilant Love’s unique and powerful Muslim, Japanese, Black, Indigenous, People of Color, LGBTQIA, multigenerational and multifaith beloved community. Amid especially difficult conditions of polycrises we are facing, we are celebrating these collective accomplishments as models of what is possible when we come together. We hope these examples of clarity and commitment can serve as sources of inspiration for all of us to practice and deepen Vigilant Love’s values of healing justice, relationship-building, arts activism, shura (collective consultation), and transformative justice.


More than ever, we feel that our anti-imperialist, anti-war, abolitionist movements on the left must continue building out healing justice and racial solidarity infrastructure to resist the War on Terror, national security apparatus, and white supremacy. These threats especially continue to impact our comrades fighting for a free Palestine and BIPOC immigrant communities who are living through and dissenting genocide, fascism, and climate collapse. We urge our community to continue pouring into the leaders, organizations, and movements that carry on this legacy of resistance, power building, and principled struggle.

Why we’re closing this chapter

Ultimately, the decision to sunset was made with deep consideration to the arc of Vigilant Love’s existence, a centering of the organizational values, and care for our people. We hope the momentum of Vigilant Love’s work will be continued, and we know that our movements are part of a larger network of resistance that lives far beyond any one organization. 


Across our many years of existence, Vigilant Love and our leadership persevered through a number of hardships in our efforts to combat relentless systemic violence with extremely limited resources and personal and collective traumas. Over the last few years, we persisted through strategic planning and experimentations of our shared leadership structure. More recently, we focused on resourcing trainings for infrastructure development to formalize Vigilant Love’s values as a democratic worker-led organization while also carrying on our community work, such as co-creating anti-Zionist racial solidarity programming. At the end of 2023, Vigilant Love experienced a period of internal disruption and conflict that caused the organization to pause a majority of our external-facing programming and organizing in order to prioritize and address these matters that impacted our entire team. After months of dedicated transformative justice work and shifts in the capacities of everyone involved, Vigilant Love’s leadership decided to sunset the organization.

What we’ve learned

Much of what we experienced during this period is widespread within our radical movements. We hope to be part of ongoing and future efforts to address these issues with other organizations and movement workers who have experienced similar struggles relating to conflict and organizational resilience. For now, here are some learnings we want to share with our community and partners, which are informed by our recent challenges and what we have heard from our comrades across movement spaces:

 

  • Accountability for Each Other: Our movement spaces continuously face systemic attacks that often impact and trigger our personal traumas and capacities, which can disrupt our abilities to collaborate and remain connected to each other. This kind of disconnection and trauma can lead to inequitable application and weaponization of healing justice and transformative justice values. Although many of us strive to build a better world rooted in liberation and healing, this tendency makes our movement spaces vulnerable for rupture and harm. If we want to be on a path towards liberation and collective healing, we must tend to our personal healing and build a strong ethic of self-accountability for each other. 

  • Mutual Commitment to Values and Practice for Cohesion: Shared goals and political analysis are critical for organizing. However, in order to achieve and sustain cohesion, groups need clearly defined values, commitments to being in right relationship with one another, and practices for working toward shared goals. It’s also important to collectively define and clarify those values and practices on an ongoing basis so everyone can be mutually committed and accountable to them

  • Policies and Processes to Uphold Collective Standards: All organizations need clear practices, systems, and policies that uphold a shared standard of accountability, safety, and dignity of every member. These policies and processes will be emergent throughout the lifespan of an organization, and take time to develop. They also need to be regularly maintained and supported with personnel, resources, and collective commitment. Even with these systems in place, there will always be limitations to what organizations can do and hold. Expecting perfection and missing opportunities to extend curiosity for internal working dynamics can inhibit generative growth and instead often promote conflict avoidance and divisiveness.  

  • Org Development for Horizontal Leadership Structures: Models of horizontal leadership are gaining popularity in our movement spaces, and for good reason – these kinds of non-hierarchical structures can work to undermine the antiquated norms of traditional nonprofits where non-democratic decision making occurs frequently and multiply-marginalized people are often underpaid and overworked. That said, it’s tremendously important for organizations and collectives with horizontal leadership structures to develop and commit to clear accountability and feedback processes so that in non-hierarchical working relationships, there is delineated and equitable responsibility for work, leadership, benefits, and co-creation of organizational culture. Even within a horizontal leadership structure, it's important to recognize and intervene whenever unhealthy power dynamics may persist. Generative intervention requires a mutual commitment to organizational values, self awareness, and strong communication and conflict transformation skills to work through such challenges.

  • Discernment for Transformative Justice: In order to support healing, equity, and accountability, transformative justice (TJ) requires a wide and deep array of resources, time, mutual commitment, practice, and training. Without this, TJ can unintentionally replicate, and at times even exacerbate, harm and trauma. As the TJ movement continues to develop and evolve, it is important to recognize the limits to which TJ can be effective in the nonprofit industrial complex.

  • Support Systems for Equity and Healing Justice: The staff and leadership at small, grassroots organizations – which are increasingly strained for resources and support – need committed, effective, and values-aligned boards, advisory steering committees, and/or volunteer committees. These support systems help prevent staff and leadership burnout, encourage mutual accountability and collective decision-making, and create possibilities for everyone involved to uphold healing justice practices together. This might include, but certainly is not limited to, taking turns in receiving breaks and wellness support, placing healthy boundaries around roles and responsibilities, etc.

  • The Time for Healthy Transitions: Healthy, robust, values-aligned offboarding practices are just as important as onboarding practices. Individuals, relationships, and capacities change over time, and people’s lives and work can take them in different directions with different goals. It is the responsibility of all parties in a working relationship to notice when it is time to initiate conversations of transitions. Too often, we in movement spaces see these kinds of conversations as adversarial and harmful to relationships (or a sense of belonging) when in reality staying in a role that no longer fits can create more tension, hurt, harm, or resentment within a group.

 

We hope these lessons are supportive to the longevity of other grassroots organizations because the resistance remains as urgent as ever. As we sunset Vigilant Love, the work continues amid countless partners who have been building power for years, as well as new organizations and grassroots initiatives who are in their sunrise. We want to thank all of you who have supported, collaborated, and engaged with Vigilant Love. We look forward to seeing and supporting the local efforts and broader movements that will continue to learn, grow, enact change, and build the liberated futures we believe in. 

See you in the streets,

Vigilant Love