Re: Josephine is closing its doors
Hi folks, it’s Matt and Charley from Josephine. It’s been awhile.
Like you all, we’ve been spending more time at home recently. Struggling to balance between physical distance and emotional solidarity. Practicing cooking as a form of escapism. Trying our best to roll our anxiety out into a stack of Danish pancakes, wrap care into every wonton.
We’ve also been thinking of you all — thinking of parents suddenly home with their kids, unsure of how much they can, or should, shelter their 7-year-olds from the storm outside the walls of home. Thinking of home cooks, nervously checking pantry stocks while rolling up their sleeves to cook up a sense of safety and familiarity for their families and neighbors. Thinking of friends in the food and restaurant industries, unemployed, stuck anxiously at home, counting their savings in months of rent. But then our phones will buzz, bringing us back from anxious daydreams with messages from family, friends, and neighbors that are all saying the same thing in different words — I’m thinking of you, and I love you.
So here we are passing it forward. We’re thinking of you, and we love you. How are you all doing? How are you all taking care of each other? Where do you need more support?
This past week, we’ve been hearing from a lot of you. Parents looking for help with childcare and home cooked food, cooks wondering how to safely cook food for their elderly neighbors, community members looking for more ways to help each other. Our screens are inundated with community-sourced mutual aid compilations and financial support resources. Processing and triaging all of these conversations is somehow simultaneously heart-breaking and -warming, especially when seeing how frequently cooking & food-related needs are being mentioned.
This sense that everyone is trying their best, and that somehow our efforts still might not be enough, is overwhelming. That said, there’s something bittersweet, maybe even beautiful, about how even as we are physically distancing ourselves, we are all realizing and feeling our interconnectedness.
For the past 6 years, we’ve been trying to shine a spotlight on the overwhelming significance, power, and *necessity* of this invisible economy of community care. We have been trying to increase awareness around all of this physical and emotional labor that takes place in homes, in neighborhoods. Turns out, only when our entire economy is shut down do we finally realize the value of our place in our communities. That when businesses are all closed, we still need to cook for and feed each other. Amidst this entire pandemic, everything has shifted — the only constant is home.
For the foreseeable future, there will be no ‘business-as-usual’. And yet, our work has never felt more important.
Home cooks, gig workers, non-“professionals”, domestic workers, & caregivers are the backbones of our society. When every other business needs to close its doors, these are the people who are keeping us safe and sane. When the outside world is safe again, they’ll be doing the work that will make rebuilding and healing possible. They’ve been doing this forever, without the recognition or compensation, and they will keep doing this work regardless. Yet it’s become glaringly obvious that they are also the people who are most immediately and devastatingly impacted in this time of crisis.
We owe it to ourselves and our communities to seize this moment of clarity — to take care of the people who care for us. The work of championing the people who provide community care and weave our collective resilience feels more urgent than ever.
Truthfully, we had already been planning on getting back in touch with you all, to share the progress we’ve made with the COOK Alliance and to invite you to join us as we move beyond policy into the next phase of our work. But we’ll reserve those updates for another day. We’re trying to be thoughtful about where and how to help, and who to join forces with, as this all continues to unfold. So until then, consider this a community check-in with a reminder that we’re here for you. Please say hi and let us know how we can help.
As always, with care,
Charley & Matt
