Luminary Brain Trust Updates
January 5, 2024
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Enjoy the Winter Incubator Playlist
Even if you can't join our Winter Incubator this year, you can still be with us in... vibes.
Enjoy the Winter Incubator playlist!
Happy 2024, friends!
This winter, I’ll be working on:
- Creating a new monthly Family Action Toolkit
- Luminary Braintrust Collab Lab on Sabotage for Do-Gooders
- Luminary Braintrust weekly updates with new fun things for you to enjoy (you are here)
- Providing unpaid labor as an advisor in our school system’s disability advocacy group
- Facilitating a media working group for a group of Arab, Muslim, Jewish, and Palestinian parents in our local community
- Kicking off a Participatory Research Action project centering parent activists with Alison L.
- Preparing for Chinese New Year & Spring Festival
- Facilitating the Winter Incubator through February (and then the Summer Accelerator in July)
- Week 7 of living without a kitchen (by spring, we should have unlimited access to running water and heatery things to prepare food!)
- Facilitating a parenting book club for my kiddo’s middle school PTO
- Coordinating an upcoming podcast episode with our friend Nat of Come Back to Care
- Also a summit with Nat in September (not sure what a summit is, but it sounds important and probably fun!)
- Figuring out how to move my body in winter (I don’t want to! It’s too cold!)
- Reaching new people who might find any of the stuff I do helpful by announcing stuff on Facebook, Tiktok, and Substack
- Becoming a potted plant parent, where I just hang out in the room while my kids scream and just hold space for them, because they don’t want my advice anymore, they just need a safe place to dump all their big complicated tween feelings
- Figuring out how to fund… all of this ::gestures broadly:::
Every summer, I trim down my list of responsibilities and narrow my floodlights into laser-beams. But this is not the time for that – this is the time for moving slowly and deeply through the process of our winter incubator.
I’ll report back on how it goes!
I’d love your feedback on what you need from me, which projects you’d like to join me on, and which items in this… mountain of stuff are less helpful for you so I can put some stuff down.
How do real people do just one job and also get paid for it? One day I’ll crack that mystery!
@raisingluminaries How to sustain activism long-term (even when you’re juggling work, kids, and day-to-day stressors) #parentingtips #smashthekyriarchy #transformativeparenting #burnout ♬ original sound - Ashia Ray 🇵🇸🍉♾️
Coming up next
After hearing from members who want to participate, but can’t juggle anything more right now – I’m pushing off publication for our Sabotage for Do-Goodery until March.
Meanwhile – enjoy the last installment of our Goofy Bullshit Year of the Rabbit Horoscope – find out what this winter has in store for you!
With you,
– Ashia
PS: Bellamy’s book club is back, starting January 23rd!
PPS: Pat yourself on the back for all the great stuff you accomplished this year. And if you can’t remember what you did – that’s because you forgot to track in in our weekly Little Wins! Give Future-You the gift of recognizing your accomplishments.
PPS: Have you subscribed to April Brown’s newsletter for trauma-informed educators?
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©2025 Ashia Ray of Raising Luminaries™. All rights reserved.
Raising Luminaries is anchored in the land of the Wampanoag & Massachusett People.
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Photographs via Unsplash & Illustrations via Storyset, used with permission.