Mission
By Ashia R., Head Custodian of Raising Luminaries
What we do
Raising Luminaries creates resources to support caregivers and educators in raising the next generation of kind & courageous humans.
Who we are
Members of the Raising Luminaries community (‘Incendiaries’) are of parents and guardians (caregivers), as well as teachers and librarians (educators), and any other grownups tasked with influencing and raising the youngest generation of humans (ages 0-10). See the Participants section of the Accountability Statement for more.
We are, in general, progressive-minded and radically leftist, with an emphasis on learning, listening, inclusion, and transformative justice. We do not compete with organizations and individuals whose missions align with ours. We collaborate.
How we do it
The primary focus of Raising Luminaries is scaffolding difficult conversations with young children through our ancillary organizations, Books for Littles (BFL), The Luminary Braintrust (LBT) the Student Ignition Society (SIS).
Books For Littles provides children’s book recommendations and family action toolkits to support parents, educators, and caregivers in tackling tricky conversations with kids. By using picture books to make hard conversations easier and to introduce complex topics simply, we educate grownups, who then go on to have ongoing discussions with their littles and their wider community.
The Luminary Braintrust is a support space for caregivers providing resources, workshops, hangouts, and various experimental collaborations to sustain long-term parenting goals in igniting kind and courageous leaders.
The Student Ignition Society provides free resources for educators to build social justice curriculum for students in K-12.
Broad Objectives
The objectives of Raising Luminaries, in order of priority:
For humanity
To raise a kind and brilliant generation of leaders to smash the kyriarchy.
For members
Maintain affordable and accessible resources where Incendiaries can find discussion topics, perspective, and tools to deepen their own understanding and confidence educating children on social emotional topics.
For Ashia
I’ve determined Raising Luminaries is the most effective method (within my personal ability) to fight injustice, mis-education, and suffering.
- See below for short-term objectives by year for 2014 through the present.
- By 2025: Work towards sustaining my family while providing support to our wider community, balancing my efforts to help my kids step into thier power a way that lifts not just them, but their entire generation.
- By 2035: Raise kind & courageous humans who take responsibility for justice and inclusion.
- By 2082: Smash the kyriarchy.
- Sometime after 2082: Smash the sun into the moon (this just makes the other goals feel easier).
Objectives by Year
2024: Focus & Prioritize
2024 is a the Year of the Dragon. According to the stories we grew up with, the dragon came fifth in the footrace between the 12 (originally 13) zodiac animals that placed them in order for the Chinese Zodiac.
Why, despite being the strongest, most powerful, and fastest animal (who could also fly!) did he only come in 5th? Because unlike the other animals, he was both able to see, and able to do something about a local disaster threatening a small village. So he stepped away to protect the village before returning to the race, setting him back several spots.
While the other animals raced on through noble pursuit and petty squabbles, the dragon assessed the situation and realized – this race is just irrelevant busywork compared to the lives villagers. He still opted to engage – the race was fun, and there is power in engaging with our community. But also, with power comes the responsibility to keep a sense of perspective and focus on what really matters.
2023: Reciprocity
This year our goal is to help self-advocates balance how much we produce and provide to those with power with reclaiming our power. All Raising Luminaries resources are still available for people with privilege and power, but we’re getting much pickier on who we provide free labor and resources to. I’ll be redirecting performative allies and saviors to other spaces, and focusing my energy on helping self-advocates showing up for those who continue to show up for us.
In 2023, I developed and strengthened the spaces where our most dedicated members show up, focusing my time on resources for the Luminary Braintrust and making our seasonal collectives unbelievably awesome. This made our work more sustainable and had a nice bonus effect of creating more resources I could share for free with the public without feeling over-extended and resentful, such as our comprehensive family action toolkits.
2022: Relationships over Rubrics
As we explore dismantling supremacy culture from the roots up, we’re focusing this year on creating more relationship-building spaces to connect with each other. Previous resources focused on results and process – getting more feet on the ground and voices into advocacy, resisting saviorism and educating allies and accomplices on how to reduce harm.
This year, we create collectives, groups, and spaces that don’t drag people into toxic social media spaces, where we can show up for each other, center those most targeted, and set boundaries and priorities to stay focused, reduce harm, and build relationships across divides in need and privilege. This includes leaving social media, and building dedicated virtual spaces for the Luminary Braintrust and seasonal collectives.
2021: Survival & Interdependence
Survival through the pandemic, including direct aid to those most harmed and building resources for multiply-targeted families struggling through isolation.
2020: Demolition
Maintaining all the same stuff as previous years, plus exploring praxis through the lens of demolition and positive destruction, including decolonized practices on working in seasons of growth, destruction, dormancy, and renewal, and anti-capitalism for the resources we create here.
We’re exploring ways to invite responsible member recommendations within the BFL Facebook group and exploring our complicity in capitalism and the attention economy on social media. This is when we’re shutting down the RL Twitter and Instagram account.
This year has been also a bit bumpy with some changes in plans due to the pandemic.
2019: Collaborative Action
Maintaining all the same stuff as previous years, plus exploring praxis through collaborative action in real life and our roles as RL members. This is when we kicked up the Student Ignition Society as an ancillary organization and the Moderators for Raising Luminaries group.
Our monthly themes were similar to previous years, with the addition of American Asian & Pacific Islander issues, Black futures, mental health, ageism, emotional labor, healthy masculinity, adoption & fostering, education rights, anti-capitalism, Latinx issues, digital minimalism, and decolonizing seasonality.
2018: Leadership
Maintaining monthly themed research, monthly curated book lists, praxis by taking on both local and online leadership responsibilities. Themes were similar to 2018, with the addition of body acceptance, wealth inequality, toxic gender roles, and death positivity.
Parenting-as-praxis: lead by example for my own children. My work supporting the Raising Luminaries community is within the scope of what I can do while raising two small children, while unable to work outside the home because of my parental duties and disabilities. This is when we kicked off the Luminary Brain Trust group for Luminary patreon community members.
Measurable financial objectives for 2018 included making RL financially self-sustainable to cover expenses and to reduce my workweek on RL stuff to under 30 hours. We did not reach these financial & hourly objectives.
2017: Website & Accessibility
Create a central website to make searching for and sharing our posts easier on the booksforlittles.com website by adding popular archived content to the website to make it easy to search and less labor intensive to respond to popular reader requests.
Choosing themes by month, we researched and highlighted books with positive messages and unpacked problematic tropes.
Maintain the the BFL Facebook group is where I tested out topics, book suggestions, methods of education, and public interest. It is also where I solicited feedback on what challenges parents and educators face, so I can learn what needs more research and what resources they need help finding.
- January: Activism
- February: Black history
- March: Women’s history
- April: Disability acceptance
- May: Understanding faith & religion
- June: Environmental justice
- July: Immigration
- August: LGBTQi2S+ family constellations
- September: Interpersonal & emotional skills
- October: Decolonization
- Intersectionality & privilege
- Topics by member request
2016: Social & Emotional Skills
I thought it was ‘curate & recommend picture books that foster social-emotional support for children with social disabilities.’ But I found an article on an archived 2016 blog that said our focus was on general ‘Do-Goodery.’ So the mission was do-goodery, I guess, and one of the ways we sought that was through curating & recommending those books.
2014 & 2015: Expanding Complex Representation of Gender & Race
Curate and recommend picture books within the Books For Littles Facebook group with responsible representation across gender and race. Signal boost the work of #OwnVoices authors & illustrators.
How we measure success
This needs work, as I don’t have quantitative ways of measuring many of our objectives yet. I currently track the following to gauge the success of our topics and concepts. But ultimately, RL is designed seed its own destruction by rendering itself obsolete. (If there is no longer any oppression to write about, we have nothing to write about!)
- Website traffic
- Luminary Braintrust comments, activities, contributions, and message feedback
- Summer & Winter Collective enrollment, participation, and feedback
- Critical feedback – both the feedback suggesting that what we do is immoral, and those that agree with the underlying values, but think we’re doing it wrong.
- My income & expenses running RL as a metric of reciprocal sustainability.
Accountability
Members of Raising Luminaries [RL] and our ancillary organizations Books For Littles [BFL], the Luminary Braintrust [LBT] and the Student Ignition Society [SIS], including our supporters, readers, contributors, and the founder of RL and author of this statement, Ashia R. are responsible for transparent and clearly stated missions, objectives, goals, and procedures in an effort to create kind and courageous spaces and resources.
Check out the Accountability Statement & Guidelines for more.
This document was last edited in March of 2024 by Ashia R. to replace Patreon platform with the Luminary Braintrust and update our metrics of success.
