Remote Community-Building During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Vigilant Love’s Solidarity Arts Fellowship

Started in 2019, Vigilant Love’s Solidarity Arts Fellowship (SAF) is a six-month long program for Japanese American and Muslim American young adults between the ages of 18 and 25 who desire to build transformative relationships, receive political education, and participate in multi-disciplinary arts and creative expression workshops. Therefore, the SAF program is a unique opportunity for youth of color to engage in creative, healing justice frameworks to develop deeper understandings of personal and family histories, and to resist larger structures of Islamophobia and white supremacy. When the COVID-19 pandemic presented programming difficulties to hosting SAF retreats in-person in 2020, the Vigilant Love team adapted the SAF program to virtual and hybrid modalities, maintaining the program’s core missions while also creating a system of care for SAF participants who experienced heightened stress during the pandemic. In this case study, I draw on interviews with SAF alumni and the Vigilant Love leadership team to examine the ways that the SAF program not only pursued its goals for inter-spiritual and multi-ethnic community-building but also reveals needed alternative models for youth of color leadership development by grassroots community-based organizations.I argue that within the current landscape of non-profit and grassroots community work, Vigilant Love’s Solidarity Arts Fellowship offers a timely model of youth-centered organizing, inspired by themes of interracialism and “serving the people” from the Asian American Movement and the Third World Left. Promoting accessibility through hybrid, online retreats and ensuring community care through mindfulness and creative-expression activities were a few of the ways that the Vigilant Love facilitation team responded to recent moments of precarity and stress. This case study considers how a community-based organization has sought to build “solidarity” and “community” through an accessible youth-centered program revolving around queer and trans-affirming politics, sustainable mentorship pipelines, and deep political education for their constituents