Yichen Feng [Starting at 03:40]: Hello, everyone. It is very wonderful to be here with you all. I hope the end of the year is winding down nicely for everyone.

We are approaching rest soon. I am Yichen and I’m one of the founders and co-directors of LUNAR. I was born in Shanghai, and I’m a first generation Chinese American.

Sabrina Wu: Hi, everyone! It’s so great to see you all today. I’m Sabrina Wu. I am also one of the co-directors and co-founders of LUNAR. I’m second generation Chinese American and both Yichen and I are based in Oakland, California, on Ohlone land.

LUNAR, which you’ll hear more about today, is a vehicle to build cross-racial solidarity between Asian-American and Black and indigenous communities through community building, political education, and resource mobilization. For us, at its core, LUNAR was really always meant to be a solidarity project. It was born out of our own personal commitments to solidarity, and we understand solidarity as a practice of mutual support that is demonstrated through tangible and material actions.

So what that looks like in practice for us: we’re a giving circle. We do political education with our members, we pool and move resources from Asian American members through collective decision making and move that money towards Black and indigenous communities, and we are also a larger solidarity fund that’s currently raising $20 million from institutional and individual funders to move resources that scale, also to Black and indigenous communities.

Yichen Feng: I’m gonna start off by just giving you all an overview of LUNAR. It’s my understanding that folks here, some may be part of giving circles. You may be leading or starting your own giving circle or you may just have curiosities about giving circles. We thought just for us, as a community of practice, it would be helpful just to give you all a sense of what we do at LUNAR and how our program actually works.

So we built LUNAR with the belief that,  like what you were saying earlier, Kelsey, about personal practice, that raising our own consciousness as Asian Americans actually then fuels into personal transformation, at the individual level, that then eventually leads to transformation at the community and movement level. For us that’s a very basic building block of our theory of change, that individuals need to transform themselves, and then transform our community, and that  builds up to the movement, and cross-racial solidarity and power building that is core to our vision. That is why we do a lot of political education, with our circle members as well as thinking about solidarity as this core experiment that we are embarking on together.

For LUNAR, we believe that stronger organizing of Asian American communities actually leads to more powerful multiracial movements, and that we as individuals in our small giving circles of 10 to 12 people actually play a really, really important role in that transformation. A little bit more about our giving circles: this is our depiction of the model of individuals, like-minded folks who want to learn together, strangers coming together.

Each LUNAR circle member, when we put out the call to welcome people into this space, is committing to quite a few things. One is a financial commitment of anywhere between 5 to 10,000, or even more, dollars. We really encourage our members to lean into a little bit of what is asking meaningful, potentially a little bit uncomfortable for them, as it relates to their contributions. Then for us on the LUNAR team side, Sabrina and myself, we actually fundraise to match the funds. So in an ideal world, we are actually getting to $100,000 of pooled capital in every LUNAR circle. To date, we’ve been able to accomplish $100,000 of collective funding that goes to the organizations that are identified by the groups.

In terms of matching funds, that’s also been successful from our end, to be able to get institutional support from larger scale foundations, as well as individuals who really believe in the work of what we’re doing together. The individuals who come into the circle know that it is in service of funding and flowing resources to Black and indigenous-led organizations.

The essentials are that our giving circles are actually quite involved. It requires a deep time and financial commitment. So last year, which was our inaugural year for LUNAR, we actually did a very highly dense 12-week program where the circle met for three hours a week, every week, with additional webinars spread throughout. It was amazing in terms of momentum and building the giving circle to make a collective decision within twelve weeks.

One thing that we moved to this year, for the second circle, is that we expanded the program to be a six-month program. Part of that was a direct response to the first circle’s feedback to have more spaciousness, to actually build relationships with each other.

One of the key learnings that we got from the first circle was that people just really, really wanted to deeply get to know each other. In parallel, as they were doing the work, too, of understanding their own money stories, understanding Asian American history, and our communities’ both anti-Blackness, as well as solidarity with Black and indigenous communities.

We’re a six month program now, we’re still moving $100,000, our members are engaged in a deep personal reflection with each other on their experiences with race and racism, and also given the opportunity to be in dialogue with Black and indigenous movement leaders, that we invite and bring in to showcase their expertise, or things that are incredibly urgent and top of mind for them.

There is a very large list of community organizations and grassroots groups that we are in community with and we move together with. I don’t want to name them all, but you can go on our website. There are also many movement organizations that we co-collaborate and work with a lot of their curriculum on too. So one example would be Movement for Black Lives, and their Reparations Toolkit.

This is all for the purpose of ultimately moving money at the end of the circle in a reparations and wealth redistribution framework that is co-created by the group, the purpose and thesis behind LUNAR and how we are thinking about outcomes as we design each piece of the curriculum.

As I mentioned, we have a six-month program. Right now, the way that we are organized, each month has a different topic that we focus on. Some of it has to do with understanding ourselves, understanding the Asian American community, understanding what is alive right now for Black and indigenous movement leaders. Reparations itself is an entire topic, solidarity is an entire topic, and also solidarity funding is an entire topic.

We start the month with these content circles that we are deeply embedded in. We are doing a lot of learning together. And then, two weeks later, in the middle of the month, we have more of a relational circle where we get together, we do more community building and relationship building exercises that are not really grounded in content. It’s really getting to both, “Here’s the information,” and “Let’s be together, let’s learn together, and let’s form an identity for who we are as a collective.”

Political education has always been at the center of the work that we’re doing. We do a lot of exercises in terms of breakout rooms, bringing in speakers, sometimes doing artistic and self-reflection exercises, etc. We’re happy to share all of this curriculum and content with anyone here who is interested.

Obviously in our giving circle, there is a bit more focus on Asian Americans, so we dive very deep on Asian American history, and also movements within the Asian American community, too.

Before we move on to the last piece, just in summary, we’re moving a few parallel strategies that for us, again, bubble up to this larger scale change. So one focus [is] on building the authentic relationship, creating strong communities of Asian Americans that are politicized around racial justice. Most of our members actually come to us because either they are seeking a community of other Asian Americans, or their consciousness maybe was awakened during 2020 with all the anti-Asian xenophobia that was ongoing, juxtaposed against all of the violent murders of Black folks that we were seeing.

So [in 2020] we saw a moment, which is also the same year that LUNAR started, to get Asian American folks who [saw] that part of their consciousness come alive, and allow for them to connect with the community of others who were also seeking folks to be together in their explanation of a politicized Asian American identity. And then separately, we also facilitate, from the LUNAR institutional perspective, relationship building and the resources flowing between Asian Americans and other Black and indigenous communities. There’s a lot of learning and  parallel community building that comes there, too.

At the end of the day, the last thing I’ll end on is that the resource flow is key to us because it is a tangible, material demonstration of cross-racial solidarity in support of Black and indigenous lives. There’s a lot of education, [but] we also really want to put money behind the process by which people come together to choose, select, and think about the organizations that they want to receive this funding.

There are a lot of lessons that have been emergent over the last two cohorts. There are a lot of values that we are still learning and distilling from the giving circles.

One key one for example, from the first year, is that we learned that the money matters, but it’s also the relationships that matter. The individuals were really yearning for a connection with the organizations and also wanting to be able to give the money in a completely unrestricted way. There were a lot of these insights that are helping us, as Sabrina mentioned, prototype this larger $20 million LUNAR fund. That is this broader vision of ours.

The $20 million fund is a giving circle at scale. We started asking ourselves, well, “If we can get 11 people who come together in search of solidarity, trying to understand how to be in solidarity, what if we gave them $20 million, $1 million, $10 million?” We see giving circles as sort of the most basic form of a fund, of people putting money together in a pot and making a decision on how to allocate it.

So for us, the dream of the $20 million LUNAR fund is something that has the ability to deploy integrated capital – all different forms of capital: grants, loans, equity investments – potentially at a much larger scale in support of the organizations that the circle decides to [fund], beginning with Black and indigenous led organizations. We’re seeing some of the initial grant-making that’s come up open doors for other opportunities to get more deeply involved, to potentially deploy larger dollars as well. So with that said I’ll just pause there and I will pass it to Sabrina.

Sabrina Wu: Thank you. That was a pretty detailed rundown of our programming. As Yichen mentioned, we just wrapped our second cohort, which we’re so excited about and are in the process of moving our second $100,000 worth of grants to the community. The last cohort met for a total of 6 months, so it was a pretty long time commitment that people are signing up for to engage in political education, in collective giving, in the relationship and the community building.

The political education [component] is a huge focus of our giving circle. It is where we spend the bulk of our time and our energy together. So we wanted today to give you a taste of some of the types of political education activities that we do in the LUNAR circle.

As you saw in the slide with the curriculum, our political education curriculum focuses on solidarity heavily as a principle and a practice. As a principle and value, folks reflect on what it looks like in their lives, and then we have whole other sessions where we bring in funders whose role is to move resources in support of solidarity. Meaning, they work at institutions who  define or identify their work as solidarity funding.

So today, we’re gonna do a short activity that we facilitated with the circle members, when we first introduced the concept of solidarity to them. The premise here is that in order to do work, or move resources, in a way that demonstrates solidarity, we each need to begin with our own personal understanding of what it means to us, and how we should experience it in our own lives.

Over the next ten minutes, the group separated into breakout rooms, where participants responded to a few different prompts:

• How have you experienced or expressed solidarity?

• What are some of the qualities of that act of solidarity that really made a difference?

Once everyone returned from the breakout rooms, Yichen and Sabrina began a group discussion focused on political education and solidarity. Sabrina asked attendees to share their experiences in the chat. Discussion questions included: 

• How have you or your giving circle incorporated political education or solidarity in your work? Or how would you like to?

• Any successes or challenges you’d like to share?

• Where would you like to grow?

• What support do you need? 

Sabrina Wu: In terms of community building, the hope is that we are starting to build a community of cohorts that can each connect to one another, and relationships that will last beyond the giving circle itself. We’re also hoping that folks who participate, that this is not their only engagement in this work, and that they will actually take a lot of the learnings and be involved in other giving circles or other organizing work in their communities. That was a lot of what the focus on the solidarity sessions has been about: how to actually be in close and direct, day-to-day relationships with folks on the ground, in your own community, where you live, and to be able to apply some of these principles that we talk about in the giving circle.

Ideally, what we would love to see is that each of the folks that are coming to us and going through our program are then taking that into the world, into their own communities, and creating the ripple effect.

Yichen Feng: The last thing I’ll close on is that you all should have our emails in the calendar invite, so I’m happy to share anything. Really, we have some curriculum. We have some topics. Whatever can be supportive and encouraging your circles, or your friends, to think about solidarity.

If that’s something that is interesting to your group, or looking at any of the  pieces of information in ways in which we’ve held those conversations, we’d be more than happy to share that as a resource.