“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

One of our newest Neighbor Teams at GatherFor, consisting of five mothers living in Brooklyn, has come up with the following approach: every month, they draw a name out of a hat and the team focuses on understanding what that particular Neighbor needs and how to best support them. They are willing to pool funds to help pay bills, to help with groceries, childcare, whatever it takes. This month, the Neighbor…

“The fastest way to learn is to be slightly wrong in public.” — Patrick O’Shaughnessy

In April 2021, I published a post originally titled Maslow Got It Wrong. Turns out, I got a number of things wrong in that post myself. Feedback from readers led me to digging in deeper to the story of Maslow’s being inspired by the Blackfoot in the development of his hierarchy of needs, and publish a more thoroughly researched and nuanced piece that I have retitled “Could the Blackfoot Wisdom that Inspired Maslow Guide Us Now?” The process helped remind me the difficulty of arriving…

Author’s Note: This is a complete revision of the post originally titled “Maslow Got It Wrong.” My earlier version included inaccuracies, as some readers pointed out, like the assumption Maslow depicted his theory in a pyramid shape. I have documented and attempted to correct these errors in this companion post called What I Got Wrong: Revisions to My Post About Maslow and the Blackfoot. I’ve updated the post you’ll read below, so it is more focused on what we can learn from the Blackfoot and from other Native cultures. I have retitled this post to reflect this emphasis more clearly.

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Over the last few years, I have been researching models that centered the experience of belonging for people as a transformative and overlooked part of addressing society and structural inequality. One of the models I’ve been most inspired by for years, ever since I was lucky enough to work with them while I was at Uncharted, is Thread, led by the indomitable Sarah Hemminger.

Thread’s model, operating in Baltimore matches a team of up to five adult volunteers with a freshman student performing in the bottom quintile of their class and hailing from low-income neighborhoods with no more than a…

We’re in the process of submitting a form to secure 501c3 status for GatherFor, with the help of some wonderful and supportive lawyers. One of them asked, in reading about our work, “How do you know that the people you’re giving $500 to will use it appropriately?” He was referring to the fact that we give $500 to each of the people we work with at GatherFor (whom we call “Neighbors”).

This question left me wondering what it means to use money appropriately and who gets to decide. If you’re poor and out of work, is it appropriate to buy…

A New Series on the Internal Work of Justice

On a recent podcast episode of On Being, Krista Tippet reflected on growing up in the sixties, when the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 were passed. Though these laws transformed our country, she wondered why, more than 50 years later, the scenes in our streets and the discussions in our media today are so similar to what they were at that time. She says it seems like, “we changed the law, but we didn’t change ourselves.”

Why? Krista Tippet’s guest on this recent episode, therapist and trauma specialist Resmaa Menakem, writes, “While we see anger and violence in…

A response to the structurally-designed separation in our country.

Below is an excerpt from an email written by Gather For’s Founder Teju Ravilochan to our team. We wanted to share this publicly to add our message to the movement: Black Lives Matter. We’re pledging to do our small part in responding — as individual humans, teammates, and an organization working to build a more just society.

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Team,

This last week, our full collective humanity was on display. It has made me think a lot. A large impetus for our work at Gather For is the question: “How do we…

What we’ve learned since starting GatherFor.

It’s been almost two months since we began GatherFor. During a short seven weeks, we’ve created partnerships, renamed our company, engaged with and trained volunteers, talked with people in New York who are struggling to have their basic needs met, and have had long conversations about the unique value we can add to the world and the best way we can ensure people get their needs met during this pandemic, and beyond.

Needless to say, we’ve learned a lot. And we wanted to share a few of these big discoveries with our community, partners, and peers. Why?

For one, we…