029: Prioritizing Community with Anja Tyson
Sometime last week on my commute home, a man came on the subway with a cooler full of food. Anyone in need of a meal for themselves or their family was welcome to take something, free of charge. Before moving on to the next car, he opened up a bag to collect donations, noting that his foundation does not receive any government funding, so any contribution helps. Almost 90% of the car dug out their spare dollars and stretched out their hands — a kind of generosity that warms you up, even on the coldest days. Despite the outstayed ennui of winter that seems to be lingering for everyone, moments like this remind us to come back to our center, and prioritize our community.
Anja Tyson, who I recently got to speak to, models this beautifully through her work with One Love Community Fridge and role as a sustainable business consultant. Her humble reach is an inspiring embodiment of the support that so authentically exists in this city. Let her inspire you too:
Beginning Threads
A native New Yorker with a bloodline deep-rooted in social activism, Anja described her venture into nonprofit work “almost natural.” Her personal experiences, however, accoutered her with a sensitive wisdom that would become the vessel to her dedication to community.
Through college she was working full time in luxury retail, which then transitioned her into a showroom management role at Opening Ceremony. While 2007 / 2008 was peak Prada, peak Miu Miu, it was also when the economy was collapsing.
People had to be scrappy, so it was an amazing opportunity for lots of young designers with a point of view and something to say about the way we were approaching fashion to come up.
Suno, a collection at Opening Ceremony produced out of Kenya, was one of the smaller brands that piloted Anja’s curiosity around sustainability and fair trade practices. Working with people who didn't necessarily have a steady internet connection or electricity everyday prompted new perspectives that would influence her future efforts.
Single Motherhood
Come her late 20s, Anja became a single mother which posed many unpredictable, emotional, physical, and financial obstacles.
When it was just me and Matilda I was really experiencing a lot of touch with how difficult it was to just be nourished, particularly for single mothers.
Breastfeeding posed one of the biggest challenges. She quickly found out she needed to quadruple the amount of calories she was consuming to produce enough milk for her newborn daughter. The expenses involved with that made the decision of whether to breastfeed or use formula something she didn’t get to decide.
I had so much guilt about it. There’s already so much emotional fraughtness around breastfeeding to begin with. I felt like a failure for not being able to feed the baby I made in my own body.
This was happening to so many women for such a long time before I came along, and I think that’s one of the things that is most grounding or perspective giving about parenthood; all of the things that you experience, you're like, oh my god, this has been happening for so long and I had no idea, until I was going through it.
With a deep resonance to those also dealing with limit and the unforgiving paradigms of single motherhood, Anja imbued her experiences with an eagerness to support those with a similar (or more difficult) narrative. This is what struck me most about Anja: her ability to multitask her own adversities with a better understanding of what other people were going through. She conceded that this mentality existed widelier in our world during the pandemic.
People suddenly had the time to perceive or digest all the cruelty that has happened to Black and brown bodies for the last 400 plus years. They made space for it in their minds and their hearts for a summer because they didn’t have anything else to do, and now we are seeing people drift their attention away from it.
NeverSleeps NYC / One Love Community Fridge
In 2020, Anja created NeverSleeps: a New-York based forum listing mutual aid and rescue effort organizations. Donation drop-off locations, grassroot movements, & trauma-informed counseling are just a few of the resources that reside on the site.
More recently though, she has focused the majority of her energy working with One Love Community Fridge, with its founder, Asmeret Berhe-Lumax.
It’s a really effective, really authentic organization with a lot of integrity…. It’s based around health and dignity, which I think are two of the most majorly missing things in American culture right now.
In New York, more than 1.5 million people are food insecure, 1 in 4 children live in food insecure households, and 40% of food produced for consumption is wasted.
The income diversity that so ostensibly subsists in this city keeps our perspective narrow. It is not often we consider that the person without enough to eat isn’t just an unhoused person living on the street or living under a tent. In her example of her daughter and stepson, it is also, possibly, the kid sitting next to them at school.
It’s interesting to me that we live in a very fancy neighborhood, and if I walk a half mile up to the nearest community fridge, I am surrounded by people who are dependent on the shelter system who are genuinely unhoused, people who are living in, essentially, government housing projects, and people who are elderly and their social support has not kept up with the cost of living.
One Love, whose value proposition is not only rooted in expanding access to fresh foods and nutrition-education for its community, but also annihilating the stigmas around hunger, has a message that really spoke to Anja. It does not require individuals to stand in long lines or adjust their schedules like a food bank might, but works to offer healthy, high-quality foods 24/7.
It’s very lateral, it’s very community based, it’s very much about equalizing people in the eyes of everyone so that there’s dignity to the person who’s shopping out of the fridge, and there’s dignity— and not a savior complex— to the person who’s filling the fridge. It’s very much just a shared resource.
Overwhelmed by Anja’s story, words, and radical support to her community, we acknowledged the power that comes from just talking about things, without judgment or condescension. The power that comes not just from learning, but learning together.
Sustainability and Wellness
Though many of the clients and brands she consults for remain in fashion, Anja finds her understanding of sustainability to partner nimbly with her understanding of wellness. With both concepts, she aims to perceive the way we look at things culturally, while also maintaining a practical, loving, and undogmatic lens.
Wellness for me is very much about our relationship with other people, and with the world around us… I think we’ve kind of lost the ability to be around different types of people, and I think that is a key piece of our health: being able to relate or tolerate or love those around us.
In a world obsessed with speed and optimization, I asked how she stays so centered in solicitude. Her response was to do the opposite: Go slow.
It’s much easier to get right with your community when you’re open to the concept that there’s lots of things you don’t know yet, and that they’re all waiting for you if you’re willing to be receiving instead of constantly grabbing and taking what you think is yours. It takes slowing down.
Something to read
The works of Dr. Gabor Maté— the Canadian physician and author who primarily explores addiction relation.
Even if you’re not an addict, the way that people who are addicted to substances are being affected is not any different than the way you & I are being affected, they’re just expressing it in different ways. It’s a very compassionate and equalizing way of looking at people.
Something to support
Venmo: @OneLoveCommunity
Take care,
Chloe