Carnivals have been speckled across campus over the past few years, but have you ever attended one centered on the climate crisis? Carnival Built in H&!! brings together collective learning, sustainability initiatives, food, and joy into a space that gamifies mutual aid values. Such values include building long-term community relationships, redirecting resources and services within community, and creating a network of community support based in solidarity rather than charity. These practices constitute the survival work necessary to respond to crises in community and are the foundation of transformative change.
Let it be known that I am new to the sustainability organizing scene… I started off my undergraduate career exploring psychology and creative writing, eventually finding my way into the Arts and Ideas program in the Residential College. Concurrently, I started engaging with different levels of student activism on campus focused on racial justice and its intersections, but I was mostly out of tune from the various programs on sustainability and environmental justice. One fateful day in winter 2024, I received an email in my inbox titled “Noon at Night,” a wandering classroom that prototypes creative adaptation to crisis, from dawn weleski, the 2023-25 Student Life Sustainability (SLS) artist-in-residence, an internationally renowned social practice artist and seasoned community organizer. At the time, I was Programming Chair of the United Asian American Organizations (UAAO), and dawn reached out to interview our executive board on the legacy of our organizing work and advice we’d offer to our younger selves. Together with the Cultural Organizers (CO), a unit under SLS that leverages the power of the arts to envision a more sustainable world, dawn pulled quotes from this interview to be part of Noon at Night Cafe, a pop-up event titled, “Eating within the Belly of the Beast” with a menu of foods eaten and prepared by student organizers throughout U-M’s history. Through this effort, Noon at Night was able to tie in legacies of student organizing with the politics of food, encompassing its making, its serving, and its consumption.
When I saw a Cultural Organizer job posting over the summer, I was eager to apply and get involved, especially as I took note of the 2024-25 cohort’s timely topics of focus: the climate crisis, grief, imperialism, and mutual aid. Learning how to better integrate arts into organizing, while building relationships with collaborators and co-conspirators — this was my first goal entering Noon at Night. Over time, my goal — our collective goal, really — began to shift. I began asking myself, how can I get more people on campus engaged? How can we build relationships amongst one another? So many initiatives and programs already exist; how do we highlight and uplift them?
At the same time, I couldn’t help but acknowledge that topics like the climate crisis can feel incredibly daunting. The heart of SLS is recognizing the connections between environmental sustainability and justice, and how one cannot be reached without the other. Given the locality of our organizing, we must recognize the histories of stolen land and labor, and people and resource extraction through colonialism that have shaped the city we live and work within. With this understanding, the work of building sustainable futures becomes about healing relationships; an act of reparative justice. Responding to the needs of oppressed and marginalized communities while being accountable for our complicity and actions within this larger project of empire… This is tough work! And this work can be uncomfortable to navigate, even more so if you don’t have the language to speak these dynamics.
In our collective learnings and reflections, the Cultural Organizers explored the notion of food and culture as binders between sustainability and community. We asked, what brings us together? What shows our ties to the people, the environment, and the spaces around us? Where, in this web of foodways and cultures, do we see injustice breaking down our community practices of care and resilience? In what ways do these injustices emerge from dynamics of imperialism, which result in the climate crisis and collective grief? How can mutual aid be leveraged as a tool to such crises?
These questions shaped our event production efforts, eventually culminating into a Carnival Built in H&!!. The event featured a community organizations fair, and many stations of carnival foods (soy hot dogs with pickled veggies from Maize and Brine, snow cones with housemade syrups, cotton candy, and freshly baked pretzels. The centerpiece of the event was a Mutual Aid Simulator where participants were invited to weave through game stations, did-you-know fun facts, and interview quotes centered on the themes of mutual aid, climate resilience, and play. This was a space designed to make big concepts more digestible through interactive and engaging activities. Partaking in this carnival was an opportunity to build relationships, identify the necessary skills to respond to crises through the gamified simulation of a heat wave, and ultimately, to strengthen one’s critical and political consciousness about why we are in a climate crisis and what we can do to creatively and equitably respond to it.
That being said… I cannot lie and say that planning this event was entirely smooth. Lots of tensions emerged within our group as we reflected on important issues of what it means to transgress and resist institutional oppression by building resiliency. We had to learn what it meant to be part of creating sustainable frameworks, while functioning in university spaces that perpetuate the gentrification and are part of larger settler colonial projects. Lots of tensions also sprung up within ourselves as we thought about our roles within this institution. And all at once the world is burning! A heatwave is coming! Are we prepared to handle this?!
In navigating these difficult questions, I found that reading has grounded me, writing has sustained me, and imagination is an exercise of worldmaking. By this, I mean imagining worlds — or perhaps more specifically, local communities and working groups — that are more just, more sustainable, more relational. The act of imagining begs the question, how can we (re)shape our realities? How can we shift how we experience the world around us? It also entails, in my processing at least, a certain level of art and creativity, which definitely requires play. Political imagining and worldmaking also — I fear — requires icebreakers (which I’d like to think I’ve gotten pretty good at). It means asking each other our best animal impersonations, our ways of decompressing from the stress of the world, and getting opportunities to share a meal and express joy and laugh a little. Worldmaking starts at the smallest scale, but we cannot be atomised in collective imaginings. We must do this work with others.
For us, collaboration came in the form of retreats. Some took place internally within the CO unit. Others took place department-wide with other folks in SLS, affectionately called “Susties”, and were facilitated by Visionary Organizing Lab, an educational laboratory that approaches community and organizational change by emphasizing both material and nonmaterial needs. The members of the CO team also broke up into smaller working groups to develop a carnival event narrative, a climate emergency scenario, and game concepts, all the while actively drawing connections with a legacy of organizing and activism. Planning for this event also involved spending hours painting game stations, cooking carnival foods in the Palmer kitchen, and taking snack breaks together, during which I finally admitted I actually really enjoy Trader Joe’s snacks… It was also having conversations with folks outside our Noon at Night unit — interviewing people working towards environmental justice (spanning urban planning, mutual aid in rural communities, student food sovereignty, and seed justice) and drawing on our relationships with local organizations (e.g. Kiwanis Thrift Sale, Campus Farm Club, Radical Planning Initiative, AADL).
At this point, you may be wondering what the h&!! arts and culture can do in our efforts towards building sustainable and environmentally just futures. Noon at Night bases its strategic efforts in, among other frameworks, cultural organizing. The Highlander Center, a popular education and activist training center, defines this as: “the strategic use of art and culture to shift and move more progressive policies and practices within marginalized communities.” As Addy Schuetz, a former researcher and intern at Highlander, writes, “For the cultural organizer, “culture” has dual meaning, as both tool and consequence of political action.” This framework enabled us at Noon at Night to identify aspects of culture (like art, ritual, and food) to work within our power and lived experiences. It encouraged us to dance with difficult conversations through creative and engaging means that speak to our personal and collective identities and values.
Exploring culture and art and the material and non-material conditions of our reality, as well as being rooted in history and place — all these processes play a critical role in adding vital nuance to our work in sustainability. They also help us identify opportunities to build and be in community! If you’re based in Ann Arbor, it could mean joining the community kitchens at Food Gatherers, or picking up some seeds of native plants from the UM Seed Library, or submitting a recipe to the A2Zero Community Cookbook, or pick up some fresh produce from the UM Farm Stand, or joining a local mutual aid group to identify needs and and join events. Me? I’ll be going back to the motherland… exploring pine trees and mountain trails and cooking with my mom and writing love letters to the river.
As we ease into the rainy, budding, blooming season of spring and prepare for the buzz and heat of summer, let’s not forget that we exist in community with our human and more-than-human kin. Tending to these relations is one step in a continuous effort towards achieving sustainability and justice, and perhaps a starting point in responding to crises.
V Shin is a Cultural Organizer in the Student Life Sustainability.