I

It happens slowly, in the quiet places of a person, often long before there is any outward sign of what is taking shape. When the work finally surfaces, it can look sudden to others, but the individual who has been carrying it knows the truth. It has been gestating for years.

The Library is one of those surfacing.

It came to me in a dream, quite literally. In a deep state of sleep, I was shown the space, fully formed, in the way that only dreams can show you something. I saw the room from all angles. I saw the way the light illuminated the spines of books on the shelves. I saw the people who had come to experience it, and the ways in which they were interacting with the space. It was a tangible space, full of beauty and vitality. I woke knowing what I had been shown, and I knew that it had been entrusted to me to bring into the world.

I remember sitting on Louiza's balcony, fresh off a discovery call with a fundraising platform, when I felt the pull to share my vision with her. I described the dream as it had come to me: what the space looked like, what it felt like to be inside it, what it stirred in me. By the end of the conversation, we both knew. This was mine to create.

But a dream like this does not arrive randomly. It comes to the person who has been quietly preparing for it their whole life, even when they did not know they were being prepared. So before I tell you what The Library is, I would like to share with you who I was before it found me.

A Girl Who Read Her Way Out

I have always loved books.

As a child, I used them to escape. I read my way into worlds I had not yet been to and worlds that did not yet exist. I read into other people's lives, other people's centuries, other people's questions, griefs, and joys. I sought out books that took me far outside of my own experience, and I gravitated, even as a young reader, toward writers whose lives, histories, and communities were different from mine. Those books were my first introduction to global social justice movements, to histories my schools were not teaching, to ideas that quietly began to shape the person I was becoming. They expanded my understanding of a world I would otherwise have been ignorant to, not because of personal choice, but because of the circumstances I existed within as a young person coming of age in the South. They molded me. I am who I am because of what I read, and because of who wrote what I read.

Reading was also fun for me. I want to say that out loud because the seriousness of this work can sometimes obscure something that mattered deeply to me as a child: I had a good time reading. Summer reading lists were the highlight of my summers. The Pizza Hut Book It! Challenges (remember those?!) turned reading into a game and a celebration. There was a culture, however imperfect, of rewarding young people for reading, of meeting their curiosity with encouragement, of telling them that the time they spent inside a book was time well spent. I want to bring that same energy into The Library. Reverence and joy are not opposites. The most serious readers I have ever known are also the ones who choose to be open and to operate with a sense of whimsy, fun, and curiosity.

A Student Who Returned

That love of books carried me, but it did not insulate me from the realities of trying to navigate higher education without the scaffolding that some students arrive with.

I was nineteen the first time I left school. I began my college education with all the hope and none of the support. As Louiza would say, "I did not know what I did not know." I did not have the people in my corner who could explain financial aid, or campus resources, or the particular loneliness of being a first-generation student trying to figure it all out in real time. The support and guidance I truly needed in those moments? Unfortunately, very limited. So I did what so many of us do. I left, entered the workforce, and kept moving. I tried again at community college and had to step away again because I had bitten off more than I could chew, given the financial pressure and the time it required.

But I always knew I would go back. I had to go back. That knowing stayed with me through my twenties, through every chapter of my life that did not include a classroom, until I moved to Oakland in 2018 and felt, for the first time, that the conditions might finally be right.

I stepped away from my career. I enrolled at Laney College. And this time, I had what I had been missing the first two times. I had an otherworldly, incredible partner who believed in me fiercely. I had a friend who had become my colleague, our founder, Louiza, who valued my learning as much as I did. Louiza saw me as a whole person, not as an employee whose education was something to be tolerated around her work. In her world, I was encouraged to do both. I was supported in doing both. I was received as someone whose growth was part of the work, not in competition with it.

In May of 2020, I graduated from Laney College with my Associate of Arts in Social Justice Studies: Ethnic Studies (Go Eagles!). In 2022, while continuing to work full-time, I completed my Bachelor of Arts in Race and Resistance Studies at San Francisco State University (Go Gators!).

None of this happened on its own. It was the right conditions, the right people, and the right moment. It was Asafa Collective's values in action before Asafa Collective had a name.

It was during those years of study that the books I had loved as a child met the woman I was becoming. I began reading the kinds of texts that the schools I attended as a young person had never put in my hands (Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States altered my brain). Books that named the systems I had been navigating my whole life. Writers who had already found the language for everything I had been carrying without words. Something in me settled. Something else in me ignited.

I believe our lives are written by the universe, by a wisdom older than us. Our paths and footsteps are charted, and we are led toward the moments that were always meant for us when we are finally open enough to receive them. I am adamant in my belief that The Library came to me when it did because I was finally ready to receive it.

I had spent my life loving books. I had spent years studying the conditions that determine who has access to which books. I had begun to imagine what it would have meant for a young person, any young person, to walk into a room full of stories that reflected them back to themselves, and to walk out of that room a little lighter. The dream did not invent The Library. It revealed something I had already been building inside myself for decades. The work had been quietly happening in me long before I had the language to name what was being made.

The Library is my heart's pathway towards liberation. It is the way I lend myself to the liberation movement, the way I take what I was given and return it as service. I believe, with everything in me, that books are how we dream, expand, and evolve. That literacy is one of the most fundamental tools of liberation we have. That a community deserves a space where they can walk in, pull a book off the shelf, sink into a chair, envision expansive futures, and feel that the room was built for them.

Because this one is.

We are building it now. The collection is growing. The archive is taking shape. The vision is becoming, slowly and intentionally, a real place in the world.

Thank you for being here at the beginning.

Stories are how we hold our history, imagine new futures, and make change possible.