June 4, 2022
Thriving in Community
Thriving in Community
The communities that thrive are the ones that work together.
That’s the premise behind Pandemic of Love, a South Florida–based mutual aid organization that is now 2 million donors strong. Pandemic of Love was established in March 2020, when meditation teacher and community activist Shelly Tygielski looked around and realized that in her community there were people with needs—and people with the ability to fill those needs. The organization has brought people together in communities of care, supporting one another through the pandemic, mass shootings, and hurricanes.
“In any ecosystem… organisms all need each other, not just merely to survive, but in fact to thrive,” she says. “When they work together, when they cooperate, when they give and take, they actually do a lot better than merely just surviving. I think that points to a lot of what we can look to as human beings.”
On the latest episode of the podcast Life As It Is, Tygielski sits down with Sharon Salzberg and Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, to discuss her work with Ukrainian refugees in Poland, the connection between self-care and social transformation, and the radical power of just showing up.
