About aequa

Who are we?

aequa is an intersectional community united by our dreams of a world in which everyone can thrive. With diverse experiences and perspectives, we are brought together by our desire to learn, to share, to support and show up for each other. Together, we put our dreams into practice and strive to create something better for all of us. 

We do this because we believe another world is possible!

As a community, we are people who are all working in our own ways to create a future in which each person can live with safety, respect, access, dignity, growth, joy and compassionate accountability, regardless of the context and identities we are born into — that’s what we fight for. Though we as individuals work across different issues and movements, through aequa we pool our resources, know-how, creativity and care. We know that we are better together.

As an organisation with a space in Wedding, we run events based on our pillars of social equity, mutual support and solidarity. And we offer workshops for organisations and individuals.

What do we do?

We are a grassroots organisation working towards mutual support, solidarity and social equity. We do this work both through our own events and initiatives and by hosting and supporting projects online and at our community centre in Wedding. The movements closest ones to our hearts include — for example — anti-racism, abolishing borders and prisons, migration justice, sex workers’ rights, climate justice, queer liberation, transformative justice, and all the places these and other related issues intersect. Our community supporters make all our work possible.

Mutual Support

Supporting each other to meet our needs and to thrive.  Empowering each other by sharing skills, knowledge and resources that help us become more effective participants in the movements that move us.

Examples: Peer support groups. Care pods. Slack space. Action Teams. Life Architecture. Queer im Kiez. 

Solidarity

Working together to shift power away from systems of oppression through actions that centre the needs and demands of the most impacted and most marginalised. We show up for each other in a thousand ways, every single day.

Examples: Beyond Visibility. Close the Camps. Berlin Collective Action.

Social Equity

‘To each their needs, and nothing less.’

Part of how we’re managing to stay afloat during these stormy times is through the aequa Workshops Collective, facilitating interactive, conversation-based trainings on practical social equity to individuals, organisations and companies. We also run learning spaces within aequa networks week to week, month to month. 

Here you’ll find our review of what we managed to accomplish as a community in 2021

Connections and support

Making connections

Our community supporters make our work towards mutual support, solidarity and social equity possible. We do this work both through our own events and initiatives and by hosting and supporting projects online and at our community centre.

We regularly support organisations for – for example – sex worker mutual aid, migrant justice, trans prisoner solidarity and queer liberation.

Here are a few of the groups we’ve worked with – please check out their important work and support if you can!

Our structure

As aequa adapts to new crises and opens to new opportunities, we’re constantly evolving our structures to best meet our collective needs — aequa is very much a project in emergence, and always will be. 

Founded in 2018, in the early years our core organisers and many collaborators organised a range of equity-focused initiatives and gatherings in venues across Berlin. 

In 2020, our work centred on one space – our community centre in Wedding, which opened in March – and we expanded online (and internationally) to keep our community safe and our spaces accessible during the Covid-19 pandemic. We know of course that safety and accessibility are always a process, and that work is never complete. 

In 2021, we opened up the work of co-organising to a number of working groups which have become an essential part of how we survive as a grassroots organisation and cover everything from maintaining aequa community centre, to fundraising, to social media. We also began a regular assembly process.

In 2022, we made the tough decision to close the aequa Community Centre at Exerzierstr. 14, to make way for a more focused resource center at our Workshop space across the street, Exerzierstr. 13. More details on this new collective work are coming in Spring 2023 – stay tuned!

Today, our organising structure is a collection of semi-autonomous working groups, which are connected via our Coordination (aka Coor) Team, which has two members based in Berlin. To account for some of the experiences and knowledge that the Coordination Team are missing (for example, both coor organisers are white and from the global north), aequa has an Advisory Team that helps guide community organising and decision-making. 

We are growing ever more into our community assembly structure in which the people who are most affected by decisions are an integral part of making them. As aequa grows, deepens and becomes more sustainable, the work we can do becomes more sustainable too.

Our story

As a community, we are activists, community organisers, volunteers and people who care, working across interdependent social equity movements can come together to share space, resources, experiences, learnings and energy.
We know that we are more than individuals, especially in a world that teaches us scarcity and that we must compete to survive. We are people who reject the myths we’ve been taught that some people are disposable, that success comes only from hard work, and that those who fall through the cracks didn’t try hard enough.

We reject the lie that ‘there is no alternative’ by striving to create that better world we dream of every day.

Many of us have ourselves experienced poverty and precarity that had nothing to do with how ‘good’ or ‘hard-working’ we are. Some of us know what it is to go to a transphobic medical appointment alone. Some of us know what it is to suffer racist violence on public transport or struggle to make rent each month. And many of us have been abandoned when we most needed help, even by our own so-called communities. And as a network that includes many marginalised people, we know something about the reality of systemic oppression.

We have also experienced the beauty and joy of seeing people come together to support each other through crisis. We’ve looked around the room at the end of an exhausting day and seen someone preparing a banner for a demonstration against racism, someone else processing donated books for the equity library and someone else is in the bathroom unblocking the toilets. And we know, in our bones, that this is what change can look like. It isn’t always glamorous, but it’s very real. 

We have seen the transformation – individual, collective, emotional and political – that comes from working together in solidarity. We have felt the connection, security and dignity that comes from growing something new.