Pay it Forward

Support Community Care

Deep gratitude for this equity fund that allows more resourced folks to support my 1:1 sliding scale practice, as well as just compensation my labor offering free, sliding scale care and mutual aid work. 

I’ve been doing free, sliding scale and mutual aid herb work for a long time now. Work that often goes unpaid and unseen. I offer all consultations and client formulas on a sliding scale because I believe plants should be accessible to everyone. All too often healing can be inaccessible to those who most need it, due to the nature of exploitative systems.

I’m invested in creating financial access to care for multiply marginalized folks because trauma, violence and systemic injustice have far-reaching impacts on health and financial access. I’m also committed to regularly sharing free herbal donations with mutual aid projects, folks impacted by colonization, genocide, ongoing climate disasters, community organizers and those doing solidarity work.

As my 1:1 practice grows, the bulk of clients I serve hold intersecting identities: queer, trans, Black, Indigenous, disabled, neurospicy, trauma and cPTSD experienced, folks doing sex work, survivors of abuse and sexual violence. As someone who also holds many of these identities, I’m always asking myself how these experiences shape my work, who I’m serving, and how to create more response-able relationship to my communities.

As someone who personally cannot afford the higher market rate of many healing sessions, charging everyone that price across the board would simply create too many barriers and prevent me from serving the communities of which I’m a part. It’s just not something I’m interested in. I also set 1:1 pricing for BIPOC folks at the lowest end of the scale by default, as a way to redistribute my own white settler wealth. Because practicing Western herbalism, a system built on stolen knowledge, on stolen land, is fraught with its own systemic injustice.

I’m doing this work without investors or generational wealth. Nor do I have non-profit status, even though this work is certainly not profitable. I don’t have employees, so I’m tasked with every single aspect of labor involved. I grow and harvest the herbs, make the medicine, design and print labels, built this website, and a million other administrative tasks. All with care and scrappiness and a lot of heart. 

This plant work will always root for liberation. As a survivor of multiple complex traumas growing up in a deep red state, experiencing poverty, familial, religious, psychiatric, sexual and carceral abuse, I’m deeply aware of the ways trauma and violence impact our access to healing.

Pay it Forward is a network of radical care that breaks down unjust barriers to healing that disempower and disenfranchise.

  • Due to the nature of sliding scale (more on that below), I’m mindful that the more clients who pay on the higher end, the more folks I’m able to accommodate at the lower end. This is the balance needed for sliding scale to work. However, it’s not always the case. This is an opportunity for folks with access to wealth to help fill in the gaps and allow me more capacity to keep showing up in my commitments to communities I serve.

    It’s no small thing for us caretakers to ask for help, but we cannot give from a depleted place. I rely on community support from clients paying at the top of the scale and scooping up herbs from the shop to help sustain my ability to create financial access for the long haul. If you enjoy my offerings, please contribute, share and support this equity fund to sustain ongoing community care and mutual aid work.

  • This fund goes toward the financial freedom of clients paying on the lower end to have continued access to care. This includes their ability to book regular follow-ups and receive herbs on a sliding scale. It also goes toward my ability to continue sharing donation-based herbs in solidarity with folks impacted by colonization, genocide and state violence, frontline activists and organizers needing nervous system care. I send large amounts of regular herb donations through each new climate crisis: floods, fires, earthquakes, all arriving faster than ever. All with real folks at the center showing up for each other and needing life-sustaining care through the added layers of climate grief.

    Your support of this fund also goes toward solidarity projects in my extended network. I commit regular funds to paying Shuumi Land Tax, monthly contributions to the Serenus Herb Bank along with Rootwork Herbals to continue offering BIPOC scholarships at The Peoples Medicine School. It’s my favorite thing about doing herb work that despite swimming in the waters of the healing industrial complex, so many of us share a deep longing to make this work accessible, show up hard, invest back into our communities and find creative ways to conspire with each other to make shit happen. Paying it forward is truly beautiful and liberatory.

pay it forward

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pay it forward ➾

I rely on community support to sustain free and sliding scale care & distribute funds in solidarity with liberation work. If you enjoy my offerings, invest in ongoing mutual aid and community care.

Sliding scale is available for people with barriers to access: disabled folks, queer + trans fam, community organizers and BIPOC. These spots will be prioritized.

Why Sliding Scale?

I offer all consultations and client formulas on a sliding scale because I believe plants should be accessible to everyone. Herbalism is not a luxury, despite its co-optation by Goopified influencers in the wellness industrial complex.

Plants are of the same earth as people and should be accessible to all.

Our society speaks of health as an individual trait, when in truth it’s a collective one. It’s easy to overlook the community health impacts of environmental racism, food scarcity, widespread ableism, policing and colonial violence.

Access to wealth and healthcare are cyclically linked, each informing the other. As someone practicing through an anti-oppression lens in a field rife with ‘wealth and hellness’ influencers, I’m all too aware of how care becomes commoditized, and the wellness industrial complex replicates the medical one.

My goal is to create access to care so folks can offer more care to their communities. Personally, I would not be able to access most care without sliding scale practitioners. This model has allowed me and many others to show up more for our communities. Sliding scale is a life-sustaining tool of collective liberation.

How does it work?

Sliding scale is a tool of economic justice. It’s a way of making herbal care more accessible and equitable. The sliding scale is a flexible rate for folks with barriers to access: sick or disabled folks, queer + trans fam, community organizers and BIPOC. Sliding scale is for you if the cost of a consult would interfere with meeting your basic needs.

Everyone's financial situation is complex. For more information and help determining where you fall on the scale, check out this resource from Ride Free Fearless Money and this other resource from Worts & Cunning. If you neither struggle to meet basic everyday needs nor encounter systemic oppression, please consider paying at the top of the scale.

If you're able to pay full cost, your contribution is an investment in care and access for those impacted most by legacies of racial and economic injustice and colonial state violence. This act of integrity sustains my ability to offer financially accessible care for self & community, redistribute funds and continue paying it forward.

I’m indebted to many practitioners working on a sliding scale long before me: Jennifer Patterson, Stascha Stahl, Violet Moon, my BAHRT comrades, street medics and SF wound care clinics, free clinic workers at VCIH and so many other rad punk anarchist herb hubs whose use of this model has deeply informed my practice over the years and my desire to create more access to herbal care.

Health is not an individual trait. It’s a society level construct.

– Beatrice Adler-Bolton