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This is a podcast for anyone feeling stretched thin by work, activism, caregiving, or just surviving under systems that weren’t built for our thriving. On Balm in the Burnout, we speak with artists, organizers, and community builders about what’s helping us stay grounded and resourced in the face of burnout. Together, we reclaim our right to soothe, heal, and make hopeful, sustainable action.
Megan: Welcome to Balm in the Burnout- a podcast for cross-sector people and professionals navigating personal and systemic burnout. Whether you're a doctor, educator, farmer, caregiver, or simply trying to survive under the weight of broken systems, this podcast is here to offer solace, strategy, and solidarity.
Welcome back to Balm in the Burnout. I am Megan Hadley, the host and Minneapolis based health coach, educator and mindfulness instructor. I have with me today a literal neighbor, Kelly and I met on Facebook, in our Facebook neighborhood group and I'm just gonna read her bio because it's amazing to [00:01:00] hear all that's come from her life and what we're gonna chat about today.
So Kelly Wilson is the founder of Do'gooders MN, a local group, formed as an active rebellion and protest against the current administration. The goal of Do'gooders MN is to spread radical joy to marginalized and targeted communities. Do'gooders first ambitious project was hosting "Unabashed, A Celebration of Love and Pride". This project was completely free day-long event of 12 individualized mini weddings for members of the Twin Cities L-G-B-T-Q Community. Kelly was a wedding photographer for 12 years participating in over 150 weddings during her career. It's so many. Oh. She was also contracted to teach classes on wedding planning for Minneapolis Community Education. ~For~ Earlier in her career, Kelly co-ran the Professional Women's [00:02:00] Networking Group, where she facilitated business connections for women in the Twin Cities. And produced the Professional Women's Networking Guide
Kelly has. pre-internet,
Okay. That is a really good
Kelly: an actual book.
Megan: A literal book. Okay, I'm gonna have to see this later. Kelly has been profiled in the Minnesota Star Tribune for both the Professional Women's Networking Group and Unabashed. She was also in a Bring Me the News article and a guest on the T(ea) with Roxanne Anderson on KRSM 98.9 FM for her work on Unabashed. Kelly lives in Minneapolis with her wife. They have three grown sons, a rescue dog, and a feisty cat.
Kelly: We do.
Megan: She can be reached at K trippler@msn.com and on Facebook, Kelly Wilson and the Do'gooders can be found on Facebook at Do'gooders MN or online at dogooders mn.com.
[00:03:00] So Kelly, thank you for spending your morning with me
today.
Kelly: I'm glad we connected.
Megan: I'm too, and I can't wait to just hear more about this project. I saw that Kelly was doing this and I had my reunion the weekend that the wedding was happening, and I remember just being like, I wish I could do music. I wish I could just be a witness.
I wish, I could participate and there were so many calls to action for our neighborhood group
Kelly: and people showed up.
Megan: People showed up. So where do you wanna start with all this Kelly?
Kelly: Why don't I tell you how it started, like why I started and my new mission of all of this is really to spread the story of why I did this, how I did it, and how all of us are going to need to tap into our gifts and open our mouths and gather our friends and start. Supporting each other.
We are in a place where the government has made it very clear that that is not what they're going to [00:04:00] do. In fact, they're dismantling and taking things away. It is our job to tune that out as much as possible and support the community. And that is what I did for my community to start. And, yeah, it went really well.
So I, if you want, I can start by just telling you kind of where, where, how I came up with the idea and what happened. So it's kind of a gritty story. It, the story actually begins in June of last year. I have chronic illness. I've been searching for answers for 20 years. Last June I ended up in the hospital almost an organ failure.
They had no idea what was going on, and I got some info. But I have a whole digestion problem, which stems from a connective tissue disease, which kind of breaks down your whole body as you age. And so I spent from June on trying to get my life in some. Semblance of order and I was just getting there in October and I got a call unexpectedly.
[00:05:00] I came out 20 years ago this Memorial Day as gay. I was married at the time to a man with two young children and the family that I was raised by, I would be considered Megan now, but I was raised by very evangelical right wing Christians, and that's what I was raised to be and that's not who I was.
After my wife and I got married and joined our family I got estranged from my entire family of origin. I had not spoken to them in about 11 years and on October, I think it was October 14th, I got a phone call from my father, a voice I hadn't heard in 10 years that left me a voicemail telling me my sister had aggressive kidney cancer and would be dead within a few weeks.
So, this kind of blew my entire life open because I always assumed my sister was taking care of my parents in Florida. I always assume, or I'm sorry, in Texas, same thing in my head, Texas, Florida. So I assumed that my sister and I would, you know, get back there. And my younger sister dying, she actually ended up [00:06:00] dying in four days.
She had aggressive kidney cancer, just kind of blew my world open. That was 10 days before the election. I was deep in grief. I was really dealing with family ~esra,~ estrangement, grief more than anything. It's a wild, crazy ride that most people aren't on. So you're navigating something by yourself, which I'm used to doing.
And then the election came and I was in the backyard, my backyard, watching the election, and there was a moment where I just said, this is bad. And I immediately knew all the things that were probably gonna start happening. I literally came from this project, 2025. That's project 1988. When I was young, that is exactly the playbook I was taught.
We were supposed to get into government. I myself was being groomed to get into government. I was told I had discernment I should get into government and start getting God in there. So I really took Project 2025, not only seriously, I kept telling everybody I know what this is. So the minute that I knew the [00:07:00] election was going, I just in my head had this really huge voice that said as they take the stuff away, do what you can to give back.
And that was the moment that I just started pacing my backyard and said, what do I have to offer? Like what can I do? This is huge. There's nothing to be done. I was in despair, my wife was in despair. We were like, what can be done? And I woke up the next morning and I started thinking about the things that I know how to do.
I was a wedding photographer and I was a bad wedding photographer. I don't think I was a very good wedding photographer, but what I did is I spent a lot of time observing weddings, 150 of 'em, and because I was usually a budget photographer, I helped a lot of people plan their weddings. So immediately my mind said they're gonna take marriage equality away.
It's in Project 2025. It's already been brought up by the Supreme Court. I can marry gay people, I can get people married, and I don't want people having to be in a rush and lose out on the [00:08:00] experience of a real wedding. I knew. I knew I was uniquely in a place where I could condense a wedding and we could give couples an entire experience of the whole wedding.
Not just the I dos, but the cake cutting. The first dance, the inviting your people to come, the walking out to the bubbles, a real photographer there, like all of it. I wanted the whole thing, and that's what we did. So I thought, I can do that. I know I can do that. And that was it. That was the beginning.
The minute I told myself, well, I'm uniquely qualified to do this. I don't know how I'm gonna do this, but I know I can do this. That was the moment that that started. It was the flashpoint of going, oh, okay. I can do this. It literally started with, it took me a few weeks to get up my courage to tell people.
I mean, that isn't that always the hardest part?
Like the hardest part is always to say, Hey, I have an idea because. Even when I told my first person that I had an [00:09:00] idea, which was my wife, she was like
interesting. She didn't get it. So then I told a friend and I texted it to her and she said, interesting. And then I thought, okay, you know, you get a little discouraged if you tell people stuff. They're not like, whoa, that's the best idea I've ever heard. You start to really question yourself and I thought, I have zero to lose here. The country's going in a direction I can't predict, but I can predict that I think this is gonna happen and I have nothing to lose.
And they do the people that wanna step on side. So I put up a Facebook post. Facebook is my thing. It's always been my thing. It's where when you're a sick person, you have a lot of connections. So I put up, I, I have about a thousand followers. I threw up a thing and said, I have an idea of something to do to help if you really want to help and not just talk about it.
I think I may have something we could do. Meet me at the local coffee hop house down the street. I'll be there at six 30. Whoever shows up, shows up. Seven people out of a thousand on my Facebook showed up and I [00:10:00] sheepishly told everybody my ideas and I actually had like a three tier. 'cause I thought the first one would be too big for everybody.
I thought everybody would be like, that is impossible. How are we gonna do 12 weddings in one day? Like, that's not possible. And so I had like step downs. Well if we can't do this, we could do this. And then we could go just to a mass wedding like other people have done. But out of the seven people that came.
The energy that started happening in the room immediately when people realized they could help in a very realistic way. And most everybody's even been to a wedding, right? So it's not a concept that you can't figure out where you could fit in and help. And we all met and we went home, and by the next morning we had all kind of posted on our Facebooks and said.
~said~
We're going to do these free weddings. And within 24 hours we had a location donated to us, which was the absolute perfect location. 'cause it was a church in Minneapolis that had three chapels because they have three different congregations. So the whole wedding immediately started when we went there.
'cause I could see that we could do [00:11:00] three weddings at the same time. And that's what gave us the ability to do an entire day of it. And the church donated the space to us. The Star Tribune got a hold of us because one of the people that saw a Facebook post got it to the Star Tribune, Jennifer Brooks.
She immediately contacted us. So we got credibility right away. It exploded from that point. Every single thing we needed happened at that moment. And I believe it's all because when you have an idea, especially right now, you have to open your mouth. You just have to open your mouth. It's scary right now.
But that little idea has turned into so many things. 12 L-G-B-T-Q couples got married, and I cannot tell you how many relationships were formed myself. My life has exploded in contacts. I have friends in a different way and on a different level than I ever did. I have more context. Actually I have only met about three of [00:12:00] our neighbors face to face because people were just dropping things off.
But I talked to more neighbors had more neighborly contacts, had more of a view of who the people in my neighborhood were because of this situation, because I reached out to the neighbors all the time. We have a neighbor, as you know. We met on the neighborhood group. I posted on there all the time, and then I started telling the people in our group, do that on your neighborhoods, like find your neighborhood groups post on them,
and
the connections that happened from one wedding situation has been phenomenal.
Just huge,
Megan: Yeah.
Kelly: Lots of connections, and that's what part of the goal of this was. Of course, getting the people married was the ultimate goal, but. The collateral joy that happened by marrying 12 people was nothing I ever expected to happen and was an experience. I don't even know if it can even be duplicated.
The people that were there the day of we had a reporter there. [00:13:00] She had talked to me first and then she came from, bring me the news and she came to take a few pictures to put in the article, but she ended up spending two hours. And she came up to me at the end and said, this is honestly one of the most joyous things I've ever attended, and it really was one of the most joyous things I've ever been to.
It was one of those special times in life when I think we, between coming and going and all the guests all of volunteers, there were about 350 people that we moved in and out in the course of about four hours. And I don't think there was one person there who wasn't amazed at the love the care.
People giving a whole day and a Saturday. All of the vendors, photographers, pianists, we had a pianist for every couple. We had a photographer for every couple. We had a dj, a live dj. We had volunteers everywhere. All these people could have been working on a Saturday in wedding season, that's what people are doing on May 31st.
tons of people just gave their time to come and say, let's [00:14:00] get all these couples married. And they all had their own wedding event for about 45 minutes. They all had their guests, they had their officiant, they had a pianist that brought them up and down the aisle. It was beautiful. It was great. And it was all because people came together.
Fast. We started, my idea came out on, I think I shared on May 7th, or I'm sorry, February 7th, and the wedding was May 31st, 12 of them. So we did 12 weddings from idea to getting everybody together, to coordinating everything, to getting all the volunteers, to getting media, getting volunteers to give money to give.
We, we collected 500 electric candles to light the whole place up. Everybody donated those. Yeah, it was just very large. That started very small, and I just believe very strongly that everybody can do this and not necessarily have to marry people, but I think every American right now can say, what do I have to contribute?
I have a life I've done things I can help other people with the things I've done. Even if it's one [00:15:00] person. You don't have to do a huge event. You can do little things to bring joy, to help whatever feels right to you. I didn't wanna do something that was. Hugely political. I really wanted to do something that was joyful.
I wanted to bring joy, because right now there's a lot of fear and joy is the antidote to that, especially as this unfolds and we don't know what is going to happen. That's where the fear comes, the stories we tell ourselves. I'm super good at that. Lots of practice. But the opposite side of that is the joy I had in the midst of very, very difficult days.
I had raging laughter text messages. I had joy because somebody would call and say, you wouldn't believe this. Somebody just donated 75 candles. There were so many moments in my day that could be disrupted from all of that because. [00:16:00] Me and all the people who joined with me, we created what we wanted.
We created the space for the joy to grow as big as it did. We created that. We didn't wait for anybody else to do it. We did that and we pivoted along the way, and we added when things worked and we took things out when it didn't, and we all stayed very focused on what. What the goal was, and, but the joy is what kept it all going.
I mean, it's a lot to do something in addition to everybody that works. I don't work outside the home because of my chronic illness. I work from home, so it wasn't as big of a burden for me in that way, but that was also the gift my chronic illness gave me. And my chronic illness doesn't gimme a lot of gifts.
But it gave me the gift of the time to do this, and I recognized that early on, this was something I could do from bed. If I was having a difficult pain
Megan: Mm-hmm.
Kelly: was something I could do sitting on the couch. And I also like to give that message because I wanna empower other people that are struggling with chronic illness.
[00:17:00] Mine is not an easy road. I put on an entire wedding for 12 people in three months, and I did that with a lot of help. Everybody knew that I struggled. They didn't treat me like that. They just supported me. And I want people to know that too, because you do not have to be perfect. You do not have to be fully healthy.
You do not have to be anything right now to help other people because. All the world needs right now is you and your previous experiences that's really all we need. We need you doing this. I can only speak to what I did because you are doing, you everybody. My wife works at Minneapolis Public Schools.
She's a speech and language pathologist. Two of our sons work at Minneapolis Public Schools. They're SEAs special education assistants, and our oldest son is a paramedic with North Memorial. We believe strongly in this family of helping
You can help is where you belong.
And [00:18:00] so you always belong because if you're helping, you belong.
And that's kind of what we applied to this and it, it went far.
Megan: There's so many beautiful things. I would just love to reflect. I love the story so much. What I'm hearing, Kelly, is this, I love the part of the story where you aren't sure, where you have this idea where you're ruminating and you're like, this is so bad, I must do something. Yeah.
Kelly: Yeah, that took me it took me six weeks from the time I started this on, so that was November. It was actually the day of the election. It took me from then till February. So I guess that's two months almost. Get the courage, and I'm a pretty creative person. I walk into a lot of rooms that a lot of people don't, but this felt different.
It felt hard to put myself, I've owned businesses, but that's different. This was, I needed other people. I guess that's the point. I needed other people to make this work. It was not about all of me. Was new for me. I do solo things because of my health, because of who I am as a human. It works [00:19:00] better for me.
This was an extremely collaborative moment. I worried I would not be up for the task and instead it actually changed my life.
Megan: Yep. And you saying yes to that, you calling in people to help you, you getting that advice and just like you said, going with things that worked and letting
go of the things that didn't work. What I'm also hearing is, yeah, that expansive joy seems to be very much, you know, a particular unexpected
outcome of this for you as well as just, you know. You're building this whole mutual aid network in our neighborhood
to support people. And that is huge. And I know this is happening all around the country, but people are curious just like, how does that happen? How do you start,
where do You start.
Kelly: You do, you just start I, I have to say I asked all those same questions. I've started businesses before. Do I go incorporate a business? Like, and that's actually the stuff I'm dealing with now. So what I wanna say is, when you have an idea, that's actually the genius part, [00:20:00] because it was the idea and the
novelty of, while this has not been done before, that actually kept all of us kind of like
Striving like, well, we can do this. We, yeah, we, when we have moments where it seemed a little overwhelming, and trust me, there were many, we'd all look at each other and say, we can do this, this, this is a wedding. We can do this. It's the mutual aid of everybody that can help you do what You alone, can't I?
I couldn't have done this by myself. It would've been absolutely impossible. One thing that happened in the middle of this, which to me is one of my favorite parts of the story.
~the story,~
I was, I met with every single couple and then I had five of four good friends who I designated as coordinators so that every single wedding couple, the minute they met us because they were having strangers put on a wedding for them, I assigned them a wedding coordinator so that they had somebody to talk to the entire way.
And then they had things they got to design about their wedding themselves. They had picked up their own songs. They got to pick out different things about the wedding. So they had a coordinator who helped coordinate all that and then we helped them put their services [00:21:00] together 'cause they got to choose how they wanted their service
Megan: Mm-hmm.
Kelly: So all the coordinators did all of that stuff and the mutual connection of everybody is what made that work. So. Yes, building the community networks happen once you just start,
like you just have to start. You have to find a few people to tell your idea to, and then you have to agree together and then you just start.
Now I know that sounds really simple, but it's true. Like everything else, if you're gonna go build a sandcastle, you have to start. It's not try, it's start, just do it. We ran into a lot of things I really, really wanted. Strings. I wanted a bunch of violins
Megan: Mm-hmm.
Kelly: When people showed up. That didn't happen.
We pivoted, we went on. We were like that, it's too hard. We can't get 'em together. Everybody was starting to go on summer break. Okay, that didn't work. So we pivoted to something else. We kept pivoting along the way, but when you have a lot of brains and you have a lot of [00:22:00] collaboration. People can help you pivot from side to side.
They're always, I believe I, I'm old school, I'm 52. I believe there needs to be a hierarchy
because
somebody needs to be in charge. Somebody needs to say yes and no, because otherwise you don't do something like a wedding in three months. So I will say if you're a leader, be a.
leader.
If you're a leader, go ahead, stand up and be a leader.
But if you're not a leader, it doesn't matter. You can still have the ideas, you can still get it started, and then you can find the people. I have a lot of deficiencies. I'm really good at talking. I'm really good at ideas, but I am really bad at everything else that runs a business. I'm not good at the scheduling.
I'm not good at writing the stuff up. I'm not good at coordinating all of the volunteers, but I found people, I had friends who were amazing at that, and when you find people that can fill in your deficiencies. Then the magic just happens. So you just have to do it. That's how you do it. I know that sounds really simple and I keep telling people I wish I had something bigger to say.
Like [00:23:00] when people ask how I started, I'm like, you just have to share your idea
and then you have to find good people that want to work with you and then you just do it the road ~un,~
~the road~ unfolds as
Megan: Yes. And I've heard this theme actually from a few of our guests is just the willingness to not be the, even though there is a hierarchy
to not, to kind of let that ego go a little bit to
say like, I actually need help here.
Here's a deficiency, here's what we need.
Kelly: So I thought that was gonna be really hard for me at first, but I realized that I'm good at that with my chronic illness. Um, not, not great, but I'm good at that with my chronic illness with my wife ~and.~
And
I picked people. The hierarchy that I chose to go with that I thought would work best for this was somebody has to be at the top making the decisions, which I knew in my mind what the vision was.
So I continued the vision like, no, we're gonna do it this way. 'cause I knew the workings of a wedding really, really well.
~I then had~
I then had four really trusted friends that worked very closely with me. They were the ones that were the coordinators and they [00:24:00] literally ran everything else, everything else. And not only was it easy to let them actually do that, it again changed my life because.
It made my life easier to let somebody else shine in something that I sucked in, and it actually made me feel good as a leader to know that somebody else was good at that and let them shine. The people that worked with me didn't work. Under me. They worked with me. We had a hierarchy so that we can make decisions quickly, and we did.
That was another thing to our success. I believe that the five of us that were in the decision making place made very quick, very easy decisions because we trusted each other. Trust is a huge thing doing something like this, but having people that can do things that you can't, to me is the whole key.
'cause there's tons of stuff in the world I could do, but I know. Can't do them by myself because I just don't have all those skills. Other people do have the skills you don't have. Have the [00:25:00] idea, get it going, but find those people. And I had a ton of people from the neighborhood I posted on the neighborhood site probably I think probably once every two to three weeks.
And one of the things, I think I started this conversation out that I did, that I loved that this neighborhood's just. I dunno. It will always be a story I wanna tell 'cause it's quite amazing. So a friend of mine contacted me and said, I have a friend who has a wedding set and she wondered if you would like that donated.
And it was a golden diamond band soldered together of her wedding ring and engagement ring from a past relationship. She no longer worked, was in and didn't work. I said, of course I have a lot of our couples were not, of course that's, we were trying to get people that were struggling that.
Couldn't have the means to get married, but needed to. So that's a lot of people with chronic illness. That's a lot of people that are not in great places. And so the one of the couples I had met was actually struggling with homelessness at the time and they just didn't have an ability to get rings.
And I thought, Hmm, I bet there's a lot of [00:26:00] rings sitting in a lot of drawers in a lot of places, especially in my neighborhood. And I bet people would be. Okay. Donating those, which was a crazy thought really. But I started sending out messages and we got, I think my final total came to 14 gold and diamond wedding bands.
One was tungsten, one was this beautiful silver one, but they were all beautiful. Just, just beautiful. They were appraised. Within $2,000 to $3,000, people literally donated them. They came to my house and handed me their golden diamond rings. We took 'em to New Guild Jewelers, who also donated a wedding package for one of our couples for rings.
They cleaned them all. They sized them. Almost every one of our couples had rings donated to them. On top of it. We just asked you, you have to ask, you don't know. Like, I thought that was crazy. I thought, there's no way people are gonna do this again and again, and
~and ~within three days, I had like a dozen rings enough for all of our couples, and it's because I asked.
Those are the lessons. [00:27:00] You've got to open your mouth is really my big, especially right now, there is no point. There is no point anymore keeping your ideas to yourself or staying to yourself. There is no reason to do that. The more people that you are around, the more you'll feel supported and the more ideas you hear, which gives you more ideas.
To figure out how to conduct yourself going forward in a new place that you don't know.
So getting as many people around you that you can in this kind of situation or any other is very important right now, in my opinion.
Megan: Yeah, it sounds just very generative and like just bringing this whole new energy to the idea that yes, there are so many things out of our control, but here is one thing we can accomplish together and here are the positive benefits for everyone in the community. Right.
Kelly: Absolutely. And the group itself since it stopped, we've we're taking a little break and trying, you know, when you do something this fast, you just are on autopilot and you kind of fly through it. But then when it ends, [00:28:00] now you have to, like, now you have to do the stuff that you didn't do in the front because you couldn't, there was no time.
So now we're in the, okay, well I guess we need to make this into a nonprofit, and who's gonna be on that board? We, are we gonna be just an L-G-B-T-Q or are we gonna be for all marginalized communities? What is our like, so now we have to get into the nitty gritty, like what's your mission statement?
What's your business plan? So that all comes, but if you have an idea or you have a way to help people do, I thought I had to do all that in the beginning and it felt. Cumbersome. It felt hard. It felt like, well, I'll never get to the other part. So I just said to myself, not knowing the rules, I don't know the rules.
I'm not gonna do that. I'm just gonna jump in. And people can just donate money to me personally, and I don't have a company. You're just, we're doing this thing and people hopefully will get it. That's the other thing I wanna tell people too, is you don't have to have some master plan to be able to do it.
You can literally make a phone call or post on Facebook and say, Hey, I kind of wanna do this thing. Can we figure it out? Because [00:29:00] now we're doing the nitty gritty, which. Not my favorite part of it. And I think if I would've done all that in the beginning and not just gone on instinct it would've kind of crumbled it.
So yes, you do have to put the things in place, but I think that sometimes we overthink and right now we don't have time to overthink and it's actually not needed. Nothing is working the way we thought it worked anyway. And all the things we think are our limitations. I don't think they are really a thing anymore.
So my message for everybody is when I hear somebody say, I think we should do da, da, da, I say, well, why don't we do that? Why don't we try and do that? There's a bunch of L-G-B-T-Q people that just are posting online to meet in Powderhorn Park and bring garlic bread,
To have a garlic bread night to sit and eat and community and eat garlic bread.
It's bring your own garlic bread night. Like, come on.
Megan: Yes.
Kelly: Right? That's a silly little idea that like 40 people showed up
Megan: Mm-hmm.
Kelly: 40 people in the neighborhood, which powderhorn and had garlic bread together and [00:30:00] communed, like, it doesn't have to be, let's marry a dozen people. It can be like, how do I, you know, our next idea, my next idea.
I haven't I'm actually giving it to you instead of my people. 'cause I haven't really talked to them lately, but. My next idea is a gift giving is just to give gifts around the holidays, all the holidays, you know, not just one holiday, all holidays, to actually set up pop-up gifts, gift giving, so that during a time when I think is gonna be a little difficult this winter, I think we're gonna have some difficulties.
Just spreading joy feels good. Just handing somebody a present feels like it could be something fun. This does not have to be rocket science. We don't have to solve all of this because we can't solve all of this. If we could solve all of this, we would solve all of this. We can't. We can only do what we can do in our own little spaces.
And the tighter we create those spaces, and the more we do within those spaces, the more. Connected to community. We are, and the more connected to community we are, the safer we actually are. When you have people and options, [00:31:00] you're not alone. You don't feel alone. Your mental health stays high. All of this is connected and to me, the thing that kind of weaves through it all is people.
You have to connect to other people. Now, I'm not always great with that. I'm a really good extrovert, really good at having a talk. But to continue the connection when you have chronic illness sometimes is very difficult. That I had to cancel something tonight 'cause I just wasn't feeling it. It's a struggle.
So if you already are struggling in those areas, fortifying those now while things are not horrible. Is important. So joining something that somebody starts is also an excellent way to do something. We ended up with 50 volunteers the day of. I hadn't met, I think I'd only met 10 of them before that.
We ended up with about 50. It may have even been 60. All of those people are now part of my life in some way or another. It's it's important to put yourself out there.
Megan: Yep. And I'm hearing too, just the responsiveness that grows [00:32:00] when you start creating those mutual aid networks and connecting and saying, Hey, here's a need. Here's, here's this thing. The more people that you know, then, like
you're, it's this natural give and take around.
Hey we know what people need because we're connecting with them
continually.
Kelly: exactly.
Yeah. And you don't have to start big either. You know? Before I did this, I dipped my toe in,
and
So the election was in November. I was distraught, I had this idea, but I was too chicken to, to tell anybody about it yet. So I kind of dipped my toe in and I started with a hoodie drive for at risk youth L-G-B-T-Q, youth at Bridging.
And I called them and I said, you know, this sucks. So what can I do for you, for your people? And they said, you know, hoodies, we need hoodies. So I actually posted to the same site then and within two days I had gotten. $3,200 in donations to get hoodies. And I, that was actually my first foray in anything community I'd ever done in my life, actually.
And I thought, holy [00:33:00] crap. And I had hoodies all over my living room and we had to do, so then we actually started taking some of the money that people were donating. We, we went and bought gift cards and donated them right before Thanksgiving to youth that were homeless. It can start that, it can start with that.
I, I started with, I started all this with a hoodie drive. I wanted, I knew it was getting cold out. I knew there were a lot of, a lot of the homeless or L-G-B-T-Q youth, that, that doesn't sit well with me. I thought I can buy hoodies for crying out loud. I'm not doing anything else. And that's how I started.
And so I also wanna tell people that like. My fire got lit and I felt braver to bring out my next idea, which was my big guns by doing something a little smaller first. And when I saw that I could do that and I felt the confidence in, well, that was easy, then the next step felt a lot easier. So sometimes, I guess it takes us maybe a step or two first, and that's okay too, because that also contributed to the good and made a difference.
Even if you're making a small [00:34:00] difference, it's a difference. I keep telling everybody, instead of pulling back right now, we all need to be like freaking zooming in. We need to be going smaller. We need to be like, okay, I live in Longfellow. This is my community. Okay, I'm L-G-B-T-Q. This is my community.
Okay, I have chronic illness. This is my community. Now what can I do within those communities to fortify not only me, but to fortify everybody around me? Find your people and connect. That is what? The wedding was about. That's what the hoodie drive was about. That's what going forward, anything we do will be about, not everything will be like this huge, massive thing.
It's about connecting not just with each other, but with the community and letting people in the community know you are not alone. There's people out here that get what's happening and we actually do care. You may not feel like your government cares right now, but we are not our government. We are. We are living in a United States of America.
We are not our government. Yes, our government has a huge, right now, especially, has a huge influence into what we're choosing to do. But [00:35:00] don't take all that choosing to do as negative that we have. You know, we're scared and we have to, you know, do all these things that we're scared about. We also can use it to empower us right now and say, okay, well the government has made it very clear they didn't wanna help us.
I wanna help us. I care what happens to our community. We can do that. We can be the community activist that we didn't even know we were, but we are. We are. If you have community, you're a community activist, get out there and activate.
Megan: Yes. Such a good call out for people to zoom in. I love that imagining, there's been a lot of just coping and disassociation
happening, right? And then, so what can we do instead to zoom in and focus on one thing that makes us feel good, our community feel good, us feel tighter? And that's kind of a question I have for you, you know, as you. Just started in this community space, how could you imagine burnout looking like for you if you
Kelly: Well, I'm already feeling it a little,
Megan: yeah.
Kelly: Yeah, so I'm actually in the middle of the burnout part.
Megan: [00:36:00] Mm-hmm.
Kelly: I ran on peer adrenaline and knowing I did not want to disappoint anybody from February 6th till May 31st. I have nine chronic pain conditions that all stem from one and a paralyzed stomach, which I don't digest food.
I have a lot on my plate already. But I I'm also have this great ability to just walk through the weeds. So I walked through the weeds for three months straight, and the wedding was May 31st and June 1st. I did not leave bed from June 1st till June 7th. My body just said, done.
Megan: mm-hmm.
Kelly: just absolutely done.
it,
was all my friends had written me the day a couple of days before saying, be careful you're gonna have a letdown. And it wasn't a letdown that I had. I had an absolute, like my body just shut down and almost my mind too, 'cause I had just had to keep going and the day of was so intense for my body and, but I was on so much adrenaline ' cause it was so fun that when the next day came, I just absolutely crashed.
And then the week after, I struggled a bit because we then got together, the five [00:37:00] of us that were kind of the ones that were coordinating everything and it's just different then. Everybody should know it. Once, once the big thing happens and the adrenaline goes, it gets different, and now you have to get to the nitty gritty.
I didn't wanna do that, and I felt like I had done this huge thing and I had like given every part of me, I had taken away from my family for three months, cost me time, money, all this, and now I felt sad and I was like, whoa, what am I gonna do now? Now I knew this was over. Now my mind's thinking about all the horrible things again, that kept me distracted.
I don't wanna be distracted. I wanna be present. How do I combine what's happening with what just happened? And I have spent the last month doing that. I've slept a lot. I've talked to my wife a lot. I have set up individual meetings with trusted friends so that I can draw on that community to see what do I want to do with this?
Do I want to be the leader of this going forward? Do I have [00:38:00] another vision I want to go? Do I have people I think should run this better than me. I, it's so many questions. The burnout part of it for me is. I go backwards, then into the anxiety. I go back into the worry. I go back into the self-doubt. For me, burnout looks like everybody hates me.
I don't really know what I'm doing. I need to get out of this quickly. It's too much for me. And when I'm in that place, I know that that's real. And when something's real for me, I have to acknowledge it. So for me keeping this podcast, 'cause at one point, I remember during the burnout about two weeks ago, I was like, what's the point?
I don't know if I'm gonna I don't know if I have anything to say.
Apparently I've stuff to say. I don't know if I have anything to say. Was it that big of a deal? I don't know. Like for me it feels almost like a depressional type thing. I always have to reach out to people to get me out. My wife gets me out, I have to rest.
I have to find my strength again. [00:39:00] And my connections are what does that for me. It's the people around me that remind me who I am in those moments when I forget that, help me get to the next point. And that's been my whole life, and especially the last 20 years of chronic pain. So I was prepared for that.
I would, I knew myself. I knew I would go full bowl. And I knew that when it was over, I used to post on Facebook every day. I am totally screwed June 1st. 'cause I knew that when I stopped I'm like this in real life. I keep moving. If I keep moving, my body doesn't hurt. And the minute I stop, I'm, I'm in a difficult place.
I knew the same thing would happen with this. And I was, and I've been burnt out all month. But one of the people from the group had a party for pride that was super uplifting 'cause we were all back together. It's just. Getting you back. You, you have to take the rest. It's it's impossible to do this life right now without resting.
Luckily my wife's on summer vacation. I'm always home. So we're doing a lot of resting. [00:40:00] I know not everybody has the luxury to rest all the time, but you can mentally do it and. Surrounding yourself with people that know your story and know it pretty well. Also, to me is very important. I don't like to have to explain myself and my friends.
I don't have to, I had to cancel with my friend Tara today. I wanted to see Tara so badly. I just know I'm not gonna be okay at four o'clock, and so I had to cancel it. But when you are.
Open and you are vulnerable with a few people. You don't have to be vulnerable with the world, but you're open with some people.
They really are part of what helps you get outta burnout because you don't just rot in it. You don't just sit there if it's like this new bed rotting thing. Well, that's something we've been doing forever. They just have a name and we can rot in our burnout so easily that it changes us, and I can't ever let that happen because my body goes backwards a minute I don't concentrate on it. So I feel like there's always an extreme amount of pressure [00:41:00] for me to get through the burnout. And instead of calling it pressure anymore, I try and call it all my tools to get through the burnout and people. People and rest, which is hard for somebody like me. I don't like rest, but that's sometimes the things we don't like are the things that are knocking hardest on our door.
Megan: yep.
Kelly: And rest for me is absolutely one. And so this has been a lot of lessons pushing against what I want to be and accepting who I am. And I am a person who needs a lot more rest than the average. And that's hard, but that's how I get through it. people Acknowledgement and then you walk through the weeds of the rest too.
It's not hard, it's not easy for everybody. Some people I think, are super good at rest. Some of us are very, very unable to really let it
go. And I think people like me have an extra layer. If you have chronic illness of any type, there's also this extra layer of you don't ever really feel like you can let it all go, but if you don't wanna burn out on life.
Right now, everybody's [00:42:00] burned out on life. It's not your jobs it's life. This is a this is a big shift for most Americans. It's a lot of realizations. It's a lot of understanding. Things we did not understand before. A lot of pulling back on the curtain. That in itself is causing burnout for people.
You gotta reach out to your community. You just have to.
Megan: yep. And I think what I'm hearing too is that knowing this life may induce burnout for
us, like rest has to be part of the burnout.
Kelly: It does. It has to be for me.
sometimes
I have to actually schedule it. Like, I will absolutely not do anything on these three days, and I will stay in bed till this time. I have to actually schedule it and have some things because if it doesn't come easy to you, that doesn't mean you shouldn't be doing it.
Just because it doesn't come easy doesn't mean that's something you don't need. That has been one of my biggest lessons in life with chronic [00:43:00] illnesses. Just because it's hard for me doesn't mean just because it hurts to walk three miles a day doesn't mean that's not exactly what I should be doing. So because I have that thought and I have that knowledge already about my body, it's a little bit easier for me.
I wouldn't say easy, but it's a little bit,
yeah,
it's a little bit easier for me to then zoom in on that when I know physically I'm struggling and say, okay, just apply the same thing. You have to do this. If you don't do this, life gets harder. And why would you want that? Just rest. Whatever you need to tell yourself.
You have to do it. It's imperative at this point, or you won't accomplish anything or you, I didn't rest during the wedding part at all. So yes, you may be able to get out there and run full bowl and do your one great thing and if that's your goal okay, great. But if you don't find some rest around it, you're not gonna be good for anything else.
Megan: Yep. Yep. So balancing it, knowing there's seasons of busy and there's seasons of rest and [00:44:00] yeah. I'm curious to hear, you mentioned you're putting things together right now with the Do'gooders finding that mission and vision and focusing on kind of Christmas plans.
Kelly: Yeah, holiday plans. We we've thrown out a few things. I originally wanted to maybe do a holiday bizarre type of thing geared towards the trans community. We're really trying to help the communities that are being targeted right now the most, and that that need will shift. Right now, the need is of course, in the immigrant community, but that is not a place where we feel we.
Want to have anything happen. My wife works at Minneapolis schools. There's a lot of immigrant things happening there. I feel like somebody in our family is already very ingrained in that. It's a difficult place. I don't wanna walk into something I don't, that I could mess up, that I could. I don't wanna cause any hurt.
That's my big thing. So right now we're mostly
~mostly ~focused on the L-G-B-T-Q community. A lot of the people that I'm working with, of course, are my friends. So we're from that community. So our passions just kind of go there. I have a lot of trans [00:45:00] friends, non-binary friends. They are in it right now. They are, they are the bullseye target next to immigrants and have, as we all know, since day one for absolutely ridiculous reasons.
Yeah, we keep, my brain keeps going back to how can we help this community now by helping if we just. Do decide that we're gonna go mostly with L-G-B-T-Q stuff right now. It helps everybody because I like to say that because I think people think, well, you're just focusing, you're just an L-G-B-T-Q.
No, we're, we're a life. We're a life people.
We want everybody. Rise a rising tide raises all boats. It's not an either or situation. So everybody is a human in our community. Everybody deserves the same thing, and everybody deserves to be helped and supported right now with our community being under such.
Not great things. Right now most of our focus is there. It's what we know, and I think you should always lean into what you know, especially when things are difficult. But as more opportunities arise, [00:46:00] we definitely are going to grab onto them. This gift giving thing that I thought of. It actually wouldn't be specific to the L-G-B-T-Q community.
It would be specific to everybody. It would be a way for everybody, a lot of people to get involved. It'd be a way for people to show up and do something in a small amount of time, or as large amount of time as they wanted. If we had popups, we were handing out gifts. People can come with their children. I like to do the wedding.
I encourage people to come with their kids, and a lot of people did, because this fight is our is the next generation too. This is not our only our fight. So involving children having. Opportunities for younger people, teenagers, people. This is not just our fight. I'm 52. I don't think I'm gonna see all of this change before my life's over, but I have a 21, a 22, and a 24-year-old.
This is their fight. So as long as I'm here, I'm fighting for me and my children. I also want everybody else to invite your children into these spaces because they need to see, like I wanted people to bring their children to this wedding to help.
because I
[00:47:00] wanted them to see gay people happy and joyful and getting married.
So that is what they see. That is what the queer joy is a real thing. Being who you are against what the society wants is a real thing. That if you've never experienced real queer joy it's it's something of its own. I wanted people to bring their children there so that they could see that.
And going forward, I wanna have events and things that people can, and have the whole family come because we need to teach our children.
How to keep this fight and how to fight it fairly and how to help everybody along the way. It's really now our mission, I think. I don't know what else to say about it, but I feel like all of our priorities, at least in my family, have changed. And it's changed from how do we get to where we wanna go, to, how do we help everybody be safe for as long as we possibly can.
What can we do that now is in our hands to do? It's up to us. So what can we do?
Megan: Yeah. And really [00:48:00] modeling that activism and the joy and the community connections and letting your fight continue to be the legacy of your family and the legacy, hopefully of our
neighborhood.
Right.
Kelly: Hopefully. I hope it keeps going and I hope people can still. Help. I help people keep helping and I'm not worried about our community this neighborhood.
Megan: I
Kelly: I hope people in the neighborhood hear this because I I haven't met the majority of the neighbors. I know my neighbors of course, but the amount of things that people donated.
Without question. The amount of money that people sent to a GoFundMe that was just my name. They don't even know me.
Between the hoodie drive in this neighborhood and this was in the thousands and they just did it. And I just wanna keep saying that to people because I didn't know that about my, I mean, I knew we had a good neighborhood.
We're in the middle of the George Floyd stuff. For all the people that don't know, we you know, we went through that. I really think that strengthened us. Even if we didn't meet [00:49:00] everybody, we all were in the same place.
Being careful about the same things, looking out for each other, meeting at the park, telling each other what's happening.
I think the community already has that feel of we will not let this happen on our watch type of thing. And I just welcome everybody to reach out to whatever community you feel comfortable with because that's what the majority of them are like. The majority of them are people who are just saying, oh yes, I want to help.
How do I help? Where can I send the money? Where do you want me to drop this off? Where do I come to volunteer? That day, we had, I think 10 people from the neighborhood showed up actually that day to help volunteer too. Had never met 'em, showed up. It was wonderful. Keep asking people to show up,
keep throwing out your ideas, and asking people to show up to me what I just witnessed.
That is part of the answer to fix some of this.
Megan: definitely showing up and not really being alone, you know, just like
expecting people to be there.
And I'm curious, as we [00:50:00] wrap up, Kelly, if there's a takeaway that you hope our listeners will bring with them?
Kelly: I think the thing that I keep saying over and over again, which I've said here and I will reiterate it, is that I really think we're always told to pull back.
~back.~
I really think that's the opposite of what we need to be doing right now.
I think we need to be dialing in. We need to focus our energies. The world is throwing so much information at us, and of course we need to be informed to a point, but a lot of it, a lot of it is noise.
And the noise is what actually gets in your head because those are the unknowns. Those are the fears, those are the, it could do this, it could do that. This could happen. I could end up in a concentration camp as an L-G-B-T-Q person is now a conversation that goes on in my head. Right. That is all noise.
It's there to make you. Immobile, it's there to make you fear. It's there to make sure you don't act, that you don't give your [00:51:00] gifts, that you don't speak up. And you right now, in my opinion, need to do the opposite. I have done the opposite since the day that this, I mean,
I'm kind of an oppositional person anyway, so that's not hard for me.
But it's scary. I'm
Megan: mm-hmm.
Kelly: I'm scared. A lot of times I'm scared for me, I'm scared for my wife. I'm scared for my children. I'm scared for my neighborhood. I am scared. But I keep working anyway because I know I need to dial in these people. You, these people we married, that's who matters.
That's what I can do. That's what I can affect. I can, I'm not going to Washington, DC I don't wanna be a Congress person. I don't wanna do any of that. I don't want anything to do with that mess out there. I want to help the people here who are getting. Scared her and that are upset. So if you can dial in to your life instead of pulling back don't pull back this time.
Dial in. Look at what's most important to you. What is something you want to, if you knew you were gonna die in two years, what do you want to do for the next two [00:52:00] years? In the middle of this, I was just having a massive breakdown at the beginning, crying in bed, just crying. And I said to my wife, I think this is it.
I think this is the end. I think this is gonna get really bad and whatever. I was pretty hysterical at the beginning because I was in grief and my wife sat up in bed. 'cause I was sitting up having this thing and she said, so what? what if this is the end? Is this how you want to spend it? Is this how you want to go?
Do you want to be this full of anxiety, this full of anger, this full of rage, this full of uncertainty for the rest of however long this is. And it was a pivotal question to ask me at a pivotal moment, and it instantly changed my mood. And I was like hell no. I don't wanna be this person at all.
I want to be I want to be a force. That's what I want to be. You, you, you're doing all this. I want to be out here and be a force. And that empowered me immediately. So [00:53:00] I would say, figure out what empowers you.
~you.~
Then just start doing something. Just, just start doing something. It can be little like buying five hoodies and dropping them off at your local shelter.
Start with something. That's all you gotta do.
Megan: mm, I love that. Thank you for sharing that story and that pivotal question from your wife in a hard moment. It's been so inspiring talking to you today and just really getting this sense of an idea that can spark. You know, and that can kind of grow into this wildfire of love and
action and capacity building. So I'm just, I'm grateful and I know that we should meet up for Coffee next. need to plan that.
Kelly: Should. Right. I know, and you know, I did send you an email last night saying, I don't know if I have anything to say. I may not be the right person. So thanks for giving me the opportunity to say a few things.
Megan: Of course. I think people are gonna appreciate this and I know our neighbors will be grateful to hear more of the full story.
Kelly: Well, thank you for giving me the opportunity to share some of it, [00:54:00] and I just hope that people out there, here that you matter and what you have inside of you, what you've already done in the world actually can matter to other people going forward. And right now, people need what you have.
Megan: Definitely. So inspiring. Well, thanks Kelly. We'll leave again your email
address, your Facebook group and the website, and we'll just catch you very soon in the
neighborhood.
Kelly: Thank you so much. It's been wonderful to talk to you. I appreciate the opportunity.
Megan: Yeah, definitely take care
Kelly: All right. Bye-bye.
Megan: Balm in the Burnout is a listener supported podcast made possible by my work at Harvest Health and Wellbeing. If you'd like to support this project or contribute to a community scholarship, you can leave a tip on Venmo at HHW -LLC. Thanks for listening and see what you can restore and alchemize today.
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