Hi, we are Aeriel and Kyle Ashlee. We are social justice educators, married partners, and traveling explorers.
For several years we have been facilitating dialogues around important topics like race and gender. Through these powerful conversations, we have learned a lot about how everyday people can practice social justice in order to do their little bit of good in creating a better world.
Combining lessons, reflections, and stories gathered along the way, we’ve put together a book that we believe can serve as a roadmap for your social justice journey. Our book is called: VITAL: A Torch For Your Social Justice Journey.
What is VITAL?
VITAL - Vulnerability, Identity, Trust, Authorship, and Liberation - the five core principles of our book outline a framework for those who desire to gain the skills, knowledge, and confidence to effectively engage in social justice.
Too often people feel overwhelmed, angry, and uncertain about how to respond to social injustice. What if instead there was a way to feel completely empowered? What if instead of being railroaded by guilt there was a way to find courage in vulnerability? What if instead of getting shut down by triggers and tip-toeing around issues we could find strength in storysharing and authentic dialogue?
We wrote VITAL with a few goals in mind. First, we want to provide a source of inspiration, motivation, and resiliency for those who are already on the social justice journey. Second, we want to create a blueprint with clear steps for getting started down the path of social justice. Finally, we want to demonstrate the power of storysharing in social justice journeying. In fact, our VITAL book contains 38 stories of social justice!
In our book, readers will learn...
- How to be vulnerable as a way to courageously storyshare and invite others into conversations about issues of diversity and inclusion
- How to explore aspects of identity, including race, gender, sexuality, social class, religion, national origin, age, and ability, in order to better understand themselves and others
- How to develop a capacity to trust - themselves, others, and processes - finding peace outside of our comfort zone in working toward growth and change
- How to author their lived experience, feeling empowered to tell their story and creating spaces for others' to share narratives that may not otherwise be heard
- How to liberate themselves by analyzing their thoughts and behaviors, creating personal freedom and social justice
Why crowdfund VITAL?
The publishing world is complex and controlled by a powerful few. We were contacted by a couple publishers for this book project, but ultimately decided that in order to stay consistent with our vision and authentic to our voice, we needed to go the self-publishing route. Having never self-published a book before, we soon realized there are a number of hefty costs associated with this undertaking. That’s why we’re coming to you; to help us bring this VITAL book to life.
Your Impact...
Any contribution you make to help crowdfund VITAL goes straight into the project. We need a total of $6,200 to complete the production of our book and get our first printing underway. The manuscript has already been fully written and edited (which has already been paid for out of our pocket) and is nearly ready for readers.
Every contribution to VITAL supports social justice broadly and some of our crowdfunding perks directly enable you to donate this important resource to a social justice organization of your choosing.
The $6,200 we hope to crowdfund will pay for:
$2,000 for editing, art design, and production costs
$3,200 for printing costs
- $1,000 marketing, advertising, promotion, and taxes/fees
If we reach our goal, we hope to make VITAL available in print and eBook formats by December 2015. If we surpass our initial goal, we will be able to fund a book tour and make copies of the book available to schools and public libraries to ensure all social justice journeyers have access to VITAL.
About the Book
- 5 x 8 paperback book (also available in eBook format)
- 198 pages
- Full color front, spine, and back cover, with special limited edition cover art designed especially for our crowdfunding supporters!
Other Ways You Can Help
There are 3 easy ways that you can support VITAL.
Contribute to our campaign!
Use your social media might and help us spread the word by Tweeting about us, posting our campaign on Facebook, or writing a blog post about VITAL.
- Donate airline miles to help us share VITAL with other social justice journeyers around the world!
Thank you so much for your support. VITAL wouldn’t be possible without you.
In solidarity,
Kyle and Aeriel Ashlee
PS: To learn more about us, check out our favorite vlog episode, where we share the story of how we created a new last name to reflect our social justice values.