We know some community members may have questions, curiosity, uncertainty, or differing perspectives about Wildflower Alliance’s relationship with Roots Up, and we wanted to offer some clarity.
First, we want to acknowledge something plainly: our relative quiet around some of these questions over the past year may have left room for confusion, assumptions, frustration, curiosity, or uncertainty. That makes sense to us. That quiet has not been indifference.
The truth is that Wildflower Alliance has had meaningful internal work to do. Transitions involving shared history, strong relationships, organizational evolution, differing perspectives, and community emotion are deeply human terrain. They can be complex. They can be tender. They can take time.
Wildflower Alliance currently has an interim leadership structure in place, and Wildflower Alliance is being led from within by its current leadership team. We are naming that because clarity matters. Rafael Rodriguez and Earl Miller are serving as Interim Co-Directors and signatories to this message. Natan Cohen is also an Interim Co-Director. Natan is currently on leave and is expected to return in early July. While Natan is not signing this message during their leave, they have been a significant part of helping Wildflower Alliance move through this moment.
To be clear: Roots Up is a separate organization from Wildflower Alliance.
There is shared history here. There is appreciation here. That includes gratitude for Sera Davidow’s contributions as a former Director of Wildflower Alliance, and appreciation for the many people whose labor, imagination, courage, care, and wisdom helped shape this community over time.
Wildflower Alliance remains deeply committed to our Defining Principles. They continue to ask us to stay curious, expect imperfection, honor lived experience, resist oppressive systems, and keep learning from one another. They also remind us that clarity and relationship can belong together.
Wildflower Alliance is still Wildflower Alliance. We are still a group of people trying-sometimes beautifully, sometimes imperfectly-to make the world a better place to be human in. We still believe in peer support, mutuality, dignity, liberation, creativity, and community care. We still stand firmly against racism, transphobia, sexism, homophobia, ableism, classism, and the many ways oppressive systems harm people.
And the work continues. Wildflower Alliance’s work has reached and influenced people across the globe, and it is also happening every day in the specific, local, practical ways that make community real.
That work includes Afiya, the first peer respite in the Commonwealth, and Anemoni, the first LGBTQ+ focused peer respite in the world. It is happening in Bowen, Holyoke, Greenfield, Pittsfield, Discord, online and in-person groups, peer support conversations, support groups, advocacy efforts, trainings, Wild Ivy, housing-related work at the Rainville and with the Hampden County Continuum of Care, support for many important initiatives, and in the countless visible and invisible acts of care that rarely make headlines but
matter deeply.
It looks like responding when SNAP cuts threaten our community’s access to food. It looks like sustaining resources like the Bowen Food Pantry. It looks like our administrative team keeping the work moving, often quietly and behind the scenes. It looks like understanding budgets, how resources are used, and the reality that anywhere two of us are together, there is community.
We want to appreciate the people helping carry this work, including Wild Ivy Director Fern Fairchild, Administrative Director Amy Troyer-Karas, Afiya Director Tokyo Baldwin, Senior Respite Director Ephraim Akiva, Director of Learning Opportunities Caroline Mazel-Carlton, Liz Mombourquette for her work supporting inpatient hospitalization work, Career Initiatives, and a myriad of other initiatives, and Interim Co-Director Natan Cohen, who is currently on leave and expected to return in early July. As Interim Co-Directors, Rafael Rodriguez and Earl Miller are deeply humbled by and grateful for the level of support we have received from the Director Team, our team members, and the broader Wildflower Alliance community.
We also want to say clearly that the Directors Team exists inside a much larger community of leadership. Leadership moves in big and small ways from moment to moment-in a conversation, in a group, at a center, in Discord, in a spreadsheet, in a budget conversation, in a ride offered, in a hard truth spoken kindly, or in a door opened when someone most needs it. Wildflower Alliance exists in the context of our relationships, and
we are all students and teachers in our own ways. We value and honor all of our team members who have shown up for this community during this transition.
Reasonable people can disagree. Different perspectives are welcome. Conversation is worthy. At the same time, leadership has a responsibility to offer clarity when clarity is needed, and this is part of that effort.
Wildflower Alliance and Roots Up may, at times, be in some of the same advocacy or policy spaces where commitments overlap. That shared presence should be understood as participation in a common issue space, not as formal partnership, shared governance, or organizational overlap. Sometimes aligned policy commitments bring organizations into the same rooms. That does not mean those organizations are the same, or that they are operating under shared leadership.
We wish Roots Up well. We simply believe clarity matters, and that separate organizations should be represented clearly and thoughtfully.
We also want to recognize the Consortium team for their support. The Consortium has been supportive of Wildflower Alliance’s work and has been on this journey with us through challenge, transition, learning, and continued community commitment. We expect there will be more conversations ahead about what our relationship with the Consortium is, what it could look like, and how we move toward our future with thoughtfulness, honesty, and shared responsibility.
Wildflower Alliance is still finding our footing in some ways. And extraordinary things are still happening. Wildflower Alliance is not paused. Wildflower Alliance is alive.
If you have questions, curiosity, disagreement, or simply want conversation, we genuinely welcome that. Please reach out directly at info@wildfloweralliance.org, or to Rafael or Earl at rafael@wildfloweralliance.org and earl@wildfloweralliance.org.
With appreciation,
Wildflower Interim Co-Directors
Rafael Rodriguez
Earl Miller
EN 
ES