Daisy Carter is local black, queer organizer and artist based in Louisville, KY.
Carter is also a certified yoga instructor who uses movement to promote healing for BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and other marginalized communities.
Carter is originally from New Orleans and was displaced by Hurricane Katrina with their mother. She is now involved in racial, climate and environmental justice organizing. For college, Carter attended Western Kentucky University and studied journalism and English.
While living in Bowling Green, Carter founded a mutual-aid organization called Rise and Shine BG. Carter’s interest in organizing stemmed from her personal experiences as a climate refugee and survivor.
“It took me a while [post-college] for me to understand the struggles that I was in and how that was directly tied to economic disadvantages and my experience as a a climate survivor,” Carter said. “That’s how I think I started picking up an interest in investigating people’s lives.”
Now, Carter is a co-founder and network organizer of Survival Bloc, a national, BIPOC-led climate survival network building movement infrastructure to survive the climate crisis. They recently launched a regional chapter in Kentucky.
In working to develop the Survival Bloc, Carter said the main priority has been finding and building committed leadership who can bring the most effective strategy.
“The biggest thing that has gone into developing something new like [Survival Bloc], and at the scale we’re doing it, is finding dedicated and committed leadership,” Carter said. “I think also balancing the fact that the majority of the people that do have more emotional capacity to take on the work are leading other work in other nonprofit spaces, and the people that bring the most meaningful, effective strategy and lens to the work are poor people who oftentimes sacrifice themselves to get involved in work, like I did at some point.”
Another factor in developing a movement group in the current political climate is finding resources and funding.
In September, President Trump announced efforts to target left-wing organizations and non-profits, including investigations into certain groups’ tax exempt status despite federal law prohibiting the presidents from ordering investigations into groups’ tax statuses, according to CBS News.
“The Trump administration has been targeting nonprofit and movement groups based on their organizing ideologies,” Carter explained. “Folks that are leading anti racism work, anti capitalism work, you know, those sorts of things. It equates them to potentially be involved in terrorist behavior and organizing. And so, you know, again, for the scale that we’re trying to build in this way, where we have leadership to support, we have chapters to support, we have national programming and local programs to support… We need to find ways to resource this work that’s not dependent on grants or other institutional funding that is threatening our strategy and what we’re trying to accomplish.”
Above all, Carter’s largest priority is ensuring it helps people who are impacted by these issues, such as climate disaster.
“I think also, as far as just trying to concentrate the work locally, is to make sure to bring people into the fold that are actually directly impacted by these issues,” Carter said. “We oftentimes see a lot of people get involved in movements that are not directly impacted, or they do carry some level of privilege, and that that sense of ownership and collectivism is not passed off to the people that actually need it.”
Carter shares poetry on their Instagram, and their poem “Baby Boy” was published in “Discarded: A Rural Anthology.”
“I don’t have the steady practice I used to, but it’s hard to be creative when you’re trying to survive and ensure the survival of others,” Carter said. “I do it when I can. It’s usually when I’m really upset about something happening in the world, which is why a lot of my poetry often comes off as political. I have so much trauma, I’ve seen a lot. I think it helps me move through memories and ways of expressing those traumas that I normally can’t do in dialog.”
Her biggest influences as a writer include James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, June Jordan and Nikki Giovanni.
“I’m still developing my black voice,” Carter said. “I think rooting my poetry in the Black experience is really important to me. And not just in those experiences, but making sure that the person who’s reading it is also a person of color. I’m trying to write for my people.”
A common theme in Carter’s writing is her complicated relationship with her mother.
“I’ve written about my mother a lot,” Carter said. “I think about my mother a lot. We didn’t have the best relationship when she was around. I think, you know, that was the person that I went through the biggest crisis of my lifetime with.”
Despite not having what Carter describes as “the best relationship,” Carter feels that she learned about survival and gained her ambitious nature from her mother.
“I don’t think that I would have the ambition or the steadfastness that I have, or like my need to survive. I don’t think that would be instilled in me if it wasn’t for her, putting food on table, paying bills – despite lack of resources, despite all odds, you know,” Carter said. “I think I carry her with me when I organize and when I’m thinking about building power. I have to work collectively, despite money, despite people power, you know, despite these things, because we don’t have a choice.”
For anyone interested in becoming involved with community organizing, Carter encourages starting with activism, and finding an organization or a crew involved with an issue you’re interested in and begin putting in hours as a volunteer.
“I would consider activism or advocacy, is what we call it,” Carter said. “These are roles where a person can advocate for a particular person or an issue, but they’re not directly involved in shaping the change process which can be really intensive. It’s more of uplifting a message or aligning around a particular value… I would say that’s a good start for people.”
For those interested in learning more about Carter’s work, Survival Bloc is hosting a “Know Your Rights,” a community panel with food available on Thursday, Oct. 23 at 6:30 p.m at MaybeItsFate Co-op.