We recently had the chance to connect with Dani Amassa-Gana and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Dani, thank you for taking the time to reflect back on your journey with us. I think our readers are in for a real treat. There is so much we can all learn from each other and so thank you again for opening up with us. Let’s get into it: When have you felt most loved—and did you believe you deserved it?
I receive a lot of love from my neighbors outside. Even when I need to take a step back and haven’t seen them in a while, someone always remembers me and the effect I had on them. I remember the effect they had on me. Many of the times I feel most loved are outside with the people. Watching birds, talking about the state of the city and how it’s handling its own manufactured scarcity of housing, listening to stories, learning lessons, playing games, handing out squares. I take time to remember the people I’ve met over the years and what they taught me – their love and resistance replenishes me when I’m facing despair. They keep me going. They are the reason I don’t believe in love being “deserved”, I think love is more abundant than many people realize. Love is an invisible, constant force – like gravity, one is pulled to love. Whether we are conscious of it or not, we always seek out love where and when we need it. It’s not about whether a person deserves love, it’s about whether they’re ready to receive it. In whatever form it comes to them, not matter how small.
Friends outside have gifted me hats and sweaters I still have to this day. At the time, I was hesitant to accept them because I thought I wasn’t deserving, but they persisted in giving. Their stubborn love showed me that it wasn’t about whether I deserved it, I was getting love in one of the strongest ways they could show me – and I needed to open myself to receiving it.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
My name is Danielle (Dani) Amassa-Gana. I am the community organizer for Say It With Your Chest DTX, a mutual aid organization based in Dallas dedicated to teaching people autonomous community care in solidarity with our unhoused neighbors. We prioritize the immediate survival of our neighbors outside, and do what we can to provide them with supplies that help them get to the next day. Mutual aid is different from our society’s traditional ideas of charity in three main ways: First, it removes the focus from the people giving to the people receiving. Second, it doesn’t ask questions or decide who is “deserving” of aid. Lastly, it does not expect anything in return (for example, tax write-offs).
Say It With Your Chest DTX is unique in that it has run for over five years solely on crowdfunding from regular community members – truly working-class people who are dedicated to changing the way we approach poverty and houselessness. Over the years we have programmed many initiatives including a large-scale laundry program for the unhoused that lasted over two years, firewood distributions in the cold months, annual metroplex-wide water drives in the hot months, and Care Package Parties.
Care Package Parties are monthly events where community members gather to pack gallon bags full of essential supplies necessary for survival outside, including hygiene items, socks, first aid supplies, food and water, and more. Afterward, our volunteers take the bags home and distribute them where they live. This way, we can cover more ground around the metroplex and reach people who may live further from main services located downtown. Homelessness is an extremely isolating and dangerous experience. We want our neighbors outside to know that there’s good people looking out for them wherever they are.
Okay, so here’s a deep one: What did you believe about yourself as a child that you no longer believe?
I grew up in the Richardson/Plano area and spent my formative years under the influence of a predominantly white and conservative suburbia. I was always an empathetic child, but I was taught certain things that didn’t seem to add up for me but were chalked up to “the way of the world”. People emphasize a strong sense of “fault” when it comes to homelessness and automatically assume that an unhoused person was irresponsible or did something wrong to get into their situation. Even if they did make choices that landed them in their situation, that doesn’t mean they don’t deserve food or shelter. We all make mistakes. Unfortunately, this concept of ‘fault’ bleeds into everything and prevents people from looking at the systems that contribute to this hardship. It affects all of us in different ways. For me, it made me believe that failure was always my “fault” and that making mistakes makes you a bad person. This mentality contributed a lot to severe anxiety and depression in my formative years. It took me a long time to learn how to forgive myself, and it’s still an uphill battle.
I left that bubble and discovered more for myself. I met people where they were at and listened to them. I not only broadened my worldview, but gained more insight to affirm the part of myself pushed back against the binary way of thinking. A view that was mainly shrouded in hypotheticals rather than real-life situations. I sought out the answers I was looking for, and I learned. I learned about capitalism, about white supremacy, the “war” on drugs, classism, conformity, and manufactured scarcity.
I learned that many times, people “fail” in this society simply because that’s the way the systems put in place are designed to work. Homelessness is a violent threat to the working-class through our governmental structure. It is a threat to conform to an oligarchy that only benefits a few; burning out and exhausting the working class. I lost any desire to be rich. Rich people are rich because they exploit, lobby, and bribe to prevent people from having stability. As long as capitalism is around there will always need to be people suffering and dying at the bottom. Simply put: 7,000,000,000 people are suffering because of 3,000 greedy people (not including the thousands of millionaires they fund to do their dirty work).
Does it need to be this way? Absolutely not. Humans made these rules, and therefore humans have the power to change them. Supremacy and capitalism are not immutable forces like gravity or love. They are human-made structures that can be dismantled and changed to benefit everyone, not just a few.
If you could say one kind thing to your younger self, what would it be?
You’ve been right. Forgive yourself, you’re still learning. Stick to your guns and defend yourself with every fiber of your being. You knew you didn’t have to sacrifice your soul to succeed, in spite of all the people you encountered telling you otherwise. You succeed and continue to do so because your concept of success is not linked to man-made things like money or what you own. You succeed every time you preserve that backbone in the face of adversity. Every time you trust your intuition. Every time you are loud and stand up for yourself and others. Every time you say it with your chest. That is true success that cannot be stolen or repossessed by anyone.
So a lot of these questions go deep, but if you are open to it, we’ve got a few more questions that we’d love to get your take on. How do you differentiate between fads and real foundational shifts?
Over the years, I’ve seen many people and organizations come and go. The biggest times are around elections. From 2016-2020, we saw a lot of momentum for change that quickly dissipated once Biden was elected. It felt like many people saw the fight as over as long as the guy that said the quiet stuff out loud wasn’t in office. But those of us truly dedicated to revolution knew this wasn’t the end, nor was it the beginning. It was simply another mile in the marathon to build the world we want to see. We know change, whether local or national, is gradual. It takes a lot to go up against the Hydra that is the American empire as we know it, and it purposefully makes it harder to change from the inside using the tools it “allows” us to use.
For example, many people see their sole power in voting and voting alone, but that is simply not true. This is mainly because the Electoral College still exists to this day – a function of government solely created to prevent the working-class from making decisions, because the founding fathers deemed them too incompetent to do so. Therefore, members of the Electoral College are not required to vote in the interests of their constituents. Add corporate money in government through Political Action Committees (PACs), thanks to the Citizen’s United ruling, and now our votes don’t hold nearly as much power as they once did. Subsequently undercutting our entire democracy, leaving us with the illusion of choice. This isn’t to say voting is completely useless, but it means we as individuals need to do more collectively outside of voting to see the changes we want in our society. That’s where mutual aid comes in. Giving without determining whether one is deserving or “worthy” of aid and not looking for a reward in return plays a big part in rewiring the brain from relying on what it was initially taught.
I know I’m young, but I have yet to see a large foundational shift that can maintain itself for longer than a year or two, and believe a lot of it boils down to a mindset of hyper-individualism instilled in all of us from an early age. Getting out of that trap is difficult if you’ve known it all your life because it requires a large amount of unlearning as it pertains to the ideas of transactional relationships and self-worth via consumption. This unlearning is something we have yet to see on a large scale, BUT we’ve had another election, more and more people are learning about mutual aid and direct action nationwide. I hope we won’t have a repeat of complacency and defeatism, and hold my hope dearly to maintain the belief that a shift is coming. I’m both excited and scared, but it’s time for all of us to either get with it or get left behind.
Okay, so before we go, let’s tackle one more area. If you laid down your name, role, and possessions—what would remain?
A soul intact, and a strong moral backbone. I leave this world with what I was given when I arrived.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://sayitwithyourchestdtx.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/sayitwithyourchestdtx
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/sayitwithyourchestdtx
- Other: https://linktr.ee/siwycdtx
Image Credits
Erin Devany
Krystal Reed
