Vigilant Love (VL) came together in December 2015 within days of the San Bernardino shooting in response to a nationwide wave of Islamophobia. VL was started by an intergenerational group of women and nonbinary femmes and founded upon long-standing relationships and solidarity building between SoCal-based Muslim and Japanese American leaders after 9/11. By using arts and healing practices to build bridges between two communities with interconnected histories of profiling, surveillance, and incarceration in the U.S., VL strives to model the kind of multi-ethnic and intergenerational movements needed to resist xenophobia, Islamophobia, and discrimination.

Our core programming reflects these values and brings together Muslim American, Japanese American, and other communities to challenge cyclical violence. This programming includes: VL’s Solidarity Arts Fellowship (SAF), an arts-based program for youth which has run for 5 cycles and hosted 70 fellows; organizing around community health and safety, such as with our current campaign, #ServicesNotSurveillance, focusing on access to mental health; VL’s annual Bridging Communities celebration, which creates space for connection through arts and food and welcomes hundreds of community participants during Ramadan each year; and VL’s pilgrimage to Manzanar, one of the sites where 11,000 of over 120,000 Japanese Americans were unconstitutionally forced from their homes and incarcerated during WWII, which offers an occasion to honor the experiences of former incarcerees through creative presentations and storytelling.