Hi, Tiauna! Thanks so much for sitting down with me. So, tell me a little bit about yourself and what led you to QVS.
My name is Tiauna. I’m a recent graduate of Swarthmore College and grew up in Nebraska.
Before the pandemic I lived in Omaha — where I was doing Americorps. I was living in this house with six other people. Not many of us talked to each other. We hardly talked about how we wanted to take care of the house. We bought our own groceries. We had a shelf full of different milks. We weren’t invested in our space as much as I wanted us to be. It felt weird. It felt like whenever there was a conflict, it was a conflict, not just a disagreement.
I noticed I was behaving in ways I didn’t want to behave, like sending disgruntled texts to my housemates and not wanting to be involved in my neighborhood. I felt the need for a more friendly and intentional environment.
I talked to my mentors in Nebraska, and they recommended doing radical things now, while I don’t have things like a permanent job or debt limiting me.
Since Swarthmore is historically Quaker, there are a lot of Quaker connections there and I had some friends who had done QVS. I was actually thinking of applying to QVS after I graduated. But I thought there was no way I could commit to earning only $125/mo, so chose to do Americorps to earn about $1,000/mo. The additional money ended up not making much of a difference because I wasn’t as happy as I thought I could be, and unlike at QVS, at AmeriCorps I was still responsible for the majority of my living costs like rent, food, and mental health services.
Coming into the year, were there particular questions you were holding? Hoping to get answered?
Coming off Americorps, I was intrigued by the intentional community living thing. I wanted to know: How do I grow to be comfortable around people? How do I allow myself to ask for help? How do I make a home out of a place?
I had some anxiety around money to work through — as someone who comes from a low income background. I was disappointed in myself because I thought money would make my life better. I thought I would like Americorps because it was like QVS but I was making more money. I found that I wasn’t actually confronting my insecurities, but instead was hiding from them.
I’ve always assumed — especially going to Swarthmore — having money was what success looks like, and would make my life fulfilling.
I realized I wanted to be more comfortable with the resources I had. I wanted to see how I could live a fulfilling and safe life without the excess wealth I always assumed I needed. I’ve never had excess wealth.
I was able to come to terms with the stipend because I saw that QVS was marketing something different. Not about obtaining wealth, but abundance and community support. QVS hands you a support network that consists of your house, the organization, and the Quaker meetings. I knew asking for help — especially when money was involved — was really hard for me. Things I’d never felt comfortable doing, asking my neighbor for a spatula, or asking a friend to pay for a book that I’d like to read. Small asks. I wanted to be more comfortable with accessing the abundance around me. QVS is really trying to teach Fellows to live within a community, a house, a neighborhood. So far, it’s given me a great home in which to grow.
What is it like to build community in a QVS house? What is it like to build intentional community during a pandemic?
It was tough. QVS has met and exceeded my expectations in some ways. And there were different waves of community [building] within my house. Moving in together was very exciting. Before QVS, we’d each spent months adapting to the pandemic — many of us were mostly alone, not spending time with friends.
There was a period when the newlywed phase wore off. We began (all at our own pace) confronting insecurities and patterns that made it difficult to grow in community together. It showed us how personal the community building process was. We were scared and intimidated by that in different ways. We all had to go through a process of re-committing to each other, especially at the end of winter. And not all of us were able to do that.