iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Power Blossoms @powerblossoms.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

Happy 5th Anniversary to Power Blossoms! We’re celebrating this month by sharing with you all how a grassroots abolitionist prisoner-support org makes it this far – along with plenty of ways you can support or join our work in the months and years ahead. Lots more to come! 🌸

A stylized black number “5” on a pink gradient background, decorated with pink flowers and sparkles. Below the number, the word “Years” appears in bold, playful black text. The overall style is celebratory and whimsical.

But our inside members kept us on track: “We need accurate health information.”
“We need funds to buy supplies to keep ourselves even a bit safer.”
“We need penpals who stick with us through the isolation of endless lockdowns.”

So we made and mailed out a COVID guide that focused on accessible and grounded info. So we raised thousands of dollars to buy care packages and put money on people’s books. So we didn’t just match penpals and move on: we constantly retooled our program to ensure connections were maintained and resulting in real solidarity.

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Power Blossoms @powerblossoms.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

Now some of those inside members are with us out here. Now we work with the lawyers and the reentry programs - and, astonishingly, give advice to multimillion-dollar nonprofits on how they could better run their mail programs like ours.

It took work; it takes work. (Just ask the 8,000+ stamps we’ve used so far.) We’ve heard you like our aesthetic – thank you! –but there’s little glamor in supporting prisoners. We negotiate lesser defeats more often than we notch victories. You’ll think you’ve helped someone and then your letter to them gets returned, marked DECEASED with no explanation. You want to quit.

But our trans & queer siblings behind bars do not and cannot quit. Their survival is no performative activism: it’s a testament to an irrepressible spirit no empire will ever succeed at stomping out. They’re not going anywhere, and neither are we.

Here’s where we say, “We couldn’t have done it without you,” and we mean it. Thank you for the birthday cards! For penpaling! For donations and for volunteer-ing! We need more of all of it, and we’ll spend the weeks ahead pulling back the curtain on our work to explain why that is and explore where the next 5 years might take us.

For now, though, let’s end by honoring our inside members who haven’t breathed free air since some of us were 5 years old. Do you know them? Are they a part of your community? You could; they should be.

In 19th-century Brazil, it’s said that escaped slaves hid on farms where they grew camellia flowers that were sold to help fund the abolitionist movement their petals also symbolized.

It’s late spring, and the camellias are still in bloom. When will we plant them together? Think and dream what else takes root on the day our power blossoms.

Close-up of a white camellia flower with a soft yellow center, blooming in natural light against a background of dark green leaves.

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