Guide to community care in the beatbox community

Here is our guide to community care in the beatbox community. Community care is essentially self care but for the community. In day-to-day life that can range from being a good neighbor who helps out, to cooking for a friend in need or protesting for human rights. All these actions fall into community care. Here are some ways to practice community care in the beatbox community:

Discounted prices / sliding scale pricing

This is something you should only offer if you are able to obviously. This makes learning beatboxing more accessible to low-income individuals, a demographic many marginalized people fall into due to systemic issues. This will also help children of low-income families to have better access to beatboxing. It is already pretty common practice to give things cheaper when it‘s booked together, so we‘re already going in a good direction there.

Initiating collaborations

While collaborations can be stressful and sometimes don‘t end up happening, it is important that collaborations happen more between people that aren‘t necessarily best friends. That way the community has more connection points for contact. This is especially essential for beatboxers in communities that aren‘t as big as the US scene or the UK scene yet. Collaborations don‘t have to be full tracks, they can go from little challenges to a full fantasy battle crossposting. 

Creating safe spaces for marginalized voices

This is possible not only at events, but also online. Having a monitored space where people can go and feel safe is possible at events by having a dedicated area or room that has more security. Online these safe spaces can be chat rooms that are more heavily moderated and checked on.

Boosting marginalized voices & topics

We have a lot of underrepresented groups of people in our community that deserve to be made more visible and audible. More well-connected or influential artists could push their content and outspokenness to make it seen that these groups of people are welcomed and supported in this community. It doesn‘t have to ruin your brand or reputation as an artist to share the spotlight. There are plenty of creative ways to go about little shoutouts, resharing artistry or resharing a post about social issues.

Educating (with) your friend group

Educating yourself with your friend group on something or educating yourself and then your friend group can push forward progress in this space when it comes to social issues. Maybe you wanna learn more about a culture or about a specific form of racism. If everyone learns a part and then comes together to explain their findings to each other the information will stick better. Taking courses and workshops together is also a good way to learn together.

Including more marginalized voices in friend groups

Obviously this shouldn‘t be super forced, but we all know the friendships that could develop and then people stop talking. Or even worse, the marginalized people are included in friend groups and then get dropped for talking about their experiences and showing signs of trauma in their behavior. Boundaries are always important, of course, but making an effort to include more underrepresented people and build friendships with them when you think it clicks is important. Plus being there for someone mentally unwell or traumatized and helping them on their healing journey in a way you have the capacity to is also a form of community care.

Sharing your mistakes with others

When 3 people make 100 mistakes alone, each makes 100 mistakes and learns from them. When 3 people make 100 mistakes and share their learnings with each other, each person is 300 mistakes ahead in life. We already do this quite a bit with beatboxing and learning sounds. We should do it way more with other skills inside and outside of this community. Share more with each other about judging, stage presence, battling, personal growth, mental health, finances, marketing & general business mistakes. Sure, some mistakes will still be repeated, but sharing is caring.

Speaking out against unfair treatment of others

Speaking out about the unfair treatment of others by a community, organizers, followers, society at large, is important. The same goes for speaking out about biased treatment of people in and outside of the community after getting as much information about the situation as possible makes people feel safer around you unless they are the ones acting wrong (or knowing something you don‘t know about the situation yet, that is also always still a possibility to not ignore). 

Opposing the dehumanization of people

Learning about and being against the cancellation and isolating of people is important, while also not dehumanizing the people that have practiced cancellation or isolating before. Everyone deserves to be treated like a human.

This is not to be mistaken with community safety boundaries. Those still should be set to keep the community safe from people that have shown to act in harmful ways. Believing in the possibility of healing for those individuals and not abusing them back is important in those cases.

Communities can and should have collective boundaries!

This was our little guide to community care in the beatbox community for you. This is obviously a limited list. There are way more ways we can be there for each other and help each other. Feel free to share more community care practices you can think of in the comments below.