Author: Roan

While I’m waiting for the chance to process some of my thoughts from the POOR seminar in writing, please listen to this clip from the KPFA Morning Show. POOR’s segment (some brief excerpts from Revolutionary Giving) starts at 32:40 and goes until 58:20.

I just got home from training Resource Generation’s Donor Organizing Institute (it was awesome by the way – thanks so much to all the fabulous participants for your smarts and heart), and I barely have time to do laundry before getting on a plane Friday morning to head to the Bay for POOR’s Revolutionary Giving seminar. I have a million ideas racing around in my head from the combination of these two things and I’ve been dying to gather them here but I have two seconds of free time and for now – I wanted to collect my thoughts before heading into this weekend and share three reasons why I’m excited for Revolutionary Giving:

1) I’ve spent a lot of time in both: spaces for people with wealth talking about leveraging privilege for social justice AND in spaces for grassroots fundraisers talking about building accountable funding structures from the ground up. But it is SO RARE (/unheard of) to have these two (often overlapping) groups of people in one room intentionally having this conversation.

2) People who are dealing with immediate, poverty-based struggle on a daily basis very rarely get to shape conversation about philanthropy and what rich people should do with their money and what a just redistribution of resources looks like. And we need those voices at the forefront.

3) In the past few years I’ve witnessed/been part of so much awesome grassroots fundraising conversation about shifting power by raising money from a broad base of constituents/members rather than from foundations. This is such a huge and crucial part of building sustainable movements, but to me one piece that’s often missing is how we talk about rich people. Because the wealth that rich people own rightfully belongs to poor people/people of color/grassroots movements/etc. I want to be able to talk about rich people giving money as a form of reparations rather than “philanthropy” or charity. 

My head is kind of exploding from all the people from different areas of my life that I’ve always wanted to have this conversation with who are going to be there this weekend. I’m so excited and a little bit nervous and I can’t wait and I also wanted to let you know that although the registration is officially closed, my sources tell me that it is not too late to get in on this if you are cursing the fact that you never signed up. Just email deeandtiny@poormagazine.org. It starts Friday night with a Juneteenth ceremony. Maybe I’ll see you there?

I encourage everyone to take a look at this blog chronicling a new project of the brilliant Isabell Moore. It’s sort of like the sister of Enough!

Honest Living is “is a project about how people who care about radical social change figure out issues of life path, jobs, vocation, and livelihood. The blog is a space for conversations about how people work through these questions, and what the political implications of our different choices are.”

Let’s all read it and contribute to it!

I’ve had such an incredible week and have been wanting to write about it all on Enough, but I haven’t known how to organize the mile-a-minute thoughts in my head or talk about all the amazing conversations I’ve been having. 

So first, I read this great new book called Arm The Spirit by Diana Block – have you seen it? It is a total standout in the genre of memoirs by white activists who went underground in the 60s and 70s (actually Diana fascinatingly went underground in the early 80s) to participate in militant revolutionary solidarity work. Diana was part of Prairie Fire Organizing Committee and worked as a public activist for many years before she and several comrades decided to begin working clandestinely to support the Puerto Rican independence movement and other Third World struggles.   Continue reading “Lessons from elders”

I’m leading a workshop in Philly on April 5 for people with access to wealth who want to support social justice work, and I thought some Enough readers might be interested. Here’s the link – Giving and Beyond: Leveraging Privilege and Resources for Grassroots Movements (I’m privately calling it “Philanthropy for Anti-Capitalists”). Please come!

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What does it mean to be both a donor and an activist? How can people with access to wealth support grassroots social justice movements? How do we challenge institutionalized oppression within philanthropy? What are some ways to leverage privilege and resources beyond giving money?

Giving and Beyond: Leveraging Privilege and Resources for Grassroots Movements
A workshop exploring class, money and social change.
Sunday April 5, 1-5pm
1500 Walnut Street, Second Floor Conference Room
Fee: Sliding Scale $35-$75 
To register for this workshop click here.
(This workshop is a solicitation-free space)

This interactive workshop is intended for people who have a working understanding of social justice philanthropy and grassroots organizing, and who have experience giving or planning to give. We’ll share some specific models for giving money within a social justice framework, explore other ways of leveraging privilege, talk about what it means to support grassroots organizing beyond the mainstream nonprofit model, and much more. We’ll also have time to delve into deeper questions about accountability, how much is “enough”, applying social justice principles to our personal practices around money, and whatever else you bring!

This workshop is designed specifically for people with social justice values who have access to financial wealth. “Wealth” can mean many different things: it can be something we have now or something we expect to gain access to in the future, it can come from earnings or inheritance, and it can range widely in scale from a thousand or less to millions or more. This workshop is for you if you feel that you have (or have access to) substantially more resources than you need to support yourself.

A couple weeks ago I was having a talk with somebody at a coffee shop in my neighborhood, and I noticed some graffiti on the bathroom wall that said: “Downward mobility is not radical.” Incidentally, the talk I was having that day was with a young white class-privileged person who was struggling with what to do with some inherited money, and we were talking about wealth and social justice and giving away inheritance and all of these things, and the whole time I kept pondering the graffiti and thinking that actually, downward mobility is radical. Wouldn’t it be very radical if all wealthy people gave away their money and spent only what they needed to live? 

[I’m talking here about the kind of downward mobility that’s chosen and intentional, not the job-loss/cuts-to-social-services/increasing-wealth-disparity kind.]

 

But I know what the graffiti means – it means that the writer is sick of people who act like they don’t have money when actually they do. Personally, I lived this problematic phenomenon for several years after high school, which I spent hitchhiking, trainhopping, and dumpster diving my way around the country in the company of other freewheeling punk youth who (like me) often lacked a particularly tight race and class analysis. Continue reading “On downward mobility”

I wanted to share a couple resources that have come to my attention recently: first, our friend Dori (magical herbalist extraordinaire) sent us this link to a couple of great radio interviews about connections between capitalism and patriarchy and many other things. She writes,

dean & tyrone,

here is an interview with sylvia federici, who wrote caliban and the witch, discussing the european witch hunts and the rise of capitalism/destruction of the commons. thought you might find it interesting, especially the part about the loss of magical knowledge as part of the undermining of the peasant class. 

http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/48133

love, dori

Also I’ve been following the (Re)thinking Walking project (a collaboration between two brilliant writers), which I highly recommend for some thoughtful and insightful reflections about important things like self-care, movement and movement building, power, history, and anti-capitalism (of course). Take a look.

Dean gave a brilliant lecture on Monday night in New York, about trans politics on a neoliberal landscape, and of course I was up half the night thinking about these things. There are many fascinating angles from which to approach this topic, but here’s the one I want to talk about now:

Neoliberalism’s hallmarks are cooptation and incorporation, meaning that the words and ideas of resistance movements are frequently recast to become legitimizing tools for oppressive political agendas. 

One simple-to-grasp example of this is LGBT organizations working to strengthen hate crimes legislation (or feminist organizations working to strengthen domestic violence legislation, etc), which in turn strengthens policing, the PIC, and the criminal legal system which are themselves major sites for violence against queer and trans people and women. Mainstream LGBT and anti-violence organizations use language about “safety” for women and queer people, but really mean safety for the privileged few who aren’t targets of policing and incarceration, and along the way queer liberation (and feminist) rhetoric gets used to enforce and legitimize racist tools of state violence.

So, one of the things I was thinking about while lying in bed the other night contemplating neoliberalism and cooptation was a book I’m reading, The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, which I highly recommend (although I’d love it more if it had a better critique of capitalism generally and of white supremacy). There are a million and one things to say about this book (which is all about neoliberalism), but there’s one small side point – about philanthropy, specifically the Ford Foundation – that I will share here because it’s relevant (and because I’m obsessed with philanthropy I guess). Continue reading “More agonizing tales from philanthropy”

I received this email from my friend Adele Carpenter that I thought Enough readers would appreciate. It’s so important to remember how much grassroots movements could really use a little economic stimulus right about now.

Dear loves,

Some of you may have been privy to the international gross-ness known as last week.  We are officially turning the beat around, as of Monday, starting with the full moon, okay?  If you were somehow spared the pervasive bummerness of last week, be glad. Continue reading “Hopeful letters from friends”