Author: Roan

Do I say the same things over and over again? Sometimes I feel like I can’t let go of these questions and so I keep analytically pounding on them from different angles searching for some new insight. After I wrote that last post, I realized that I wrote an essay about very similar things last year and forgot about it. I wrote it after reading the book Outlaws of America by my new friend Dan Berger. Have you read it? I really recommend it – Continue reading “101 ways to write about the same thing”

I keep meaning to write about Making Money Make Change, which I’ve been massively processing since I returned from the Bay Area. There are a million things to say about this conference, and I’ve written a little about it here. One of our Enough correspondents who was in attendance is compiling notes from MMMC for us to post, so look for a more detailed description soon. But meanwhile, I wanted to share a little piece of what I’ve been thinking about.

Continue reading “Ranting doesn’t always help”

Jessica Hoffmann sent me this link to an interesting article about participatory economics in the workplace. I really enjoyed reading it particularly because this year I started working part-time at a collectively run consensus-based cooperative. Learning more about participatory economics and collectives and worker-owned co-ops feels pretty crucial to developing practices of economic justice and resistance to capitalism. Despite the slowness, constant meetings, and sometimes painful or challenging consensus process, the joy of working in a collective has not waned. It feels like a really human, experimental, resistant, trial-and-error process. I love that our dysfunctional workplace dynamics feel more likely to be about conflicting personalities than institutionalized exploitation. Dean probably has good stuff to say about workplace collectives too.

It’s been hard not to feel somewhat elated during the past few days. I’ve been soaking up the euphoria on the streets of West Philadelphia where I live, the joyful tears of civil rights leaders on the news, the energy and exhilaration everywhere I turn. Although I expect no more from Obama that from any other moderate liberal in the two-party system, it’s definitely been exciting to watch the election of our first president of color – a man who did not grow up owning class, who worked as a community organizer, who talks explicitly about race, who says thoughtful and intelligent things on a regular basis, who (despite his selective denunciation) has as a mentor a radical Black reverend who vocally critiques the racism and imperialism of the U.S.

I also know that this victory by no means symbolizes an end to racism, let alone imperialism, injustice, and exploitation. And I know that Obama never could have been a serious candidate if he posed any opposition to corporate and imperial power.

Continue reading “Excitement and critique go well together”

On Tuesday I went to a funders briefing/panel discussion hosted by the Beyond Prisons Fund, which my friend Jamie set up with money he was given by his family. His goal was to use the money to fund prison abolition (almost unheard of in the philanthropy world), and he worked with a board of grassroots organizers to grant all of it out. Angela Davis was the featured speaker at the briefing, accompanied by a panel of folks from Critical Resistance, Generation 5, and Creative Interventions. Everyone was brilliant and nuanced and inspiring, and it was especially amazing to be there so soon after CR10 and feel such movement momentum around abolition.

This particular event was amazing and unique due to the kick-ass speakers and the presence of a lot of activists and organizers along with the funders and donors. Usually, though, I hate going to donor briefings because they tend to be so uncritical of philanthropy as a system. I sometimes find myself at them anyway, as part of my work with Resource Generation – the idea being that as a person with access to those types of spaces (because of class privilege and being a major donor), it’s useful to get involved and push them in a more radical direction – or at least towards funding more radical things. It’s part of the whole “leveraging privilege” strategy that Resource Generation is really good at, and because I know how powerful my access to those spaces and resources is, I try to push past my discomfort with the hors d’oevres and suits and detached professional atmosphere and bring a social justice analysis with me into the philanthropy world. I struggle with it a lot though; lately I’ve been thinking about an essay by Emi Koyama that I read a couple years ago in The Color of Violence, in which she describes her work in the domestic violence social service industry. As a former patron of those services, she enters the work vowing not to perpetuate the type of abuse that she experienced from social workers in the shelter system – but she ultimately concludes that the system itself is so institutionally abusive that anyone who functions as its agent is forced to perpetrate abuse just by holding a position of power within the system.

Continue reading “Philanthropy and abolition”

I’m still coming down from CR10, which was huge and great and filled with more amazing things than I could have possibly absorbed. I ended the conference feeling inspired and tired and reminded of how important it is to incorporate prison abolition into all the social justice work we do.

There were a lot of highlights, but a big one was the opening plenary – which had an amazing lineup of speakers and performers including Andrea Smith, whose speeches always feel like a really good chiropractic adjustment for my brain (everything coming back into alignment with really intense sensations but it feels SO good); and Destiny Arts, who RULED the stage so hard with their tight dance moves after Andrea Smith’s amazing talk that I was kind of having an out-of-body experience from the excitement of it all. Also Miss Major made me so proud of queer and trans social justice organizers everywhere and Suheir Hammad made me (and everyone around me) cry.

Continue reading “CR10 and creating alternatives”