Author: Roan

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Grassroots fundraising for the revolution

I just got home from Raising Change: A Social Justice Fundraising Conference, and my head is spinning with ideas and thoughts. The conference was amazing and filled with phenomenal organizers totally ready to geek out about grassroots fundraising for two days straight. It was great to be in a space with so many longtime grassroots activists (mostly people of color) talking about raising, mobilizing, and strategically using money to support a broad-based social justice movement.

Continue reading “Grassroots fundraising for the revolution”

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Poverty Scholarship

by Tiny a.k.a. Lisa Gray-Garcia

“Writing, reading, thinking, imagining, speculating. These are luxury activities, permitted to a privileged few whose idle hours of the day can be viewed otherwise than as a bowl of rice or a loaf bread less to share with the family.”

-Trinh T Minh-ha from Women, Native, Other

There are many things this poverty scholar can teach you, but in reality, no more or less than any of the poverty scholars you see, or more than likely don’t see, everyday. Homeless families, poor youth of color, migrant workers, panhandlers, sex workers; sitting, dwelling, camping, soliciting work, convening. I am them, they are me. Continue reading “Poverty Scholarship”

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Privilege and Solidarity

I wrote this in June 2007. You can also print it out zine-style by clicking here: Privilege and Solidarity Zine PDF

HELLO.

I wrote this zine for a few reasons. When I was growing up, I knew my family had money but I didn’t really get the concept of “privilege.” Then I became an activist and started thinking about systems of power and oppression and how privilege played a role in them. I started thinking about my own privilege, mostly as a white person, and about how I could challenge the racist systems that gave me privilege while others were oppressed. Then I started thinking about class privilege, and about how I was raised with a lot of it, and about what that meant. Somewhere in the midst of that, I learned that I had a $400,000 trust fund and became incredibly self-conscious about it. Then I realized, mostly through the urging of smart friends and fellow activists, that it was useless (and counter-productive) to try to hide or otherwise not deal with my class privilege, and I started thinking about how I could take responsibility for it in ways that reflected my values as an activist. Continue reading “Privilege and Solidarity”

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Some Considerations for Anti-Racist Educators

By Sailor Holladay

March 2008

This article is inspired by my friend Ingrid Chapman at the Catalyst Project. Ingrid asked for my input into the Anna Braden training program, Catalyst’s new anti-racist training program for white activists. Their website can be found at: http://collectiveliberation.org.

I offer my reflections as a participant and facilitator of anti-racist workshops in undergraduate, graduate, and community education settings with the intention of building the leadership of raised poor and working class people, including raised poor and working class white people, within the greater anti-racist movement. As a raised poor white anti-racist, I have had frustrations working in groups dominated by white, middle and owning class people. I offer these thoughts to middle and owning class white anti-racists, to soothe past moments when neither of us knew how to act; with the intention of moving together toward what we want: an end to racism and white supremacy in our lifetime. Continue reading “Some Considerations for Anti-Racist Educators”

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The Suspension of Fear

There’s something oddly alluring to me about college towns. Perhaps surrounding myself in such an environment provides an illusion that my college years will forever live on and allow me to deflect the cold permanence of the so-called real world. Moving from one transient community to another, I found myself in Northampton, MA in 2005 looking for a cheap place to live after a few months of apartment-hopping. This was when I first met my new roommate Sailor Holladay, who like most people in this area, moved here for school. We lived together for the remainder of Sailor’s time at UMass-Amherst. The following interview was conducted on my radio show “Passions and Survival” in May of 2007, just before thousands of diplomas were handed out, summer plans were actualized, and the population of this peculiar valley turned over once again. Our conversation covered the politics of debt and academia, traveler culture, the desire to desire, and the forging of practical ways to create and support radical projects. Continue reading “The Suspension of Fear”

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Easy come, easy go for punk rock philanthropists

I didn’t have the highest hopes for this New York Times article about giving money to social justice organizing, but I was still disappointed by the complete absence of basically anything substantive that I or my fellow “idealistic young heirs” said in our interviews. The author approached me and other folks involved in this fundraising project and in Resource Generation, pitching a story about what she called “punk rock philanthropy” (otherwise known as social change philanthropy) to run in the Fashion and Style section. Kind of ridiculous, but I was hoping it would be a useful way to direct some media attention to important social justice organizing, raise some simple critiques of philanthropy, and set a positive example for all the rich people who read the Fashion and Style section of the NY Times.

Continue reading “Easy come, easy go for punk rock philanthropists”

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Class Stuff

I’ve been thinking about class and community. I’ve been thinking how hard it is to build cross-class community. Lots of stuff comes up in my cross-class relationships. Stuff about money of course, but really, it’s not just the money. There’s stuff about talking, stuff about eating, stuff about dressing. There’s stuff about how close you stand and who you touch and how far in advance you make plans. There’s stuff about how often you do laundry and who has your spare key and how you feel about the kids on the corner. Continue reading “Class Stuff”

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More than Enough: Precarious Lives, “Mere” Survival, and Abundant Joy

by Kriti Sharma

“Can’t believe

How strange it is to be anything at all.”

-from “In an airplane over the sea” by Neutral Milk Hotel

The day I stop being astonished by my own aliveness might be a good day to die. It’s my great fortune and my only grace that such a day has not yet come. Good air rushes in through my nose and hugs my lungs, oxygen melting into my beating blood and warmly flowing everywhere, leaving no piece of flesh untouched. My body is a lively forest, an intricate, densely populated world. Each of my cells whir and hum in their quiet watery way, knit tightly with trillions of other cells, each miraculously complete and simultaneously a part of a greater whole. Like the cells, I whir and hum, jump and flow, open and close, stretch and breathe. Some fire makes it all crackle, some gravity holds it all together. Some mystery keeps this body alive. If I didn’t know what a body was, I don’t know that I’d have the creativity to imagine it. In its intricacy and enigma, its completeness and its vulnerability, it exceeds by far anything that I could dream.

Even on my most devastating days, when earth looks warm enough to sleep in forever or when fire seems a merciful ashy alternative to despair, there comes at least one moment when grace flashes like lightning into my hours. Every day, there is always a moment, at least one sudden, ecstatic moment when a simple exclamation rings clear in my mind like a bell:

“Alive!”

 

Yes, emphatically yes! “how strange it is to be anything at all.” Continue reading “More than Enough: Precarious Lives, “Mere” Survival, and Abundant Joy”

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Privileged with Cancer

by Libby Goldberg 

It’s been four months since I was diagnosed with a rare form of ovarian cancer and six months since my long-term partner and I split up. Needless to say, thirty-one has been a fucking hard year for me. Less than five percent of women with ovarian cancer have my type, germ cell, and most of those who do are between the ages of fifteen and twenty. My diagnosis and treatment have impacted my life in deeper ways than I have words to adequately express, both negatively and positively, and I have faced enormous challenges. One of the major factors contributing to my ability to successfully meet these challenges has been my class identity. My recent experiences with cancer have provided me the opportunity to more viscerally understand the individual and institutional privileges I have access to and have inspired me to share this understanding with others in similarly privileged positions. Early on my process with cancer, I made the decision to use all the angles I could, however unfair it might be, to take care of my body and to save my life. While this decision feels like the right one, my experiences have continued to feel complicated and riddled with questions. What does it mean to be a radical with access to the best medical care in the country? What privileges are okay to use? Can I still be part of the “movement”, even though I belong to the owning class? What is the best way to leverage the resources I have towards social change? For those of us whose fire inside burns stronger with the possibility of a just world, where every human need gets met, where we are collectively liberated from oppression, I am hoping that my story will encourage discussion and action. Continue reading “Privileged with Cancer”