Cross-class relationships and land projects

One of our readers wrote in with a really interesting question that I’m hoping you will all have feedback about:

“I’m writing because I’m looking for support, feedback, strategies and this seems like a really good place to find it.  the subject is: a cross-class intimate relationship where the two people involved come from different class backgrounds AND, most saliently, have really different levels of access to money/resources right now.  and, maybe, they want to embark on a big land-based project together (with other folks involved, but as the primary movers).  this project will require many resources from both of them, but money can only come from one.  you see how some issues might come up where support and strategies would be very helpful!”

Please share your thoughts by commenting.  Thanks!

statement from La Raza Centro Legal

I wanted to pass along this statement from La Raza Centro Legal that provides some useful info about current immigration reform proposals.

WE DON’T WANT JUST ANY IMMIGRATION REFORM!

Last week, we witnessed the powerful marches of immigrant communities in Washington D.C., and in other cities, in support of “immigration reform.”  These righteous protests allowed those impacted by unfair immigration laws to remind lawmakers of what they are demanding:  legalization for themselves and their families.

But some of the groups that organized the march in Washington, led by beltway advocates like the National Immigration Forum and the National Council of La Raza, are supporting policies beyond legalization which actually harm immigrant communities. Continue reading “statement from La Raza Centro Legal”

Hi, remember me?

blossoms1Sorry for the lengthy silence. I’ve missed you! I’ve been thinking about so many Enough-related things lately – somehow I live this charmed life in which creative anti-capitalist projects and conversations surround me – and I’ve been wanting and planning to write about them all here, but, well – I haven’t. But I will! I guess I’ve been busy, with many things, some of which I am going to tell you about now. Also, let’s be real – it was winter, and sometimes winter can tend to drag on, and for some of us who are from Texas the lack of warmth and sunshine can have the effect of my life completely falling apart a slight decrease in productivity. But the sun is back and cherry blossoms are blooming all over Philadelphia, and I’ve been wearing shorts and sitting on my roof and planning a garden and I’ve been filled with joy and exuberance and also, of course, anticapitalist fervor. The feelings go hand in hand, really. We should make up a new word for anticapitalism, something positive, don’t you think? Because when I say I’m against capitalism, what I really mean is that I’m for, you know – liberation and people taking care of each other and collectivity and spiritual wholeness and cherry blossoms and such. Anyway, the point is, I really do believe in my heart that springtime = more writing on Enough. And that doesn’t just mean me and Dean, it means you too! Okay?

Meanwhile if you’re looking for something awesome to read, have you seen the new issue of make/shift? That is a good magazine. I highly recommend subscribing – every time a new issue comes out, I can’t believe how delicious and satisfying it is. AND in the latest issue there is a conversation between me and Tiny a.k.a. Lisa Gray-Garcia of POOR Magazine, which I would really like for you to read. POOR is incredibly important to me, as evidenced by the ten million times I have referenced them on this site, and I am very excited about the interview with Tiny because she is brilliant and because she articulates ideas about things like interdependence and community reparations that are integral to my work and my life and maybe to yours as well. Please read it and then tell us what you think by writing an essay for Enough.

A few more things in the works that I’d like you to know about:

1) My friends from the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign are launching a huge march/caravan from Newblossoms2Orleans to Detroit today, ending at the U.S. Social Forum, to demand healthcare and housing for everyone. PPEHRC has a long history of organizing poor people’s marches as a movement building strategy, and they have a huge network of member organizations all over the U.S. doing incredible work. I’m yearning to join them on the march but am prevented by other responsibilities – if you live in or near any of the cities along their route, you should connect with them so you can bring your people out to their march in your town. I hear they’ll be updating the blog on the PPEHRC website with dispatches and video along the way, and of course if you can you should come to the USSF. Maybe I’ll see you there?

2) If you are a person with class privilege and lefty politics who wants to talk more about leveraging privilege and resources for grassroots movements, may I suggest that you consider coming to Resource Generation’s Donor Organizing Institute? It’s in the Bay Area from May 21-23, and I am co-facilitating it with the wonderful Nicole Lewis from RG. The website suggests that the deadline for applying is very soon, but I suspect that if you’re running late with planning you could finesse your way in (or just ask). Feel free to contact me or Nicole if you want more details.

3) And finally, this seems as good a time as any to publicly state that, in fact, I facilitate many things. Yes, it’s true, I not only write about the personal politics of resisting capitalism but I also speak and teach workshops about these things. I created this website about it under a cloak of secrecy a couple months ago and didn’t tell anyone because it it felt strange and individualistic and public in away that Enough doesn’t (it has a picture of me and everything). But then I realized that I will never fulfill my dream of having conversations with everyone in the world about the ways that capitalism impacts our souls if I don’t announce that that’s what I’m trying to do, so there you have it. You could bring me to your conference, school, organization, or local collective infoshop bookstore and we could talk about all this in person. I can’t wait.

More to come, I promise, and meanwhile I hope you have cherry blossoms in your town, or some local blooming thing that is equally amazing.

blossoms3

A history of the Self Education Foundation

Hello dear Enough readers, I promise we haven’t abandoned you! I have a new piece to post, by the incomparable Jessica Hoffmann: The Practice of Freedom: A History of the Self Education Foundation.

The story of SEF has inspired me for years – they were a very small, very grassroots funding project run mostly by young women – organizers and activists who had few sources of individual wealth but shared an expansive vision of self-education that was rooted in social justice movements. None of the founders and organizers were traditional philanthropists – they just wanted to direct whatever resources they could to support the movements that inspired and sustained them. I’ve learned so much from being connected to some of the organizers of this project and hearing their reflections and anecdotes, and I’m very excited to be able to share this written history. Their story is especially inspiring in this era of professionalized social change work – SEF is a great example of what capitalism often makes us forget: that change is created by regular folks with vision and creativity, learning as we go, making mistakes, making up new models, taking risks, working together. Check it out.

The Practice of Freedom: A History of the Self Education Foundation

by Jessica Hoffmann

           I don’t have a college degree. Though I was on the path to go to a private liberal-arts college out of high school, after a series of financial-aid-related bureaucratic snafus, I ended up one gray morning when I was 18 staring at a sheet of paper offering aid mostly in the form of loans. I’d been raised by a single mom whose finances were generally precarious and who was afraid of the credit game. She never had credit cards or car loans or a mortgage or anything like that when I was a kid, and so the loan concept felt unfamiliar and frightening to me. I was pretty much on my own in terms of finances and big decisions at that point in my life, handling the college/tuition stuff by myself, without any parental or other guidance, and trying to go to school in a small town where jobs were scarce. The idea of signing on to a bunch of debt made little sense to me. I thought: I can read and write, research and explore ideas, on my own; libraries are free, and the world is vast and full of lessons. I don’t need to go into debt for this.

            Actually, my not doing college started before that. Sitting in class one afternoon late in my senior year of high school, just months before I was supposed to go to a college I’d applied to excitedly the fall before, I thought: I don’t want to go there yet. I’ve been in school almost my entire life. Its structures and systems are the main things I know. I want to be outside of all that for a minute before going from the insular social and academic world of high school to another insular social and academic world, one literally perched on a small grassy hill set off from the town it’s located in. I wrote a letter to that college asking to defer admission for a year.

            During that year, I lived in a big city thousands of miles from the big city where I’d grown up, felt lonely a lot, worried that I was “fucking up my life” (because in the world of educational elitism I’d grown up in, bailing on college, even temporarily, was a major fuck-up), worked at a small bookstore and loved it although the pay left me with little after I paid my exorbitant big-city rent (so my roommate and I ate lots of Cream of Wheat and sometimes shoplifted, and once in a while her boyfriend, who worked in a health-food store on the opposite coast, would mail us a box of food he’d pilfered from his workplace), wrote and read widely, walked everywhere, did a lot of thinking … It was a hard year and a good one. I learned a lot from all the reading I did, and also from being sort of loosed in the world, from feeling stupid and incompetent living outside the realm I’d always felt smart in (school), from having to gain and practice new skills and kinds of knowledge, from feeling sometimes isolated and sometimes thrilled by a sense of autonomy, from feeling life without the familiar structures of planned curriculum and school calendars. And when, the next fall, I was ready to start college, I discovered that the tuition grants I’d initially been offered were no longer available after my year off. That’s when the loan option emerged, and I stared at the loan papers and couldn’t bring myself to sign and decided I’d keep learning outside those systems.

           That’s one part of my story of self-education and money.

           In another part of my story, a few years later, my dad started making a lot of money, and one day I realized I needed to rethink my sense of my class identity. I’d been raised by a struggling single mom. And while my dad had always figured out how to make his child-support payments and could sometimes also help pay for stuff my mom couldn’t afford, he wasn’t a rich guy during my childhood. He lived in a van for a time (a time I have fond memories of, when he and my sister and I would spend our weekends together camping on various California beaches), and he struggled a lot money-wise for years. But by the time I was in my early twenties, he had become quite successful in dominant culture’s terms, and I realized that my sense of myself as a poor kid among rich kids—an identity I’d settled into after years of feeling alienated among wealthy classmates in the fancy public-school classes my mom was savvy enough to get me into, after I stopped trying to pass as equally “classy” as them and started questioning economic and cultural hierarchies—well, that identity was no longer quite apt. A part of me was connected to wealth, to class privilege, now.

          And so I immediately went looking for books and articles by other class-privileged lefties, assuming there must be lots of work out there by people who had reckoned with the combination of having wealth (or access to wealth) within an unjust economic system and believing in economic justice. That work must be out there, I figured, I just hadn’t found it before because I wasn’t looking for it—it wasn’t relevant to me. Now it was, yet after months of searching, I’d found hardly anything, not even articles in which famous lefty professors or lawyers talked honestly about their salaries and how their politics informed their personal relationships with wealth (which is why Dean’s piece here is so important). I didn’t find much to learn from in this area until I started meeting and talking to peers who were struggling with similar questions (largely through Resource Generation). One day Tyrone gave me his zine. Another time Dean and I organized a cross-class dinner party to talk about some of this stuff with our friends. Enough, a radical independent publishing project, started posting amazing content about the personal politics of resisting capitalism. In these and other community-created spaces outside dominant institutions of education, people are learning together how to rethink philanthropy, our personal roles within capitalism, resource sharing, economic justice, interdependence …  

              Now, I don’t mean to categorically disparage formal education. The links between institutional education and jobs/living wages in this society are intense. And the students protesting UC tuition hikes, as just one example, are fighting an incredibly important fight for widespread access to education within public institutions—a fight that reveals yet more connections between learning and money. Also, I recognize the ways various privileges (including my mom’s getting me and my sister into the best public-school classes in our area when we were kids, which was in part enabled by white privilege and her own class privilege, having been raised in an upper-middle-class family) have affected my ongoing project of self-education and my ability to work in fields where most others have college degrees. I just mean to let you know a little about why I was excited when Tyrone asked me to write about the Self-Education Foundation for Enough. Money and learning, rethinking traditional structures of resource sharing and education—these are themes that have been important in my personal life and my political/community work. Also, I think the very act of documenting activist histories is a kind of alt-education project. As my friend and frequent collaborator Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore said in a roundtable on activism and journalism that I facilitated for LOUDmouth several years ago, “Activists have to be journalists because our work is not being covered, and it will be disappeared from the media as soon as we snap our fingers. Activists need to document our work as much as possible because no one’s gonna do it for us.”

          So, in the spirit of doing it for ourselves, for each other, and for future community workers, I’ve interviewed a bunch of people from the Self-Education Foundation, and read through all their old newsletters and reports and things, to provide this document of what SEF was, and how it worked, and why.

—Jessica Hoffmann

It Starts with an Idea … 

          In spring 1998, Utne published an article called “How I Got My DIY Degree.”  Written by Bomb the Suburbs author William Upski Wimsatt, it was a glimpse at the life of a guy who’d dropped out of college to learn from “the University of Planet Earth.” His self-created curriculum included guidelines like “Live in a different city every year” and “Seek out hundreds of mentors.” The article ended with this note: “I’m starting a self-schooling foundation that will make it possible for more young people, especially poor kids, to educate themselves outside of school. I’m looking for highly successful dropouts as well as enthusiastic volunteers and donors with an interest in self-education.”            

          Lots of people wrote letters in response to the article, and a few sent in donations for the as-yet-unformed self-schooling foundation. Among the respondents was a rich Chicago teenager who was bored by school and excited to throw his wealth into a project that promoted self-education. Months later, a mixed-class radical youth activist who wanted to see a politics of racial and economic justice brought to the home-schooling movement linked up. Others joined, too. And out of the varied passions of this crew, the Self-Education Foundation was born. Challenging traditional ideas of both education and philanthropy, SEF was a youth-led, grassroots-oriented project that in seven years directed more than $30,000 to over 80 small, underfunded groups working on self- and community-based education.

          SEF wasn’t perfect (what is?), but it was a transformative learning experience for everyone involved—and the story of SEF offers lots of lessons for those of us still dreaming, a decade later, of different ways of doing both education and social-movement funding. SEF was an experiment in altering how movements, and the people in them, engage with both knowledge and money.

… and with Collective Action

          SEF cofounders William Upski Wimsatt, Karl Muth, and Emily Nepon came to the project from really different places. Wimsatt was an author/activist/speaker who wanted to mobilize the wealth of successful autodidacts in support of self-education opportunities for everyone. Muth was “completely dissatisfied with my upper-middle-class high-school existence … I thought I was learning nothing.” He’d reached out to Wimsatt after reading “How I Got my DIY Education” in Utne. “I was really underprepared to play any role in the organization,” he says, but “I was pretty good about asking people for money; I wasn’t at all shy about money.” Nepon, who had been unschooled in childhood, had recently dropped out of an experimental-ish college and was involved in radical social-justice work, especially youth and anti-police-brutality activism. She wanted to see a politics of racial and economic justice brought to a self-education movement that often was individualistically focused on privileged families’ ability to opt out of ordinary schooling.

            For a time their shared enthusiasm for self-education bridged the differences in their visions. By 2001, they had an expanded working crew, a board, and nonprofit status. They gave out their first $10,000 in grants that year, and engaged in a couple organizing projects, including one that challenged racist school-funding inequities in public schools in Philadelphia, where SEF was by then based. Nepon proved to be the most hands-on of the cofounders—digging into the day-to-day work of running an organization—and that meant her vision largely guided the way SEF took shape. As the project progressed, the focus wasn’t so much on mobilizing the resources of wealthy autodidacts (Upski’s original vision) as it was on challenging traditional philanthropy while supporting innovative self-education organizing. And its vision of self-education broadened beyond what Muth had imagined: “SEF decided to take on a very diverse group of goals,” he said. “In retrospect, probably an overly ambitious mix of things – everything from traditional homeschooling to new urban homeschooling to the dropout movement [to] incarcerated self-education.”

          Nepon and Wimsatt drew a solid group of inspired organizers to the project, and from 1998 to 2005, SEF existed as a small grassroots fund run by young activists. They raised money to give grants of $100 to $500 to inspiring activists in many different areas: homeschoolers and dropouts organizing for educational resources outside of schools, student-led school-reform projects, incarcerated self-educators and their supporters, independent media, and popular-education projects. Grantees were spread all over the U.S. and a few other countries geographically and were rooted in many different communities.

Giving Differently

“We believe that rich people aren’t the only ones who can talk, think, and ACT about money. Being a group of young women without access to great personal and family wealth (and the connections that go along with wealth), and deciding to take on the task of moving money is a huge challenge. We’re banking, literally, on great faith that our skills as self-educators will lead us through the learning process … and our histories as organizers and community members will be all the connections we need.”

—From a 2001 SEF newsletter

          SEF was “a totally experimental model of philanthropy,” Nepon said. The initial strategy was simple: “give 12 $100 gifts to groups as a token of appreciation for their work – and then ask them to let us interview them for the newsletter.” The newsletter served as a way to expand people’s ideas about self-education. “Those interviews helped me get the way race impacts this field,” Nepon said, “with people of color having to deal with state systems of oppression, while white homeschoolers feel like it’s all free—[we’d] share those stories in a larger, movement-building context.”

          Sara Zia Ebrahimi was drawn to SEF for the way it envisioned self-education beyond “white crunchy homeschoolers,” looking at “all different reasons and ways” people educate outside of traditional institutions, from prisoner-led programs to job training at the community level. After connecting with Nepon and Wimsatt, she became increasingly passionate about supporting social-justice work through fundraising. And SEF was like a lab where young people were “changing the face of what it meant to be a fundraiser and to be a philanthropist.”

          For one thing, SEF was committed to directly financing the movement—not serving as a tax shelter, as many foundations do, but moving funds directly to “fierce, effective groups that are often under the radar of larger funds,” as they put it.

          Adrian Lowe, who came to SEF as an intern while a single parent of a homeschooled child, said: “We made this thing that would move money in the ways money has to move for rich people to file on their taxes, to move real resources to grassroots things that don’t normally get funding – often out-of-pocket organizations for whom a $500 grant is staggering.” The groups SEF funded were, in SEF’s words, “inspiring models of ideas that could be replicated in almost any community. These groups are pulled together out of inspiration and necessity, rarely with funding or institutional support.”

          SEF gave grants without putting the burden of grant-seeking work on the grantees. Max Benitez, who received two grants from SEF (one for an oral-history project during the 2000 U.S. presidential campaign, and one for a documentary about youth and hip-hop activism), loved that with SEF there “wasn’t a lot of paperwork” and that “SEF funded me when I wasn’t able to formulate a way of getting funding from traditional channels.” He “was not affiliated with any kind of organization – I was at a place of art and activism,” yet SEF was willing to fund him, and without the production requirement typical of individual artists’ grants. “They were allowing me to make mistakes in funding my early mistake-making in my work.” Today, Max works with youth, teaching filmmaking skills and working on media justice and media literacy.

           “We took risks that an institution wouldn’t take,” Nepon says, “basically we were a community funding board without the bureaucracy that usually supports community funding boards.”

            And the people running the foundation were not typical philanthropists: they were young, and they were not wealthy. They were activists with grassroots connections, while most people in philanthropy are professionals disconnected from the communities they mean to support. Ebrahimi said, “We were a group of people no one would’ve ever thought of as people able to collect that money or make decisions about where that money goes. We were this ragtag team.”

            Nepon says, “It was just a group of activists without money doing this thing, an example of youth leadership in an incredibly professionalized and institutionalized field where ‘young’ means under 35. It was amazing and inspiring [to show that] young people who don’t have personal wealth can run a foundation, can support grassroots movement, and this is a part of movement.” In all, over 150 mostly young people supported SEF as donors.

          It wasn’t just who they were doing this work, but how they did it. There was a collective decision-making process for grant decisions. And they figured out ways to support organizations that were not formal 501c3 nonprofits. The foundation structure allowed them to receive funds from people who wanted to donate to a 501c3, and then SEF could redirect those funds to non-501c3s. They also established a program through which SEF could serve as a fiscal sponsor of small grassroots organizations with budgets under $20,000.

             All this was an intervention on what we’ve come to call the non-profit industrial complex a decade before INCITE! popularized that term in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded. An item on the agenda for an SEF planning retreat reads: “Come up with dream fundraising (as organizing) plan.” It wasn’t just about doing funding differently, but also about seeing funding and fundraising as part of organizing.

Self-Educating at the Self-Education Foundation

           The people who started and ran SEF learned how to do it while they did it—making the organization itself a lab for the type of learning they aimed to support.

            “I would never encourage someone to start this organization the way we did,” Nepon told me, “but I’m glad we did it.” The cofounders jumped headfirst into creating an organizational framework that could support huge and fast growth. “Getting nonprofit status, doing your own taxes, [and the like are] such burdensome things,” Nepon says. “I don’t think it was necessary to have the level of organizational realness that we created. None of us had ever done that before – we were learning every piece of infrastructure building on the fly – and as if [the organization] was going to be huge. I appreciate that we had that optimism, but it was really unnecessary – we could’ve done more long-range imagining of steps in the process –– but I basically learned everything about running nonprofit organizations to some degree because we did all these steps. It was an incredible learning experience for everyone involved.”

          Mentorship was integral. Movement elders generously shared organizational-development charts, workbooks, and tips. The Bread and Roses Community Fund lent Nepon Kim Klein’s grassroots-fundraising videos. “People came to my crusty anarchist house, sat and talked with me – it was incredible the way that people supported,” she said.

          The learning happened on a peer level as well. Many of Nepon’s housemates were members of ACT UP Philly, and she learned crucial media skills from them. “I was surrounded by people around my age that were starting orgs,” Nepon said. “Ordinary people were running these things that were having global implications. [It didn’t feel like], Who the hell are you to attempt to have a global impact or shift the conversation in this big way?” In the late ’90s, there was a “context of possibility” around social-justice activism, Nepon said. And she thinks that is part of what inspired so many people to share resources with the nascent SEF.

          At the same time, she wishes mentors had also asked some critical questions. “I wish people had said to me, ‘What’s already out there that you can contribute your resources to instead of starting a new thing?’”

Education and Economic Justice Connect

“[T]he more you learn, the more you’ll feel compelled to rearrange basic assumptions about everything.”

– William Upski Wimsatt, “How I Got My DIY Degree”

          How do the two threads of SEF’s work—self-education and challenging/re-envisioning philanthropy—connect?

          Though SEF didn’t explicitly frame itself as an anticapitalist project, many of its organizers saw a connection between self-education and resisting capitalism. As Nepon put it, “I think self-education (by individuals and communities) is a required skill for unlearning the lies told by capitalist/imperialist media, school systems, academia, the non-profit industrial complex, and state agencies. Our ability to survive, resist, transform oppressive systems like capitalism is entirely dependent on our capacity to unlearn the damage those systems have had on us, the limits we’ve been taught.”

          Lowe concurs: “Education systems are systems, and they serve the status quo. They reproduce society as it is; that’s what they’re for. People [can resist] that in a variety of ways – whether it’s self-education or going to school and resisting it (as in the student-led school-reform movement in Philly that got some support from SEF) … cuz not everybody has the resources and family support to not be in school.”

          Connecting self-education to resource redistribution happened in multiple ways at SEF, from bringing an economic- and racial-justice analysis to the often white-dominated, class-privileged, individualistic world of homeschooling to supporting self-education work in prisons to building new models of grassroots fundraising. But none of that is easy.

Challenges (or, The Political Is Personal, Too)

           SEF’s vision was huge, and implementing it was complicated and hard work. The organizers were remarkably transparent about their struggles, which feels fitting—they documented and shared their learning process in newsletter updates and on a substantial Web site, providing resources for others to learn from.

           One of the SEF’s biggest struggles was dealing with participants’ personal, and difficult, relationships with money. 

           “It was hard to fundraise when all of us had our own pretty serious stuff about money,” Lowe said, remembering an instance when some SEF folks went to hear Wimsatt talk about giving money at a private college. Lowe walked out feeling like, “I would’ve much rather mugged people in the parking lot outside” than participate in asking class-privileged people to give like this. It seemed like “asking for money” was the space where “you have to sell out the radical nature of the work and make it seem less threatening.” Today, Lowe thinks that kind of fundraising is “an important part of movements – having people who can translate the important work people are doing into terms [that are accessible to ‘donors’] … it’s a skill that’s needed if you want to access those resources – at the same time, not everyone is able to do it.”

            At a certain point, it felt like no one at SEF wanted to do it. “The energy to ask, and the ways you have to frame things to ask, felt really awful,” Lowe said. “Fundraising is nasty, and I don’t think SEF was able to get away from the ways it’s nasty.”

            Nepon, who had become the default representative of SEF at philanthropy conferences and events for young donors, was feeling isolated. “I was literally having panic attacks in some of these young-donor-organizing spaces … In donor organizing there’s totally people with an anticapitalist agenda – but in the bigger [philanthropy] conferences [it was] horrifying … ExxonMobil Foundation giving out little oil wells filled with candy – [at one philanthropy conference,] that was the only food I had to eat, in the gift bag for presenters, in a hotel I couldn’t afford food in.” She struggled with a painful “feeling of class-outsiderness.” At the same time, within SEF, she felt perceived as the person who had experience with donor organizing, and with wealthy people, and so she felt uncomfortable when conversations happened like the one where “Adrian told me he’d rather rob people coming out of a fundraising event than beg for money. I think that conversation wouldn’t have happened if we’d had a shared theory of grassroots fundraising and the role of people with wealth.” All this was particularly painful for Nepon because she is Jewish. She felt she was “perceived as being in the Jewish middle-man position—the anti-Semitic you’re the communist/you’re the banker bullshit. I don’t think it felt that way to others involved. I think they were shocked when I brought up how painful it was to be Jewish in that position.”

          The group eventually sat down with a facilitator to talk about their individual relationships with money. As Lowe remembers it, they had “intense conversations about tokenism, about what asking for money means to different people.” And at one point it ended up with “everybody being like, ‘I can’t be the one who asks anymore.’” That the group for a long time “could not talk about class with each other,” as Nepon put it, was perhaps an inevitable result of living in a capitalist culture that discourages honest discussions about money and our relationships to it. But they eventually did talk about it, “and it turned out,” Nepon told me, that “we all had to some degree overlapping mixed-class experiences. I think we all had some amount of class privilege and some amount of experience with the humiliations of poverty. People’s own relationship with that was unexplored, which got in the way of solidarity with each other about the way we got money, even though we had shared [values] about the way we redistributed it. … We were not sharing fundraising/donor relationships collectively, so I think people perceived us as being funded by scary rich people as opposed to the reality, which was that it was mostly a bunch of high-school dropouts and a few people who had wealth and were committed to redistributing it.”

           All this wasn’t just a behind-the-scenes bit of process, but an important part of their work that was documented in an SEF newsletter:

We also had real difficulty talking about our relationships with money and fundraising. Our shared history of being in marginalized communities, and the reality that we’re trying to work across lines of race and class privilege, had left us all defensive and careful. As people raised as women, some women of color, and without our own sources of wealth, we were struggling to do effective fundraising and maintain our dignities — to do fundraising and grant making that really challenges institutional racism, sexism, and capitalism. As a solution, we’re creating a fundraising plan that lets each of us plug in along our comfort lines — and still get the work done. We brought our vision back into focus and said it: we’re doing this work together because we want to bring these movements together and move resources and money to all of them.

          “SEF was self-conscious,” Lowe thinks, about the painful class dynamics of movement funding—“which I think is an improvement – a lot of people don’t even know that they’re tokenizing or exploiting, trying to play people’s white guilt or class guilt. SEF was aware, which I think makes it a little bit powerful.”

             In Nepon’s vision, “Ideally, the movement would be accountable to no government funding, no foundation funding, no individual-wealthy-people funding. Ideally it would be a membership model where everybody gives to their ability, and that’s enough – but we live in a different model. Within that, some wealthy people have radical politics and are interested in redistributing [wealth] – although some still have terrible behavior because of their wealth, like, similarly, white people are a problem sometimes, and men. We try to put privileged people to work in the movement understanding that people with the best of intentions can be destructive, and we have to work on that. … If I were to do [SEF] again, I would want to build up trust and a shared analysis around [fundraising], because it was painful. I’ve continued to enjoy and pursue grassroots fundraising, but I can’t do it in organizations where people don’t value the work or get the liberatory politics of it – how it’s a form of base-building.”

Onward

          In November 2005, SEF announced that they were shutting down. In a letter to their community, Nepon explained:

Why are we shutting down? A couple of reasons. The first is that it was hard work to try to create and fund an organization led entirely by young people. While the philanthropic community talks about wanting to support emerging leaders and new voices, the only grants we received were from other organizations with youth leadership.

SEF was a small foundation. We were run almost entirely by volunteers, and our highest total annual budget (including grantmaking) was under $35,000.

Even though we did receive nonprofit status, we still functioned much like a grassroots volunteer project. We needed a funding boost to take on more non-profit-style work, and to offer salaries that would free up our time to really do this work … and that funding wasn’t there.

Another reason I personally am ready to step out of this work is that I feel I’ve aged out. I believe in self-education and youth activism, but I don’t think I’m currently suited to speak to those communities’ needs or act as a “talent scout” in the way I did when we started the organization.

With so many crises in the world, it has been difficult to build a movement around a long-term strategy. Our mission, misquoting Paulo Freire, says “We believe that self-education is the practice of freedom.” We believe that people who know how to educate themselves are able to gain real information about their world, read between the lines that corporate media and State-directed school systems offer us, and challenge oppressive institutions while building alternatives. With this kind of organizing, it’s hard to demonstrate or prove results. People change, are changed by their learning, slowly and deeply. We can track some of the impacts of SEF’s work, but many of the real successes and challenges lie in the life stories of individuals and may take decades to manifest.

          In all, SEF gave over $30,000 in grants to over 80 organizations, sent four local youth leaders to the 2005 INCITE! Conference, and supported other organizations as a fiscal sponsor.

          Even now, SEF is still sharing resources. Their Web site is still up, offering abundant documentation of the organization’s work, and resources for people seeking funds now: http://www.selfeducation.org/html/grants.html#resources

          The work done, lessons learned, education supported, and visions developed by a group of committed young folks in SEF are still impacting people and movements in many ways—some of which we may not even be able to imagine yet.

passing along a call for submissions

From Sabrina in the UK:

Class (still) Matters*

This is an informal call-out for contributions for a zine/pamphlet I am putting together on class, it feels overdue, but also in good time, what with the recession and ever widening socio-economic inequality in the UK (and elsewhere); the use of class by political parties recently to try and win support in the forthcoming election; class stereotypes around how particular ‘classes’ feel about immigration; climate change policies that tend to involve raising prices, which in affect means that working class/poor people are asked to contribute and sacrifice more, but arguably benefit least, but also I am interested in less conventional explorations of class – class as a process, feeling etc. Continue reading “passing along a call for submissions”

The politics of disaster relief

For more info on responsibly supporting Haiti, this article by Tim Wise breaks down some ideas in a way that might be helpful in talking friends or family out of making their donations through huge and/or U.S.-funded aid organizations: “The problem is that aid goes not to projects or services but first to service providers, the agencies themselves. And aid is power. Those who get more aid end up stronger than those who don’t.”

It’s terrifying how easily grassroots support can be mobilized for “aid” that is actually a militarized imperial project. Media coverage of disasters like this is so empty of social/economic/political history – and so filled with incredibly painful images of suffering – that we get traumatized into sending whatever donation we can to the most publicized agencies in order to relieve the immediate devastation we’re seeing. But as Tim Wise points out, “More than half the budgets of most of the largest US-based aid agencies come from the US government…[and] those agencies naturally tend to be accountable mainly to the US government, not…to the local community they serve.”

And as we all know, the U.S. government is not about helping Haiti. The U.S. government is about dominating Haiti through coups, occupations, embargos, and privatization. U.S. imperialism and capitalism are the reason that this earthquake was so devastating – the reason that so many buildings were poorly constructed and collapsed into rubble, that hospitals and clinics were understocked and understaffed, that basic infrastructure and emergency services were so inadequate – the reason that Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.

And imperialism and capitalism are the reason that the U.S. is responding to this crisis with massive militarization, and calling it aid. Over and over again, the U.S. has exploited crises like this to push through devastating economic policies that rebuild poor nations into privatized, dependent wastelands filled with resorts for rich Westerners. Aid from the U.S. government can’t be disentangled from the violent disaster capitalism that Naomi Klein talks about here and in The Shock Doctrine.

Already, U.S. response to this earthquake looks sickeningly like what went down all too recently in New Orleans after Katrina, when (poor, Black) survivors were criminalized for attempting to help themselves and their communities, the city was militarized, and billions of dollars of money pledged in aid was tied up in huge organizations like the Red Cross and kept out of the hands of local, grassroots groups.

The compassionate response to the Haitian earthquake from so much of the U.S. and global population is amazingly powerful and heartfelt. It could be an opportunity to send major support to independent Haitian organizations that are helping their own communities, but those organizations are left struggling while millions of well-meaning people in the U.S. text $10 donations to the Red Cross on their cell phones. In the aftermath of a crisis, of course we want to do whatever we can to help, but it’s so unfortunate that the organizations that are able to take the most advantage of that are the ones that are so dubious in terms of their accountability to long-term local struggles.

Six human rights groups issued a statement calling for aid that is grounded in human rights, sustainability, and self-determination for all Haitians:

“There is no doubt that Haiti’s hungry, thirsty, injured, and sick urgently need all the assistance the international community can provide, but it is critical that the underlying goal of improving human rights drives the distribution of every dollar of aid given to Haiti,” said Loune Viaud, Director of Strategic Planning and Operations at Zanmi Lasante. “The only way to avoid escalation of this crisis is for international aid to take a long-term view and strive to rebuild a stronger Haiti-one that includes a government that can ensure the basic human rights of all Haitians and a nation that is empowered to demand those rights.”

More Haiti resources

I walked into the gym this morning at 7am to find people gathered around a TV screen, weeping over the coverage of the most recent earthquake in Haiti early today. I can’t imagine what survivors must be going through.

Several people sent me these resources, and I wanted to share them here:

Statement from INCITE! and the Women’s Health and Justice Initiative in New Orleans: Haiti: Responding to the Situation

“As these important efforts are underway, we recommend that we also pause and ask the question: How can we intentionally support the long term sustainability and self determination of the Haitian people?”

ONE Petition to cancel Haiti’s debt

“Dear Finance Ministers, IMF, World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank and bilateral creditors,As Haiti rebuilds from this disaster, please work to secure the immediate cancellation of Haiti’s $1 billion debt and ensure that any emergency earthquake assistance is provided in the form of grants, not debt-incurring loans.”

Haiti resources

As I’m sure is true for all of you, my heart is breaking over this new devastating human catastrophe made infinitely more desperate by poverty and imperialism – over all of the immediate suffering, as well as the all-too-likely possibility that this tragedy will be used by the U.S. and corporate interests to push forward even more brutal forms of capitalism in Haiti. I’m sure we’ve all been inundated with various links already, but I thought I’d consolidate a few that I’ve found helpful anyway.

We all know not to give through the Red Cross, right? Here’s why, and here’s why. Grantmakers Without Borders has this list of helpful criteria for disaster response:

  1. First and foremost, provide unrestricted general funding to allow resources to go where they are most urgently needed.
  2. Give only to those organizations with an existing presence in the region and a broad familiarity with local conditions, customs and politics. Avoid well-meaning but inexperienced organizations.
  3. Give only to organizations that engage local community members in all aspects of disaster response and recovery. Avoid top-down responders.
  4. Prioritize organizations with a strong focus on gender and the ways in which women are differently impacted during and after an emergency.
  5. Prioritize organizations that link emergency response with recovery and long-term rehabilitation and that build local capacities.

Michelle O’Brien has compiled this very useful list of aid organizations, articles, and analysis on the earthquake. It’s public on Facebook, but for those who don’t have a Facebook account, I’ll cut and past it after the jump. I really recommend reading some of the articles she links to, and whatever other analysis you can find – as well as sending money, aid, and prayers, it’s so important to put this tragedy in a broader context and also respond by strengthening movements against the violent, powerful systems that make all natural disasters so catastrophic for poor people. Continue reading “Haiti resources”

Anti-capitalism and spirituality

Have y’all seen the website Bolder Giving? It’s all about people who give away lots of money – like, way more of their money than is normally sanctioned by capitalist society. It’s not very explicitly political, but a lot of the profiles are really amazing and radical. Anyway, I participated in a conference call they hosted the other day because I thought it would be interesting to report back for Enough. It was a conversation with Tom Hsieh, a high earning executive who decided with his partner to live at or below the national median household income and give the rest of their family’s income away, which they’ve been doing for years.

There are lots of interesting questions bound up in this story (how do we make decisions about what is “enough”, etc), but one of the things that stuck with me from the call was a moment when we were talking about spirituality. Tom and his partner are religious, and their choice to give away such a large percentage of their income is connected to their faith and their belief in god. Tom talked about his experience of feeling provided for by god even while making the choice to sacrifice a lot of the things that people often think they need to be secure. 

Faith and spirituality are such a crucial part of these conversations for me, not because I believe in god but because I think that any questions about how to live in a just way in such an unjust world are fundamentally spiritual, because they have to do with our beliefs about humanity and what we think is possible and things like justice and hope and goodness. During the call, I was completely identifying with Tom in terms of how faith affects my choices about money and giving, even though our belief systems are probably really different.

When I decided to give away most of the money I inherited, a lot of people around me (family etc) were flipping out because it wasn’t a “responsible” decision and they were really worried about me being safe and secure. I was very unworried, because class privilege and rich family give me a huge safety net (same way that Tom’s high-paying job gives him a huge safety net), no matter what I do with the money I have access to now.

But the other reason why it wasn’t a hard decision to give away that money was because I gave it to support things I believe in so much. I believe in deep, systemic, transformative change. I believe in a world without prisons. I believe in ending violence without relying on systems of policing and incarceration. I believe in a world in which everyone has access to housing, healthy food, ancestral wisdom, safety, community, and human dignity. I believe in those things even though they’re big and intangible and hard to quantify, and even though giving some money to organizations that are working towards that world is (as my dad often reminds me) a small act in terms of measurable impact. I don’t think about giving away money in terms of impact – I just think about it in terms of doing the right thing, the thing that is the most true to my deeply held beliefs.

And I would rather put my faith in that vision – of a world based on liberation, where people share resources freely and everyone has what they need – than put my faith in the much more tangible security of things like a big retirement fund and lots of insurance, even though the latter things are tangible and – for me – fairly easily attainable. On a spiritual level, I don’t think those things provide real security. (Not to say that material security isn’t important and necessary – just that it isn’t necessary at the extreme level that capitalism teaches us to strive for.) I think real security comes from things like community, caretaking, love, and recognizing our interconnectedness with other people. Acting according to those values makes me feel provided for and safe and connected, in a way that felt similar to what Tom was saying about feeling provided for and connected to god.

I’m remembering this old thread on Dean’s livejournal in which many people have brilliant and thought-provoking things to say on this topic. Dean writes:

capitalism is based on or produces a notion that people are fundamentally selfish, greedy, and individual, that it isn’t safe to share because you won’t be taken care of, that private property is innate and natural. i believe that people are fundamentally connected, well-intentioned, generous and caring. i have no solid singular proof of this, it’s too general to prove, it’s a matter of faith. i also believe that capitalism is unsustainable and change will occur, and that change can be less violent and more beneficial if we do key work now to set up community resources, political education, to redistribute wealth and power in ways that allow for new political leadership, etc.

I want to pick this conversation back up – I’m curious about ways that your faith and spirituality and religious traditions are connected to how you think about the work you do for justice and liberation, and the choices you make about money and giving.