wow, lots of exciting conversation going on in the comments to my post below about giving away money. to that end, i thought i'd make a new post with some things that have come to mind. it seems like part of what i'm imagining is that we might do what i see people doing in various environmental and food justice movements which is help each other have more information and ideas for doing things in new ways that match their ideals. so, people are telling each other about how to do things differently, how to know the impact they are having on the world by how they eat or build or dress or parent, and hopefully its done in a way that decreases feelings of guilt and apathy and increases feelings of possibility and creativity. i want us to do that about economic justice and wealth redistribution, make it personal, creative, mutually supported and brave. its easy to name the problems with giving away money, the fears and concerns, and that is important, but let's also share what we're doing that we feel good about and why so people can get ideas if they want.

here are my thoughts on where i give money and how:
1) i try to give money to every homeless person who asks me for it, usually $1-5. my motivations are multiple, but probably the biggest one is that i hate that people pretend they don't hear people asking for money and i want to acknowledge these requests and acknowledge that i share cities with people who are far worse off than me and that i benefit from an economy that houses and clothes and entertains me and kills others. i also want other people to see me giving to homeless people and to reject horrendous notions that people still believe in and that motivate the war on the poor, like that homeless people should only be given food and not cash because they are morally culpable for their homelessness and will make bad decisions with cash. homeless people aren't homeless because they make bad financial decisions. i feel like giving away cash is a symbolic acknowledgement of that. homeless people know more about the economy that most anyone, from my perspective, and are the best experts in what they need to do with any resources that come their way to survive.
2) i give money to non-profit organizations. i'll try to make a complete list in the order of who i give the most to first.
a) sylvia rivera law project. obviously, and organization very close to my heart where i worked for years and with which i still do a lot of work as a non-staff collective member now. i am passionate about how srlp operates as a collective non-profit. some of the features that most excite me: everyone gets paid the same regardless of educational attainment or position, no one works without benefits, the organization is focused on being governed by and for those it serves and being staffed by and for, meaning that majority governance power and staffing is always people of color and trans/intersex/gender non-conforming. you can learn more about the structure at www.srlp.org. also, i have seen first hand that SRLP, which has provided free legal help to something like 800 or 1000 people in the last 5 years, does work that literally saves peoples lives who have nowhere else to turn because of the interesecting race, class, and gender discrimination they face when trying to get basic help. i really believe in this model of providing survival services and politicizing people at the same time. i don't think we can afford to do either one without the other.
b) fierce!, audre lorde project, critical resistance. these three organizations are people of color governed, focused on building mass resistance through leadership development and direct organizing, and are committed to an intersectional analysis that builds models of resistance and change that comprehend racism, imperialism, colonialism, heterosexism, transphobia, xenophobia, and the impacts of the prison industrial complex. these orgs speak a politics that is hard to find anywhere, and support communities and build leadership that has been consistently marginalized in most gay activism.
c) center for lesbian and gay studies. i give money to this group because it is pushing forward a vision of political queer analysis and scholarship from an embattled public school system (CUNY) and consistently supports scholarship and ideas that engage race politics, trans politics, disability politics and other key areas where i think we need to develop our thinking and writing as part of movement building.
d) project south. this is a group i'm just getting to know that i think does really important work around political education and thinks about movement building in a way that i admire.
e) FFLIC Hurricane Relief Fund. this is where i chose to send money after katrina, in addition to critical resistance, because they were focusing on issues faced by youth in juvenile jails in the area and i was particularly concerned about how people who are "thrown away" into the prison industrial complex would survive the disaster.
other groups that i'm interested in these days that i think are doing key political work that is under-valued by philanthropy and is essential to building the world we need are incite, southerners on new ground and the miami workers' center.
i also give money to specifica emergent needs, like the recent fundraising for the families of the Jersey 4 (4 young black queer women who were railroaded in a criminal case motivated by racism, sexism and homophobia and given enormous criminal sentences), and to people i know who are raising money for things like political trips to their countries of origin or to other key places in their movement work, or for their surgery funds. part of this is about participating in an ethic of money sharing amongst friends and making sure people feel supported by their communities. i do want us to move past a model of individual surgery benefit parties and toward a model of pooling funds and giving the money away in a need-based framework, because i think that the people with resources to throw parties are not always those with the greatest financial need, but i still want to contribute to those benefits while they are going on.
i don't have a consistent, planned way i give to these groups but i would like to. often i just respond to their mailings, except with SRLP where i donate particular funds that come my way like certain proceeds of speaking engagements. i hope that one thing we could do if we develop this group conversation is talk about how to build a consistent practice, recognizing that we can build stronger social movement infrastructure if we can consistently support organizations and allow them to rely on our gifts by telling them ahead of time how much we can contribute and letting them budget that in, especially by making multi-year pledges. i definitely starting giving more money away when i started struggling to raise money to keep SRLP's doors open, and seeing how hard that was, and how unjust the process of grant-giving is, and how much work small organizations do to keep our communities alive and push political mobilization.
the whole point, to me, is to recognize that i want to end wealth, that any extra money i have (not that it is easy to figure out what is extra and what is necessity in capitalism) does not belong to me, and came to me through a variety of practices of maldistribution that i am responsible to correct. sharing this list is not about celebrating my generosity, but rather about being open about my internal process, and inviting you to do so as well, so we can talk about what giving money away looks like, how and why we do it, how we can increase it and make choices about it and support each other in doing so.
also, i want to add a couple other notes about an economic practice/principle that is important to me. i think that profiting off someone else's housing is wrong. i think no one should own housing the don't live in, and i think we shouldn't make a profit off subletting if that is something we do. when i sublet my apartment, i do it for the amount of rent i would pay for that period or less. profiting off someone else's basic living needs, off of just solely having the privilege of owning real estate or a lease and having more than you need, seems to me to a be a basic tenet of capitalism, like inheritance, that i would like to see abolished. in general, i'd like us to move away from private ownership, but for now, i definitely think we should move away from landlordship and profiting off other people's need to be housed. home ownership and land ownership is more complicated politically and i would love to see people help each other develop some ways of thinking about this, especially in the context of gentrification and all of us living on land stolen from native people. as i watch white people who identify as activists buy apartments in historically poor and/or people of color neighborhoods in new york and philly, i feel like we need a conversation about those choices and what they mean and what factors lead to them and what alternatives are. even in terms of people i know who are talking about buying rural land to create communal living space, i think we should talk about the fact that only some people can do that, and that land struggles are the backbone of imperial and colonial projects, and what it means for non-native people, especially white people, in the US to participate in the land economy. i don't have answers to this, but i would be so excited to be a part of meaningful conversations with other people concerned about building shared analysis and political practice regarding this topic.