I have been full of thoughts this week and way too depleted to form any of those thoughts here. I’m thinking about community care and disability justice and exertional intolerance and the fact that millions of people with Long Covid are newly disabled with no path to financial stability. And somehow, all of that together, marinates nicely with a fundraising campaign I facilitated this week moving thousands of dollars from the community to a Black woman on the edge of a housing crisis. Let me tell you more about what I learned this week.
I’ve been facilitating what I’ve been calling barnraisers– raising funds directly on twitter with a methodology of small contributions from many people to meet emergency needs- since 2018. The asks started smaller, around $300-500, usually for my Black and queer friends who, with less access to wealth and safety nets, needed community support to replace lost cell phones, pay for prescriptions, or get their car repaired. Over the years those asks started to grow, $1000 for survival funds after leaving an abusive situation, $2000 for a security deposit on a new apartment, and, in the fall of 2020, we barnraised a $20,000 down payment so a Black woman could buy the home she had been renting when the owner died. The barnraisers, at every single dollar amount, have been successfully funded and usually in record time. It blew my mind in 2018 when, in a couple hours, a network of Twitter comrades threw together a few hundred dollars and yesterday it blew my mind when 410 people raised $32,474.47 in less than 36 hours. Read that again.
I’ve learned a lot and the process has unlocked so many thoughts about attitudes toward money, the power of money as a shared resource instead of an individually hoarded one, what mutual aid means, how white people can redistribute their access to wealth, and what disability justice might call the “crip science” of one person facilitating the movement of money in a specific direction. Here are a few starter thoughts:
- Mutual aid is MUTUAL and we all can experience more stability in the collective when we move our money around. In 2020, we raised $20,183.52. People who contributed less than $100 accounted for 96% of the contributions and 47% of the total money raised. People who contributed $25 or less accounted for 75% of the contributions and 17% of the total money raised. Contributing $5, then, is a meaningful contribution to a collective effort and actually makes or breaks the success of the barnraiser over all. We all can help each other out, even when we feel like we have no money to offer. In turn, when we then need support, we can ask for our own care needs to be met knowing that this money we pass around is a collective resource.
- Cash-based mutual aid networks are also a(n easy! efficient!) way for white and/or classed people to redistribute access to wealth. The reality is, there are massive wealth disparities in this country and the State has not taken sufficient action to mitigate these disparities in a formal way. In our barnraiser this week, the recipient of our funds had been living in her home for 12 years paying over $2000/month in rent. When you do that math, you realize this woman had paid somewhere in the neighborhood of $288,000 in rent; over HALF the supposed value of the house when the owner decided it was time to sell. Had this woman been able to be a homeowner paying her own mortgage this whole time, think of the equity should would have by now. Framed this way, I strongly believe it is the duty of white, classed people to part with $100, $500, or $5000 as often as they can in order to, one house at a time, help people historically redlined out of access to homeownership.
- The barnraiser method, where someone like me- disabled, living on the couch, Very Online- facilitates the process and shouts like a cheerleader the whole time to keep momentum up? That method works. Of course it’s not efficient and it’s not scalable so many- especially abled people- might write it off as ineffective or a poor use of time and resources. And yet, I don’t see any other method doing more to move money quickly with fewer strings attached than this. I connected this thought to what I’ve been reading in Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarahinsa where Leah talks about both “crip science” and “crip time”. Disabled people have a unique set of skills AND are often forced to move at a much slower pace than what society says we should. Both of these things actually prove to be USEFUL to the barnraiser approach to cash-based mutual aid. I’m not sure an able-bodied, full-time working person could use this barnraiser method in the same way I have been because I am literally home on the couch and have the TIME to attend to this effort in the way it requires to be successful.
- Knowing that we are on the leading edge of a mass disabling event due to Covid-19 and the resulting Long Covid, it is very much on my mind that we will need to continue to find creative, swift solutions to the financial implications of millions of people no longer able to work. Indeed, early studies from Mayo Clinic suggest that up to 40% of people have not been able to return to work post-Covid and that currently an estimated 1.3 million people are out of work due to Long Covid. Cash-based mutual aid, in the context of a government who has all but abandoned its people, will continue to be necessary and effective in order to maintain or build collective stability.
- Finally (for now), cash-based mutual aid is a lovely way to stretch the bounds of the collective imagination. We raised over $32,000 in less than 36 hours because I was willing to entertain the absolutely bananas idea that we could buy this $400k house outright for this woman. We didn’t do that, largely because the recipient decided not to pursue homeownership at that house, but what an opportunity to stretch beyond feelings of scarcity to the farthest reaches of the universe of our imagination. We can dream bigger, we can ask for more, we can, collectively, create the future world we want to live in.
[…] form but haven’t finished it yet. Given that I referenced some ideas from Care Work in my last post, I thought I’d gather some of the core tenets of disability justice in a post for future […]