After we completed our most recent mutual aid barnraiser which raised over $35,000 for a Black woman to stabilize her housing, I got a number of DMs from people asking for tips on how to get their own mutual aid money-pooling effort off the ground. One has a friend in Nigeria in an abusive situation, another has a queer comrade who needs some survival funds, another was looking to raise funds for a homeless single mom who needed a hotel.
This is late-stage capitalism, unraveling empire, cascading collapse, folks. EVERYONE needs money and the amount of money needed is only going to grow as wages continue to stagnate, housing and food costs explode, pandemic conditions persist, and everything is just so precarious all the time. Helping get money moved to someone who needs it, for whatever reason, is a really great lane for any of us to occupy and it doesn’t require a massive platform to do it. Here are some tips to get your own barnraiser off the ground:
- Targeted and time-limited. If this is your first effort trying to pool some money together or you’re uncertain about the reach of your network, start with a smaller goal. When I started doing barnraisers, it was for $300-500 at a time. Pick either a financial goal or a time-based goal that is achievable: “can we raise $500 in the next 24 hours?”.
- Champion and cheerlead. Based on my experience, fundraisers that aren’t being championed and pushed and cheerled will not meet their goals. Opening a large GoFundMe and letting it sit as a pinned tweet works less often than someone like me, on Twitter, updating a barnraiser thread every few contributions to keep the momentum up. Manufacture and maintain momentum so people can see how their contributions work together.
- Make it easy. I’ve polled people in the barnraiser network and MOST people say they prefer Venmo or CashApp or Paypal to quickly shoot money in the direction of the ask. It’s fast, efficient, and doesn’t take percentages like a formal fundraising platform might.
- Break down the goal. If the goal is $800, that’s a mere 160 people contributing $5 each. Or 40 people contributing $20 each. The point of a mutual aid network is that small contributions from a number of people is enough to head off an emergency. These fundraisers are made because poor and working people chip in $5 and $20 here and there. Another way to go about this is to say “we’ve pooled $300 which is 60% of our goal”. Big dollar amounts can actually be pooled by a relatively small number of people pretty efficiently, but only if people can see their contributions as helpful. No contribution is too small and no contribution is too big. I’ve seen contributions range from $2 to $5000; both are critical to the success of the barnraiser.
- Prioritize transparency. This should be a no-brainer but it isn’t. Be a good steward of both the literal money and the responsibility you take on when you ask people to trust you to distribute the money they contribute. Here are some of the ways I help ensure a transparent process: 1) keep a simple tracker in a spreadsheet both of incoming contributions and of transactions to get the money to its destination. 2) use the reply or emoji feature on cashlinks to show contributors that you’ve counted their contribution. I say “if I ‘hearted’ your contribution, that means it’s in the tracker. 3) Tweet the shit out of it (or whatever version makes sense for your network). If you look at a barnraiser that I’ve facilitated (like this one or this one), you’ll see lengthy threads of all the money received, any errors I may have made about numbers, transactions of when I pull money to my account and when it goes back out to the next person. Most of the people that contribute to barnraisers that I facilitate are not people I have ever met. They have built trust in the process over years of my facilitating these things and because they believe I’m being ethical with their money.
- Talk about it! Use the campaign to educate your network about mutual aid, about wealth redistribution (especially if you’re targeting white and classed people, which you should be), about community care, about money as a shared resource instead of an individually hoarded one. Use the visibility of a targeted mutual aid campaign where you’re tweeting like crazy to talk about why this method actually does work. Here’s a starting place: a quick post from me about the power of cash-based mutual aid.
I hope this helps you get started. If you have more questions, hit me up on Twitter or via email at rachelisthinkingoutloud@gmail.com.