For the past year or so I've made it a goal to myself to more to gofundmes and such. If you have the means for it, this turns out to not really require all that much out of you, so! I'm just going to describe how I've been doing it as a little blueprint, and as an encouragement before I get all negative.
There is Too Much to donate to. I think that part is obvious in hindsight, but it's very very easy to overdo it. For me, to keep myself in line, I set a strict limit, capped at 10% of my post-tax income. This works out for me because I am definitely getting paid more than I need, but I put no moral worth on the exact % so you do you. Then I put that in a separate account I can dono from. I haven't had problems with the account filling up as much as I have problems with it being always empty :x
With that out of the way, responding to donation requests is about as simple as liking or reblogging a post, all you gotta do is click a button, and track when the button has Run Out. So far I've been deliberately donating smaller amounts so that the button runs out slower, and I can ensure less of my own biases go into what gets funded, and this is a totally viable strategy and I'm sure nobody minds it.
This strategy is easy to implement, and safe for everyone involved. I recommend it especially! over the usual activity of donating a big lump sum at the end of the year to a faceless organization for tax purposes.
I'm going to completely drag this approach in the rest of this post. It's still better than doing nothing, though. Keep that in mind.
donoposting replicates existing systemic biases
The actual impetus for making this post was a podcast I listened to a recently, covering the contents of Nora Kenworthy's Crowded out, the true cost of crowdfunding healthcare (podcast link). It makes some pretty standard complaints about private charity that have been true since the robber baron era:
- people with money decide where that charity should go
- this systemically overfunds rich, well connected people with short-term needs (like emergency healthcare)
- this systemically underfunds the opposite (the poor, the minoritised, the disabled)
- it puts a lot of pressure on those seeking funding to express it "the right way". that is to say, present it as last resort, feel bad about it, don't ask for "too much", etc etc etc
- It indirectly gives a lot of power to the middlemen (gofundme, kofi, paypal, etc) to decide who is and isn't Worth Servicing
And like, all that's true even for my donoposting! I know for a fact that I overemphasize the role of disability and short-term health needs and underemphasize the role of other things, and I can tell just by looking at my reciepts ><
And, I also feel really bad when people feel obligated to "beg", yeah? And especially when they don't really get a return out of that emotional labor, which seems to happen depressingly often.
...mutual aid?
This leads to a pretty standard, not that surprising conclusion, #mutual aid is less mutual aid, and more a reflection of private charity by other means. So what would "mutual aid" be, really? just going off the wikipedia definition:
- formal organization, with explicit membership/non-membership
- there's an implicit expection of roughly equal ability to "give back" to avoid power imbalances
- focused on more than funding
- often is strictly based on geography, which is more selective than you may realize (how many people can live near an urban core?)
So while that does sound nice, it doesn't really help the people mentioned above properly. again, having long-term needs really blows the math of that out of the water - without changing all of capitalism it's just going to be true that some people will have more, and some people will need more, and mutual aid as is traditionally expressed isn't equipped for that.
...welfare?
A broad, widely available social safety net would be my obvious first choice as a socialist, of course. It would have to be big, to average out the differences in ability and need, and to avoid systemic selection effects. Unfortunately, the current state doesn't seem that interested, so until The Revolution, we're just going to have to count this one out :c
now what
I dunno! I think that's a big part of why I found this post so difficult to write. I think I want to be a little more clear with myself with what I want to "achieve", and come up with something that isn't any of the options currently presented. I'm not sure what that is, yet, so ummm, expect a part 2 at some point B[