Rich Learning: Queering Giving and Fundraising
By Ryan Heckman and Jo Lum
March 1, 2020
Hey Fam!
Welcome to Rich Learning a blog series on Queering Giving and Fundraising. We plan to use this space to offer tips and tricks to queer fundraising, giving, and your personal relationship with money.
Talking about money, asking for money, and thoughtfully giving away money is HARD. Capitalism is NOT helping! The gap between those who have money and those who don’t, a.k.a. most people, is growing and runs clearly along racial lines. Shit’s bleak out there for those of us trying to realize a world of abundance where everyone has what they need. However, what we still and always will have is each other, fierce resilience, and passion for change.
We at Outstanding Returns will use this space to share what we’ve learned and are learning. We’ll share our mistakes and fuck ups, and our very very queer perspective on the painful and extractive systems we all navigate daily.
For us, to be queer is a political identity. When we use the word queer as a verb we are transposing a political ideology and a way of life onto a mainstream belief so that we can use Queering as a tool to break free and emerge into something new. Queering is a frame of action for us to use our radical perspective and to practice non-binary and expansive thinking in service of creating a more just and loving world for us all. Queering is a way for us to practice our work within current broken systems as our authentic selves and in our integrity. It transforms common understandings of “how things work” into a tool to create the radically free future we imagine possible. Centering this practice of queering as we talk about giving and fundraising, lets us take control of the things we can, and clears pathways for us to resource our movements sustainably.
We are not the first, nor will we be the last to queer professional infrastructures. In fact countless indigenous people and visionaries of color have been doing this work for decades if not centuries. As we explore more specific aspects of giving and fundraising in relation to justice work, we will be sure to quote, acknowledge, and thank our ancestors, predecessors, and beloveds for showing us the way to this moment and understanding.
This blog is for the person who envisions an expansive and beautiful future where we all have what we need to thrive. Our slice of that vision is specifically queering our relationship with money so we can radically resource grassroots movements for systemic change led by and for the people most affected. In queering our relationship with money we break down deep-seated systems and beliefs and confront the component parts with openness, honesty, anger and hopefulness. Then, we assemble something new.
In her book Emergent Strategy, adrienne maree brown asks, “How do we turn our collective full-bodied intelligence towards collaboration, if that is the way we will survive?” This is a foundational question for our movements to constantly be asking.
This question reveals five truths that are central to how we will queer giving and fundraising:
We must center our answers on relationships and in organizing our networks.
We must trust, listen to, and center ancient community wisdom.
There is an element of deconstruction and rebuilding as you turn to something new. In other words, some things must die in order for new things to grow and flourish.
The work is embodied and at the same time is informed by our bodies.
This work is essential to our collective survival.
These truths are all rooted in interdependent community and cannot be done in a vacuum. That is why we are going to deeply explore each of these five truths with you and guest writers in this blog. Centering these five truths will help us explore how we use them to queerly engage with fundraising, giving and our personal relationships to money.
Stay tuned as we weave in conversations about biomimicry, ancestor wisdom, silly drawings we made, embodied practices, epic stories of mistakes, tips about relational organizing and grassroots network building and lots and lots of gay GIFs. Our goal is to offer our continued learning and our beloved community’s wisdom to radically change how we resource our movements for social, economic, and environmental justice.
Hop on! We know we can’t do it without you.
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