Anyone who knows me also know my passion for sacrificial giving.
You know that I feel that giving is one of those nonnegotiable elements of authentic and effective praxis. And you know that I do my very best to lead by example.
So you would think that I would be over the moon about the yearly action that has become a fixture over the last few years–Giving Tuesday.
I like the aims. Devoting a spotlight on organizations that would not otherwise enjoy prominence is a (mostly) unalloyed good thing.
Because of this day, there will be babies fed, shelter provided, awareness sown. There will be more cancer research, arts programs bolstered, beaches cleaned.
All to the good. All to the good.
As per usual with Lace on Race, though, we do our best to look through a different lens. For a perspective that can often get lost; for unintended consequences that can, if we are not mindful, and courageous enough to name potential negative impact, exacerbate inequality and increase the very harm we seek to mitigate.
You will notice that the above list of good things, and they are indeed good things, are the cookie. Some of the initiatives I mentioned take small nibbles at the edges of the cookie, others take bigger bites.
What they don’t always do is strike at what we look for every day here–in our internal selves and in our exterior praxis–what they do not always do is strike at what I have often called the fudgy center of the cookie; the structural and institutional forces that make the need for charity and philanthropy necessary in the first place.
We need to fill the shelves of food pantries; we also need to look, and hard, at the fact that disturbing percentages of supermarket and restaurant food goes to waste; more than enough to feed our fellows.
We need to provide emergency shelter; we also need to interrogate why we have empty housing stock and people are sleeping on curbs.
There will be arts programs funded, but we need to also take looks at funding models in schools and how monies are allocated; why some schools have thriving arts programs, and others have not. We need to ask ourselves if donating to the PTA in an affluent school so the kids there can enjoy still more advantage is truly charity, or is it base self-interest? Cancer research for someone who looks like you is one thing, but does that cancer research reach down to systemic issues, in mining country, in the shipyard industry, in communities where logging decimated whole communities? In areas used and then abandoned by dominant culture, who then move away and leave tainted water and spoiled soil to those they choose not to think about, except on one day of the year?
Here is the thing. Most of the cutting edge work, that actually digs into that fudgy center, will not benefit from Giving Tuesday.
One of the requirements is official non profit status. Which is hard to get for grassroots workers who are overwhelmingly of color, who often come from the communities they stand with; whose mission and passion are social change over social work; social interrogation rather than mere ‘awareness’, individuals and organizations who will never see one grant dollar; one fellowship appointment.
It is these who deliver full strength, straight no chaser considered and cogent action, which all too often get diluted down to something more palatable by other, more mainstream orgs that can attract those who define ‘legitimacy’, which the originators of the ideas and the ideals will not andcannot touch and access because of–wait for it–structural and institutional barriers.
This is a big deal. Fudgy center orgs won’t get Roddenberrys, or write ups in the paper, or keys to the city that they often critique. Most of them are at best ignored, sometimes they are actually vilified.
It reminds me of what Dom Helder Camara, one of the great prophetic voices, once said: “When I feed the poor, they call me a saint, but when I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a communist.”
The fact is, we need the whole cookie. Yes, give your canned goods; your blankets; your old magazines so kids can make collages; yes, wear your bracelets and your pink, yes, donate your cars and your dollars.
But I challenge you, for every dollar you give to an eligible Giving Tuesday org, I challenge you to find another org or individual who is doing fudgy center work, and fund them too. Do the work. Fund the change and the passion that truly moves the needle.
Or, we can do it for you! San Diego Food Not Bombs is an organization that actually does both–sharp and cogent critique of systems, even as they do a vegan food share every week. Without fail. From gifts, from dumpsters; from what sometimes feels like thin air.
I have served with them; cooked with them. They are very gracious and loving to this middle aged could-be gramma. I’m their mascot!
All of them are tentmakers; working their outside jobs, mainly to do this work (sound familiar)?
San Diego has one of the largest homeless and housing/food insecure populations in the country. Drawn by our climate, but shocked at our housing and jobs market; often they are discharged military. With anemic social services, particularly mental health and addiction treatment, Dash–the man who is the heart of FnB deals with issues both personal and institutional.
And what does he and his crew do? Challenge the system that makes their work necessary. Challenge. Hard. With relentless reliability.
And then they chop veggies and make apple crisps and serve and sit down with their people. On Fairmount Ave. In El Cajon. Blurring the line to gossamer; that line between the server and the served.
And in this holiday season the need is great. They will keep on serving, even as their own coffers are stretched thin. They will keep on shouting at the gates of power, and then they will chop veggies again.
Let’s walk with them in a mighty way.
I know there are other Food Not Bombs in other areas, but I am asking for little dilution here. I am asking that we, very pointedly, walk with Dash and his crew. I am asking that we make a real difference in this one org who the rest of Facebook will never see.
Let’s let them know that we see them.
This is important enough that I am posting this even as we are doing our best to meet our own goals, and even as we also will not be featured for Giving Tuesday. I will do a separate ask for LoR; for now, today, I want our community’s focus to be on this.
I think we can do both. I am trusting in us.
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