A few weeks ago on personal finance Twitter, Moriah and I started a conversation about how we wished the PF (personal finance) community online was more interested in sharing their giving & mutual aid.
It sparked a wonderful mini-trend of people sharing places and organizations and initiatives they’d given money to recently.
Being open about our giving can feel performative, but we do it all the time with our saving and/or hoarding and/or frugality. I’ve seen firsthand how sharing our giving stories inspires other people to give, too. For example: Angela of Tread Lightly, Retire Early was able to start a direct giving initiative this year in her Women’s Personal Finance Facebook group–by posting and spreading the word and inspiring one another, people from the group and beyond help cover ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-ONE gifts of $50 to women and femmes hit hard by COVID-19. That is over $8,500 within the span of a week distributed to folks to help pay bills and buy groceries. More recently, Anne at Unique Gifter tweeted about putting together hygiene kits for a class of Indigenous kids in the far north–and through the power of Twitter, more people pitched in to help her cover the whole class.
To continue that spirit, here’s a running list of where I’m giving in 2021. I am intentionally vague about a few of these organizations because they are hyper-local to me–but will detail the type of org, why I donate, and where you can find the version near you!
Last update: Dec. 27, 2021
Nonprofit Giving
Food Banks & Access
Specifically,
- Food Bank of Central & Eastern NC
- Feeding America
- Nourish NC
- A soon-to-be-opened food cooperative opening in a food desert in my city, designed specifically to serve BIPOC folks in a majority-Black region of the city.
As you might know, due to COVID, food banks across the country are seeing incredible demand. Donating money directly to food banks, rather than food, goes much farther in serving people because food banks can leverage their partnerships with bulk distributors to buy products for incredibly cheap.
Food cooperatives are a wonderful way to support local businesses and vendors and farmers, provide good jobs, and–in the case of my city’s most recent venture–end food deserts.
Serving Unhoused People
There are several ministries as well as secular organizations in my city that run soup kitchens and provide other essential services for unhoused people. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with giving to religiously motivated initiatives, as long as you do your research on the institution.
Beyond the local:
- Shower Power, a mobile shower unit based in Jackson, MS.
Youth
- A local nonprofit that provides bicycles and related activities for at-risk youth in my city. (I also bought a bike from them. I love them.)
Arts & Media & Education
- My local branch of NPR. I think local media is important and my local branch does a solid job.
- A literacy organization in my city which provides ESL classes for adults and adult literacy education. (I now also volunteer there.)
- The Perry Second Chances Scholarship for women formerly incarcerated.
Racial Justice
- My branch of the YWCA (Motto: eliminating racism, empowering women; provides support to families, including childcare, and programming related to racial justice).
- First Nations Development Institute, which fund grants and relief for Native people across the U.S.
- A local organization that focuses on helping formerly incarcerated folks after their release from prison.
- Local Black-led collectives in my city, which organize for community empowerment, stage protests, hold local officials accountable, maintain a mutual aid station with food and resources, and help run a community center.
- Never Again Action, a collective of Jewish people and allies fighting cruelty in American immigration policies.
- Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women USA, a collective that works to support the families of women and 2S folks victimized by human trafficking, which is an epidemic for Indigenous communities.
- The Loveland Foundation Therapy Fund, which helps Black women and girls access therapy.
Sexual Violence & Reproductive Rights
- A local rape crisis center & clinic that provides counseling and advocacy, among other services, for survivors of sexual assault.
- Red Canary Song, a grassroots collective of Asian and migrant sex works organizing transnationally.
- Various abortion funds, particularly the National Network of Abortion Funds’ Collective Power Fund as well as Planned Parenthood.
Politics
- Resistbot. I love Resistbot because it makes it easy to contact my (terrible) congresspeople to make my voice heard.
Climate Advocacy & Justice
- The Founders Pledge Climate Change Fund. This fund is unique because it combines policy change/research/advocacy with clean energy innovation and technological innovation to find solutions for climate change impacts.
- Grow Ahead‘s fundraiser for indigenous-led agroforesty projects in Mexico.
- The Indigenous Environmental Network for their work in advocacy.
Mutual Aid
- Bail funds/funds for the assistance of incarcerated people
- Local groups formed for mutual aid
- The Black Fairy Godmother
- Gofundmes
Notes on Mutual Aid
Mutual aid funds are purposefully not nonprofit orgs because of the administrative and legal requirements of nonprofits. While less formal, mutual aid groups allow people in need to get cold hard cash to address their needs, fast. Mutual aid groups also might use funds to buy things to help unhoused folks or groceries for families–all kinds of things.
My city doesn’t have an established bail fund, but we do have some abolitionist groups that work to assist incarcerated people. Early in 2021, my county’s detention center began dealing with a COVID outbreak. And many of the people in my county jail, who are disproportionately Black and brown, are being held on nonviolent charges for bails less than $500. Bails like that are too low to interest bail bondsmen but too high for poor people to come up with, so people who have not yet been tried for a crime linger in jail cells, risking COVID, solely because they’re broke.
You can check this link to find a bail fund near you. If you don’t have one (like my city/county doesn’t), dig around for activist groups in your area and ask around.
You can try to find a mutual aid fund near you with Mutual Aid Hub, but many mutual aid efforts are not formal enough to even get on that map–you’ll have to do some digging in your city and keep a pulse on local activism to find one.
Many times, mutual aid is a spontaneous opportunity that arises (like the examples above with the Women’s Personal Finance group and hygiene kits for Indigenous kids). But if you want to help a person directly right now, the Black Fairy Godmother on Instagram is an incredible resource. Simone Gordon has made national news for her organizing efforts on the ‘gram. She keeps an up-to-date list of families and people in need, specifically Black people in need, through the link in her bio, and you can buy needed items from people’s Amazon wishlists or contribute to GoFundMe campaigns. She also has a general emergency assistance fund through Paypal that people can contribute to. Simone vets all the people who request assistance as well.
Mutual aid is as important, perhaps even more important, than nonprofit giving or charity. 501c3 organizations are bound by laws, regulations, and other aspects that make it difficult for them to act in agile and responsive ways. They may serve a specific population or need, and that’s great. But rules and regulations mean people get shut out. And sometimes the easiest way for a person to solve their problems is to literally throw money at it. (Bills and bail, y’all.) Direct giving through mutual aid also empowers and asserts the agency of the person who receives that money to do with it as they see fit.
Where did you give in 2021? I’m always looking for more organizations to support!
Zillennial Values 
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