#if you would prefer to make a donation to a fund for sudan or the congo that's fine too! send me your receipt!

[hexcodesims]

fundraising for palestine!

if you feel pushed to help palestinians with donations after the ICJ ruling as well as the news that many western nations have paused funding for the UNRWA, i hope i can give you a little incentive.

send me a screenshot of a donation you made to a mutual aid fund or charity for palestine (here's a link to a tumblr post with a variety of different funds/charities), and i'll post a piece of cc for every $20 raised. i'll stack the amounts donated, so if four people donate $5 that'll count as one piece of cc!

if possible, please make sure that your receipt screenshot has a date in it. and if you made a donation earlier this week, feel free to submit anyway! i'll count everything back until 1/21/24.

(also, if you made a $10 donation to esims for gaza you can get a piece of art from the cartoonist cooperative)

thank you if you decide to make a donation!

Total: $62

[butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway]

If you want to redistribute your cash to a specific cause or group, try these.

Doctors without Borders

Funding a group of indigenous health/environmentalism/social policy advocates work around nuclear radiation exposure from military testing sites

Crips for esims for Gaza

Wildfire disaster relief

Community Kitchen serving people in crisis in Sudan

If your preference lies with giving directly to others, consider going to sites that crowdfund for campaigns [e.g. chuffed, gofundme, etc] and sorting their vetted campaigns by either newest to oldest or most to least money raised, as this will help you prioritize campaigns that are brand new and nearly complete, two areas that tend to see frequent and punishing stagnation during campaigns.

You can also work together with vetters, existing organizations/groups, and organizing networks to pool funds and distribute them to specific campaigns [e.g. bail funds, food fridge programs, disaster relief response, etc] on a regular basis. Some existing networks for this:

There is a self-policing in waiting and letting opportunities to support others come to us, rather than taking the time to really learn how to do this.

I have watched "how should we respond to online calls to action around fundraising" become a debate so heated it would turn the Great Lakes to steam, rather than people simply taking the time to understanding how fundraising work happens, what access points to it we all have as individuals, and how we can set boundaries with ourselves about what we are and are not legitimately able to offer others by way of support.

I am *deeply* tired of watching people panic themselves about how to spend their cash on fundraisers "right". I am deeply exhausted by the idea that it is somehow the easiest thing in the world to just defraud people en masse through gofundme, rather than a failure of intense security systems and policies that are much more likely to remove legitimate funds for lacking state validated identification than to actually stop fraud in the first place. I am overwhelmed with confusion as to how people came to the conclusion that online fundraising is a chaotic lawless swindle-fest, and it's better to let this paralyze us into inaction than to risk someone we didn't intend to give to receiving our money.

If you're genuinely anxious enough about "donating to the wrong person" than either bow out of the system entirely and find other ways to contribute to making a world you want to see, or TEACH YOURSELF THE REALITY of giving effectively. Connect with existing mutual aid and bail funds and ask them if you can learn from them. Find a friend you trust to handle your donation budget in keeping with your morals and have THEM tell you where to donate or even donate in your name and pay them back or whatever works for you.

But please, everybody. Take a step back from the idea that fundraising is hard or confusing or too vulnerable to fraud and just. Remember what the point of giving money to people actually is. It's about empowering them to meet their own needs how they see fit by supporting them in obtaining the resources they tell you they need. That's all.

Online financial redistribution efforts are often treated like favors, but I continue to think that they should be treated like investing in the good the world is putting out. Don't spend money at a fundraiser "because it's a good cause", that only sets us up to establish hierarchies of what is and is not deserving of funding, and nothing useful comes from that space.

Spend money on fundraisers because we want to live in a world where people who need money can ask society for it and trust that they will receive it. Spend money on fundraisers because you know that empowerment to meet your own needs is ALWAYS beneficial to the whole community, even if your needs are different from others'. Spend money on fundraisers because you have money to spend and cash redistribution is the universal economic constant that everyone, anarchists, socialists, capitalists, communities, etc, find the most useful for improving the quality of life of their constituents under the current social infrastructure. Because cash redistribution is simply a functional part of our economic relationships with each other.

[sartle-blog]

Museums Take On Trump

At Sartle, we fully believe that museums are pretty much the tits. Of course, we understand that not everyone holds these beliefs. There will always be naysayers who complain about their sore feet, overzealous security guards, and a pretentious outdated air to them. Well I am here to try to shake one of those beliefs. Museums do not live in the past and are not non-partisan. In fact, many museums entrench themselves in current political issues and have decided to do what they can and stick it to the man!

So what’s got museums’ panties in a bunch now? In a nutshell: President Trump’s immigration ban. We’ve been mulling over this gem of an executive order for about three weeks, and while it has been temporarily halted, this has not stopped people from protesting the questionable order by any means necessary. Some have taken to the streets, others to social media. Museums on the other hand, have called upon their top curators to send the message to the Trump administration that our diverse culture is in fact what makes America great.

MoMA

Just four blocks away from president’s beloved New York Trump Tower lies one of America’s greatest museums: the Museum of Modern Art. When visiting MoMA you can expect to see all the greats - Picasso, Van Gogh, Pollock, you name it. However, you may notice something a little different if you decide to visit the museum now.

In light of the executive order, MoMA decided to temporarily retire work by those big names to showcase work by artists from countries that were barred entry into America. Now when wandering around the fifth floor galleries (a floor traditionally dedicated to the narrative of Western Modernism), nestled next to iconic works such as Rousseau’s Sleeping Gypsy are pieces by artists from Iran, Iraq, and Sudan. These works will remain up for several months and are accompanied with a text that reads: “This work is by an artist from a nation whose citizens are being denied entry into the United States, according to a presidential executive order issued on January 27, 2017. This is one of several such artworks from the Museum’s collection installed throughout the fifth-floor galleries to affirm the ideals of welcome and freedom as vital to this Museum, as they are to the United States.” 

MoMA isn’t exactly tip toeing around the issue. To shove their beliefs in Trump’s face, MoMA has devoted precious real estate to showing the work of primarily muslim artists. Talk about hitting close to home.

Davis Museum

MoMA is not alone on their mission to boycott the executive order through their curatorial prowess. The less well known Davis Museum located in Wellesley, Massachusetts, has also taken a stand on the travel ban, but in a distinctly different way. In their new exhibition “Art-less,” the museum has either removed or covered up all work in their collection that was created or donated by immigrants. In total, they are taking down 120 works from their collection in order to protest President Trump’s policies. That’s about 20% of the artwork the museum owns!

Museum of the City of New York

The Museum of the City of New York has decided to jump on the bandwagon and use their curatorial voice to take a stance on travel ban as well. The museum is hosting a photography exhibition entitled “Muslim in New York” to communicate how Muslim life is an integral part of the New York culture. Making up over 3% of the city’s population, the museum wants to demonstrate how the Muslim community has been an essential part of New York landscape since its founding in 1624. That right there, is over two centuries longer than the Trump family has been kicking it in the US of A. Reality check much?

Many other museums, while not curating shows around this issue, have issued formal statements on their disapproval of the executive order as well. The Getty, the Museum Association, the Association of Museum Directors, and the International Council of Museums’ US Branch have thus far denounced the order, claiming that it will impact the richness of our artistic and social culture.

Some may ask if this sly cultured attack on the president’s policies are some how striking a chord with him. Well, Trump doesn’t seem to have an affinity towards the arts (unless of course it is big, gold, and preferably of him), so he likely isn’t looking at the general smut of the art world. That doesn’t mean that institutions taking a stance on the political climate are all for not. It is estimated that three million people visit MoMA annually alone (in addition to all the other museums taking a stance on this issues). That is a lot of people being presented with the question: What would the American landscape look like without immigrants? You know, that ideology American was built on.

In the chance that President Trump is one of the people touched by these museums’ message, we can only hope this plan does not backfire and annoy the reactive politico, for it already seems his administration is not a huge supporter of the arts. It has been reported that he wants to cut the funding to the National Endowment for the Arts, which currently receives $148 million annually, a meager .003 percent of the Federal budget. 

Of course, hating on the NEA is nothing new. Conservatives have bashed the NEA for decades. Whether due to their choice to fund Robert Mapplethorpe’s sexually charged photos or Andre Serrano’s Piss Christ, many feel that the funding the NEA hands out to artists and organizations are used to shun people’s religious beliefs and moral values. While people are entitled to that opinion, it is important to realize that the NEA funds many programs that help our culture at large and has a high return on dollars spent. 

At least we know that our museums aren’t going to go down without a fight.   

By: Jennifer