Gift Drive Guide
a veritable NYC marathon of recommendations
Early this a.m. I took myself on an Art Date, which is something I used to be really good at and have to remember to do more this winter. After COVID lockdowns, when the museums and galleries reopened, I pumped art through my veins so voraciously that you probably could have pick it up on a contrast MRI. I quite literally wept in exhibition rooms across the city, it was embarrassing in the way that only being human is so uniquely embarrassing, especially when you realize how much better life is in the deepest waters of civilization versus a desert island of delivered groceries and binge-streaming.
I went to MoMA to see the Ruth Asawa show (up through February 7th), which I’ve been looking forward to for months. It’s a sprawling show of 60 years of work across a few different mediums, including a huge collection of her woven sculpture and starting with a look at her early art education at Black Mountain College. The concept of Black Mountain College - which, if it existed in 2025 would be owned by Nvidia and cost $90k per year without boarding - is so utopic and fantastic it’s almost hard to believe. Imagine living on a flexible tuition campus in the North Carolina woods and learning crafts and arts from teachers and fellow students F. Buckminster Fuller, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Merce Cunningham, Elaine de Kooning, John Chamberlain…. and developing your own practice out of that, one that never fully lets go of what you learned with all of those amazing people. This is the stuff of dreams.
Asawa is best known for her woven sculptures, with incredible symmetry and hidden detail, and walking through the exhibit I was a little overwhelmed. Weaving itself is an ancient, heavy, meaningful practice, humans have woven for approximately the same length of time we have had agriculture, that is how deeply into our DNA is is ingrained. There are a million therapeutic analogies for weaving one strand together to make something continuous and stronger, and to doing it with your own hands. This is one of my favorite things about my Underwater Weaving subscription from BASKETS FOR BREAKFAST, and about learning how to do practical, beautiful things. Once you have learned something, with very few exceptions you will not unlearn it. Knowledge is Final Sale.
All of Asawa’s work is inspired by nature, and particularly inside each basket bulb, where you find another intricately woven basket bulb that incases or enmeshes with another smaller and even more intricate bulb, the symmetry between these shapes and our life as people is inescapable. Each hanging piece is a person, a family, a community, a world.
In New York this weekend, we did three things as a city. First, we leapt into mass action to answer an emergency need for food support in response to the U.S. government shamefully declining to fund SNAP/EBT. Second, we celebrated Halloween, which is a festival entirely dedicated to fantastic costumes, craft, and community. And third, we turned out in mass to line 26 miles of roadway and cheer on the 55 thousand people that ran the NYC Marathon.
There is an often-quoted Gwendolyn Brooks poem excerpt that I thought of a lot this weekend when people were sharing resources for food support online or when I was standing on the street with wine and friends in the middle of trick or treating madness, or when I was crying watching the marathon yesterday:
Warning, in music-words
devout and large,
that we are each other’s
harvest:
we are each other’s
business:
we are each other’s
magnitude and bond.
This fact is inescapable, it’s also evergreen and exclusive of who is in office, and it’s often the thing that people come back to when they’ve strayed far into the world of individualism or ignorance and found it empty and quite lonely. None of us are getting out of here alive, so why not double down on making everyone’s life better?
To that point:
Each year I get asked by lots of people for recommendations for holiday gift drives, and this week is normally the week that I put all those recommendations together on Instagram. This year I’m putting it on Substack so that it can live in your inbox and be shareable with whomever you like! I am also inviting everyone to add their favorite gift drives into the comments section so that we can keep this an open source chain for new and additional information.
A lot of these are available on Never Sleeps, which is a directory of NPOs and mutual aid organizations serving NYC. But I tried to make this as a la carte for you as possible.
One last thing. Sponsor gifts are always the first gifts I shop for in my household, and I always involve my kid. It is extremely important to me that she take pride in not only helping but prioritizing someone else - not a “whatever’s left over goes to them” vibe but a “let’s give this person their best holiday yet” vibe instead. When I have a bigger budget I will let her sponsor her own child or family, and when that’s not possible we sponsor one family together. But we always - always - do this before anything else.
This is my incredible friend Lissa’s initiative that she has been running for years. I don’t endorse the Salvation Army but I do endorse using their logistics and infrastructure to run a gifts program, which is actually really, really hard while maintaining the privacy of the people receiving gifts. Plus, they have elders, and I always make it a point to sponsor one elder, who (heart-rendingly) is normally asking for something warm like high quality socks or a scarf.
Little Essentials runs their gift drive off of an Amazon wishlist, which you can find here. LE supports families with children below the age of 5, and if you would like to also ease the mind of any of the parents of those children you are always welcome to throw in a case of diapers with your order. They also accept donations of new and slightly used kids EVERYTHING below age five, keep them in your rolodex for when you are clearing out closets seasonally.
This is one of my favorite organizations because it creates an opportunity to send gifts specifically to the 115k+ housing-insecure children in the NYC public school system. They also accept donations year round and operate as a rapid response organization, and you can follow and support them year round! But in the meantime, they are an excellent choice for a holiday partner.
Trans Santa provides gifts for trans youths ages 24 and under who are houseless, in the foster care system, or otherwise without the essential support of a safe and loving home. They work in an additional 7 countries outside the U.S. From their website:
“Research shows that trans youth with supportive families have a 52% decrease in suicidal thoughts—Transanta aims to broaden our understanding of family and structural support so that our entire community can experience affirmation and love even when those close to them may hurt or fail them.”
We are each other’s harvest, we are each other’s business, we are each other’s magnitude and bond
WIN is the largest shelter system in NYC providing services and housing to women and children. Anything you shop from their list will be delivered to a child in supportive housing, so shop freely and make magic!
This is my last suggestion, but I was introduced to the multitudinous programming by Henry Street via Bright Light a few weeks ago - I had no idea the depth of their services. Henry Street has a walk-in no questions asked mental health services for people experiencing crisis, children’s afterschool programming, elderly support… seven programs total that touch nearly every piece of their community.
That’s my list! This is the only time I will ever endorse using Amazon! Leave your questions, comments, sass down below and remember that your engagement increases the possibility of this resource being seen by others as Substack slides down the steep slippery hill into the slop of enshittified social media algorithms. HIT LIKE AND COMMENT.
Yours, in harvest,
Anja
Can’t wait to see the Ruth Asawa show….you made me even more excited!
Love! Thank you Anja!