Thousands of Answers
Around Thanksgiving, I stared getting a lot of messages from people looking for opportunities to engage in community work over the holidays. I’ve been writing this letter for a while, but I have especially struggled with how to send it. There are a lot of ways to engage with community, and many of us have let their brains be trained to be most receptive to headlines like “5 Ways To Drastically Change Your Community Involvement TODAY”. I would feel dishonest if I wrote something so prescriptive, but I’ve also really enjoyed getting to know as many community organizations as I have in the past 5 years especially, and further examining our cultural relationship to care and the expression of care.
So, I want to very humbly share some of the ways that I plan on and participate in supporting community aid throughout the year, because this is the period of time where I set aside hours and funds and intention in my budget for the year ahead, and this might be when you do that, too. There are many, many perspectives on how to engage with this kind of work in a way that is meaningful, so - much the same as I approach every other topic - I thought I would explain what works best for me personally, in case it’s relevant to you.
However, I do have one very strong opinion that I actually believe to be empirically true: putting time, energy, attention or money into a meaningful cause that helps other people is a critical piece of living a worthwhile life, and contributing to a larger effort to help others will help you feel less despair when confronted with the immense cruelty or unfairness of the world. The rest of this essay is an opinion piece - but that preceding sentence is non-fiction. You will reap benefits from any of the support you engage in.
Part 1: Choosing Where to Focus
There are on overwhelming number of needs in existence at all times, and it is absolutely possible to approach giving from a reactionary standpoint. However, if you’re looking to make the most meaningful and longest-term impact, choosing a few focal points to provide ongoing support will be the most sustaining to everyone involved, yourself included.
Most of the organizations I support on a regular basis fall somewhere within the Venn Diagram of the four of the (but not all of the) areas that I feel the most tied to: supporting marginalized folks in New York City, supporting families, supporting food justice, and supporting climate justice.
Each of these areas touches upon my home life and/or my work life, and I am personally invested in their advancement. Further, my personal and professional experience relative to each of these spheres means that I sometimes have skills that can contribute meaningfully to an organization’s advancement if I work with them closely. These are not the only matters I care about, but they are the closest to my heart, and so I devote the most time to them.
Perhaps you work in art, or food, or tech, or perhaps you are a full-time parent. Perhaps where you grew up, or an experience you’ve had, or an event your family lived through has informed the causes you feel most close to. List out on paper a few of the things you care about the most and feel that you have the most to offer, and maybe use this list as your loose compass.
Your recurring and sustained engagement means a lot to any organization you work with, so though the temptation to try new things all the time can be overwhelming (and we are so used to being able to do that with everything else in life), please know that your stolid, uneventful, reliable effort is what really moves the needle for most organizations.
Part 2: Ways to Engage
A decade ago, when my daughter was a toddler and I was working full time and parenting alone, there were far fewer ways for me to physically participate in giving work. So, instead of focusing on physical labor volunteering, I focused on word-of-mouth, fundraising, supply-gathering and spreading awareness. The first time I worked with Little Essentials, to whom the proceeds of Food Is a Mother go each year, my daughter was 1.5 years old and I conducted a supply drive from the basement of the local toy store in Bed Stuy on evenings and weekends. At that point, what I had available to donate was my ability to spread information and talk people into doing things, and the result was a (small) U-Haul truck full of supplies. If you are also a very busy person with a network but not a lot of free time during the day, this is very easily replicable and could be the model for you!
When I decided to start consulting 3 years ago, one of the mandates I set for myself was to carve out at least 10% of my time for non-profit organizations (the 10% being an arbitrary quota that I blew through very quickly) and I feel privileged 3 years later that I have been able to retain this priority, in addition to being able to create and contribute to some amazing Give Back projects with my clients.
Presently, I am even more privileged to be able to involve myself in community efforts through a mix of: cause-communications; fundraising; some volunteer labor; advisory work.
Maybe you have my same schedule from 2015, and you really do not own your time. Can you sneak out one morning a month (or per quarter) with friends to help with meal prep at GLWD or Bowery Mission, for example? Perhaps your special skill is social media and digital communications, but you’re not able to do physical labor. Can you be an awareness-spreader, or an inspirer for others? Side note, that’s often an effective fundraising role as well! Maybe you have a special skill you can teach to a group of teens once every month or two? Can you volunteer at Girls Club or your relevant local community center? Perhaps you got in and out of crypto at the exact right times and never have to work for money again. Can you donate your labor to the advisory board of a non-profit that means a lot to you?
One thing I am still not very good at doing consistently is volunteer labor. I struggle to find free time in my schedule between career and kids, so unless it is meticulously planned and organized in advance I don’t do as much physical labor as I’d like. However, that may change in years to come, and right now I focus on what I am able to do in the moment.
There is no wrong way to orient a piece of your life around caring for and supporting others, however big or small that piece may be right now. So please, don’t feel disappointed if you feel like you don’t have much to give right now, whatever you’re giving means a lot to someone, and if everyone showed up for just a little bit, it would accomplish a lot.
Part 3: Plan Proactively Instead of Waiting Passively
Through a mix of experience and adventure, I have a loose annual plan of how I engage in this kind of work.
a) recurring monthly donations to organizations I care about. Recurring donations allow organizations to plan their budgets more effectively than spurts of random donations, so if you know you can commit a certain amount per year, just spread it out month to month, you’ll really be helping out.
b) I personally generate three big fundraising efforts every year. The rest of my work is supporting other people’s efforts.
Each February I help my daughter fundraise for the organization of her choice, and for the last three years she has chosen to do a food drive and fundraiser for One Love Community Fridge, for which she has raised a little more than $11,000 combined. This was super easy to organize with her school and promote on Instagram, and I recommend it highly to any parent interested in involving their children in giving work.
Each April and May, I produce the zine Food Is a Mother with my collaborators at Mother Tongue Magazine, with all proceeds benefitting Little Essentials, a NYC organization supporting families living with poverty that I mentioned earlier. I pay for the production of the zine out of pocket, which allows me to send more money to Little Essentials. The zine has raised $8,300 for their cause in the two issues that have been produced, which has gone toward Little Essentials opening a second distribution location to deal with surging demand for support.
The two things I love most about this project are: first, I can work on it primarily at night or weekends, so even if I am having a busy workweek it still fits, and second, it involves 20-30 collaborators in the form of chefs, writers and artists, who are most all very eager to contribute a piece of their work to a fund raising effort for a great organization. I could donate the money I spend making the zine directly to Little Essentials, but instead I use it to organize a community of people around creating something bigger, and it has a multiplier effect on the resulting donation.
This is also very easily replicable, and I recommend it to anyone who feels most comfortable organizing a group of people around a cause.
Each August I invite my Instagram community to help raise money to buy backpacks for kids to return to school with, which are distributed in the 26th council district in Queens. Everyone is always really excited about this, because it’s a simple way to give back to kids in our city who need support, and because I handle all of the logistics and purchasing myself. Through the last two drives, we have bought 1,704 backpacks for schoolkids.
c) The rest of the year, I contribute funds or labor to organizations and humans whose work I admire, and spread awareness or explain the problem/solution proposition of other people’s efforts. Financial contributions are a line item in my budget monthly, and if I don’t meet the whole contribution one month, I roll it over to the next. Because of this method, as I have been watching in horror as the LA fires impact so many people (loved ones and strangers alike), or as Accra’s Kantamanto Market burned down last week, I know exactly how much money I can donate, and when.
Part 4: Bragging Versus Empowering
I really struggle to talk about my own work, especially when it comes to work around organizing and giving - writing out even the edited list above was painful in a way I cannot describe. I was raised to have a level of humility that is actually to my detriment, and though I didn’t grow up with religion and don’t practice one now, my reluctance is ironically heavily influenced by a pretty conventional vaguely Abrahamic religious philosophy that giving done out of pride or vanity cannot be considered giving at all. So I tend not to talk much about it because I don’t want it to be mistaken for pride of vanity.
However, I know I can make pathways for others to become involved by speaking about how I engage in this work so that they might find ways that work for their own lives, I have to believe there is an exception.
In general, as a person with lots of privileges, I try to move with the intention of 1) creating support and opportunities for people who need them, 2) creating and/or protecting dignity for the person on the receiving end of giving, and 3) modeling this for others in a way that leaves them feeling motivated and empowered to replicate the efforts, not focused on me.
I will absolutely cringe myself to sleep tonight and then have six hours of nightmares about pride, vanity, etc. because of this writing, so I hope this letter is read understanding that I have no intention to brag and wish only to give you options of how to engage in this sort of work. If you ever wanna chat more about this, please reach out! It’s one of my favorite things to talk about (1:1).
A few things I think about in relation to giving work:
The activist Ashtin Berry wrote something years ago that I have never stopped thinking about - to paraphrase, she questioned whether a lot of people who overuse the word “community” are in fact talking about “proximity”. Being in community versus being physically or visually proximal to someone are two very different things, and the emphasis on the latter denudes the understanding of the former. So when I work on projects, I tend to ask myself: am I being in community, or am I being in proximity?
In an Instagram post from the writer Zeba Blay, Octavia E. Butler is quoted by Essence magazine in an essay she wrote in the year 2000, “…there’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers-at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.”
The journalist LinYee Yuan shared a Ruth Wilson Gilmore quote with me last fall that runs through my mind like a mantra: “Where life is precious, life is precious.” So I ask myself: what am I doing to contribute to a more precious life for us all?
Might I recommend:
This year I’d like to learn how to make more things with my own hands, and two of them will be:
Tart Vinegar’s In-Person Vinegar Making Course
and
Saipua Soap-Making via digital instructions
Join me?
A vocabulary word for 2025:
compersion (n)
Compersion is our wholehearted participation in the happiness of others. It is the sympathetic joy we feel for somebody else, even when their positive experience does not involve or benefit us directly. Thus, compersion can be thought of as the opposite of jealousy and possessiveness.
with compersion,
x Anja
Really appreciate how concise and applicable the guidance you offer is. Thank you for this!
invaluable inspiration